Critical Sociology

In the grand tradition of the social sciences, the quest to build a future beyond capitalism is accused of having no basis in reality. Through fieldwork conducted in the Fındıklı district of Rize in Turkey, this study challenges this claim and proposes a distinct perspective to construct an anti-capitalist alternative project based on the long-standing culture of meci, a solidarity-based practice rooted in voluntary participation without any expectation in return. The study first explores how meci has shaped everyday life in a historical context and then shifts its focus to the politically revitalized content of the culture prompted by the electoral success of a leftist political figure in the 2019 local elections. Inspired by the idea of creating cracks in capitalism, the study concludes by exploring whether meci could be understood through the lenses of the gift and the commons – two concepts that hold the potential to challenge the foundational principles of capitalism.

Is socialism still relevant for sociology? Sociology and socialism are entwined logically and historically. But today, American sociology seems mostly silent about socialism. This essay argues that socialism should be placed back on the agenda of sociology. First, I argue that socialism is both a relevant social and political fact in the United States, and is superior to social justice as a framework for envisioning emancipatory alternatives. Second, I review the sociological literature on socialism since Erik Olin Wright’s 2012 real utopias address. I find that both mainstream and critical sociologists have neglected the study of contemporary socialist politics, both in the US and abroad, and that Wright’s real utopias project has had little resonance in mainstream sociology. Third, I make a proposal for a ‘sociology of socialism’ which emphasizes the comparative study of socialist organizations and movements. I conclude that contemporary socialism is not relevant for sociology but that it could be again, and that a disciplinary reengagement with socialism is both timely and urgent in the face of rising neo-fascism.

Informed by the scholarship of strategic ignorance (agnotology), this study presents a critical analysis of digital care work platforms and their business models in sustaining, reinforcing and feeding from the existing structural vulnerability of care workers. Based on extensive, international research on digital labour platforms in the UK and in Germany as part of the Fairwork project, the article makes the argument the unknowns and non-knowns workers experience regarding how pay, work allocation, rating systems, background checks or accountability systems work on the platforms end up sustaining and reinforcing precarity on care work platforms. In addition, not having a clear understanding of key aspects of working conditions inevitably impacts workers’ ability to contest them. The findings of the study can be extended to platform work in other sectors, where precarity continues to be a significant concern.

Since the rise of platform labor, food delivery, and ride hailing workers have become a visible part of cityscapes, unlike platform workers in the domestic sector. The invisibilization and economic devaluation of reproductive tasks, especially in the private sphere, has a long history.Although platforms are not likely to yield a radical transformation in this sector, qualitative changes concerning the invisibility of work outsourced by households can be observed. In this contribution, we draw from the analytical framework of (in)visibility of/in platform-mediated work and map it against our research findings on a key platform in domestic cleaning in Europe, including netnographic data and interviews with workers and clients. Using the framework as a heuristic tool leads us to a more nuanced understanding of (in)visibility in platform-mediated cleaning in perceptible, institutional, and individual terms. Moreover, we argue that the interrelations between these three layers of (in)visibility offer novel insights for making sense of worker organizing and collective action, the practices related to leaving the platform, and the issue of workers’ occupational identity of domestic cleaners. As such, the study contributes to the current debates on platform labor and domestic work, including the value-visibility relation and the role of digital platforms therein.

With worker shortages and the need for care workers projected to grow, personal care work through digital labour platforms (DLPs) is important to understand. This paper considers DLPs used by gig care workers providing personal care in Ontario, Canada. We recruited 20 women gig care workers for interviews. We examined socio-technical processes such as signing up on platforms, creating profiles, and searching for jobs. We draw on Institutional Ethnography to study the actual work on the following two DLP models: marketplace and on-demand. Marcusean theory provides a lens for the critical examination of DLP care work. We found job inequity between DLPs operating in the homecare sector, compared to DPs used in institutional settings. Jobs had disparate quality between the two platform types. Workers on both DLP types remained vulnerable to fluctuations in demand and had limited social security protections, and both models of DLP institutionalised precarity.

This article presents a methodological reflection on the challenges of researching domestic and care work mediated by digital labour platforms. While knowledge production on gig work in the logistics sector has soared, research on care platforms is slow to catch up, especially in very relational forms of home-based work, such as eldercare. We take this uneven development in the literature as a starting point to unpack the empirical conundrums in this field. Drawing on our own experience with trying to recruit care platform workers in Germany between 2019 and 2024, we shed light on the ethical dilemmas we encountered and offer some lessons learnt. The article calls for long-term commitments, multi-sited ethnographies, longitudinal perspectives and mixed-methods designs to study care platforms in the future. Finally, we advocate for researching platform labour beyond the gig.

A vast amount of literature on social media has researched how content creators develop practices to present themselves and play the ‘visibility game’ (Cotter, 2019). Similarly, platformization of work has led to algorithmic control through the logic of ratings and visibility. This article studies how platforms shape the practices of workers who carry out services in domestic spaces. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of 36 profiles in cleaning, care, and accommodation platforms in Spain complemented by 10 in-depth interviews with workers. Similarly to what has been found for social media, we observed how workers manage their profiles following a presentation logic, including disclosing personal information and knowledge, achieving desired results in terms of metrics, and interpreting and surpassing the clients’ expectations. Thus, the work process is geared toward satisfying clients and platforms to access working opportunities, resulting in double the work and showing how visibility permeates and shapes a variety of sectors.

Recent studies offer ambivalent conclusions on the effect of digital intermediaries in domestic and care work; while some suggest that the digital platforms exacerbate and perpetuate the precariousness of the sector as well as its underlying social inequalities, others contend that the effects of these technologies are not yet clear. Drawing on these perspectives but focusing specifically on the platforms’ organizational structures, this article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the differential impact of digital intermediaries in this occupation. Based on a study of the digital platform Zolvers in Argentina, the article analyzes the effects on working conditions of three types of working arrangements: regular work managed by the digital intermediary, regular work managed by the employer household, and casual ‘one-time-only’ jobs. This research uses a mixed methods approach, including a survey of 300 domestic workers, 20 semi-directed interviews, and two focus groups with workers using Zolvers.

In this exploratory study, we investigate the effects of digital labour platforms (DLPs) on cleaning workers. The prevalence of informality in this sector leads us to suggest analysing workers’ experiences by combining the literature on DLPs with that on the informal economy. Through in-depth interviews with cleaners in Milan and Rome, as well as DLP representatives, the article highlights on one hand, how DLPs affect informal workers and their conditions, and, on the other hand, how workers represent their work and what meanings they associate with the terms formal and informal in the location-based platform economy. The study shows that DLPs seem to play a limited role in the formalisation of work, revealing new forms of hybridisation between formal and informal labour. The use of DLPs also results in increasingly confusing perceptions of what constitutes formal (or regular) and informal work.

Domestic work has always been a quintessential example of invisible labour. In this article, I explore how workers build individual visibility on marketplace platforms. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with workers who use different marketplace platforms in Geneva and surrounding areas to find domestic work, I show how visibility on marketplace platforms requires invisible work and a different set of skills, competencies, codes of conduct and client management. I argue that visibility on marketplace platforms can be interpreted as a form of professionalization from above. On one hand, visibility becomes a barrier to entry in finding work. The different requirements for building visibility lead to an institutionalization of standardized skills and practices necessary to access work on the platform. On the other hand, marketplace platforms ignore the formality of the employment relationship and decent wages, which are externalized and managed between workers and the platform clients.

The advent of digital care platforms has been observed to give rise to a new regime of visibility, which facilitates the standardization of informal work while maintaining its precarious conditions. While these apparently opposing processes are often viewed as a trade-off between professionalization and informalization, this paper aims to shed light on their mutual interdependence. The article analyzes the case of Babysits, a global digital platform offering childcare services, focusing on the Italian context. Through in-depth interviews with platform workers and managers, the study shows that while the platform encourages workers to present themselves as professionals, it does not facilitate the formalization of their working conditions. In fact, the visibility of workers is decoupled from the construction of actual pathways of professionalization. Overall, the article confirms that, despite the construction of a ‘client-oriented professional discourse’, digital care platforms remain embedded in the informal market and contribute to its expansion beyond traditional proximity networks.

This article problematises the invocation of the stepping stone hypothesis for platform labour by Danish policymakers, namely the argument that digital labour platforms facilitate transitioning to typical employment, especially for groups of vulnerable workers. Tracing the origins of the stepping stone hypothesis back to the international literature on temporary work agencies and workfare policies triggered by neoliberal policy shifts, the article explores the ideological underpinning of the hypothesis in the Danish context, as Danish policymakers invoked it without possessing relevant data. This article questions the stepping stone narrative drawing on policy document analysis and expert interviews, but also on interviews with platform housecleaners, whose backgrounds, experiences, and aspirations indicate that they do not perceive platform labour as a stepping stone. Early Danish research on platform labour has not been premised on the workers’ perspectives. We claim that policymakers’ positive depiction of platform labour serves towards social and institutional stabilisation of technoprecarious – migrant – labour as a desired and inescapable future of work within the Danish labour market.

The proliferation of digital labour platforms ranges from ride-hailing and delivery services to care work. Eldercare platforms emerged as a prominent focus of critique regarding platformization, commodification, and the nature of care itself. However, empirical studies thus far have largely focused on domestic work and childcare, leaving a significant gap in the examination of eldercare platforms. This paper addresses this underexplored area by presenting empirical findings derived from a mixed-methods analysis involving 2144 eldercare workers’ profiles and 14 in-depth interviews. Through cluster analysis, the research identifies the distinct groups that comprise the workforce on on-demand eldercare platforms. In doing so, the study challenges prevailing narratives around platform labour, emphasizing that they are not universally applicable. The findings reveal that platforms tailored for cleaning, domestic care and eldercare each engage uniquely composed workforces, highlighting the significant stratification within care work and its implications for platformization. Ultimately, the research presents three key insights: first, that care platforms function as niche markets; second, that workers in these on-demand platforms possess substantial practical experience and qualifications in caregiving; and third, that, contrary to trends in other sectors of platformized care, migrant workers are not disproportionately represented on eldercare platforms in Germany.

Domestic work in Colombia has historically been undervalued and unpaid, with informality continuing to rise despite legal efforts to dignify it, such as the ratification of ILO C189. In this context, domestic work gig platforms have emerged as a source of formal employment. Unlike most gig economy models, these platforms operate as agencies that directly hire workers, ensuring key conditions like stable income and social security. However, gaps remain in understanding the algorithmic design of these platforms. Through an ethnographic study of one domestic work platform interface called Hogaru and semi-structured interviews with workers and customers, we examine algorithmic governance and its impact on domestic workers’ experiences, particularly concerning employment and social relations. Our research focuses on the platform’s matching system, ranking, and pricing mechanisms. We conclude with implications for designing more effective and equitable platforms, specifically tailored to the unique context of Latin America.

When platform companies first entered the scene, they claimed that their novel business models did not fit with existing regulations. This narrative of ‘platform exceptionalism’ has increasingly been discredited. This paper focuses on platform companies that mediate labour in the care sector and explores what legitimation strategies they use today. We build our argument on interviews with platform entrepreneurs in Hamburg, Vienna and Zurich and an analysis of the narratives used on their websites and advertisements. Our results identify a pervasive discourse of normalisation: Platform companies now primarily state that their organisational models, forms of work and services are ‘normal’ and no different from other businesses. Simultaneously, they position their services as a solution for the crisis of social reproduction and a contribution to (female) emancipation. We interpret their legitimation strategies as an attempt to counter the critique they faced over the last years. Drawing on feminist perspectives on social reproduction and care work, we argue that this serves to justify a capitalist system that normalises precarious working conditions in platform labour and devalues care work and workers. Challenging the problematic imaginary of platformised care work as the solution to the crisis of social reproduction, we call for developing alternative imaginaries that allow time for care.

Despite the progressive marketisation of domestic and care work, care in the Italian context is still firmly anchored within a familistic welfare model in which families must rely on their own resources against limited services. The limited development of in-kind provision reflects an overload of care functions delegated to cash provision, which, however, do not contribute to the definition of a formalised system of care. About labour regulation, in Italy since 1974, domestic and care work has been regulated by a National Collective Labour Agreement (NCLA). Unfortunately, the possibility of using the NCLA is linked to the economic and social possibilities of families, who often use the various welfare schemes to pay caregivers informally. Alongside these formal and informal pathways, a growing number of digital platforms have emerged to match or facilitate connections between workers and families seeking help. The research presented first questions on the role of care platforms as a new actor in intermediation processes. Second, stemming from the Italian familistic model, the paper seeks to understand whether and how platforms contribute to the creation of new segmentation mechanisms in the market or by exploiting the unmet demand for care to present themselves as innovative actors in the provision of care services.

This article explores the various forms of physical and digital intermediation in the provision of home care services in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and their impacts on the segregation and labor autonomy of migrant and native women employed in the sector. We analyze autonomy from three different approaches: understood as flexibility, from a post-operaist perspective and as conviviality. A qualitative methodology was employed, based on in-depth interviews with care workers, along different kinds of intermediaries, such as placement agencies, uberized platforms and care cooperatives with different levels of digitalization. While uberized platforms primarily mediate in precarious and short-term temporary jobs and tend to reduce workers’ autonomy in the three analyzed aspects, cooperatives emerge as a model that can improve autonomy across all business models, especially in the case of migrant workers.

This introduction to the special issue advances a sociology of loss and life, positioning death and mourning as both analytical and methodological tools for apprehending the social and interrogating its ontologies and epistemologies. The essays gathered here contribute to broader calls for critical, intersectional, transnational, and decolonial understandings of loss, situating death and mourning as inseparable from questions of power and its modalities, as well as from desires for social transformation—of damaged pasts and futures yet to be realized. Bereavement, bio-death, and mourning emerge not solely as sites of rupture, but as arenas of struggle, lived experience, and life-making. In this light, the social is constituted as much through loss as through life.

The 1701 Establishment of Religious Worship Act in colonial Maryland explicitly excluded ‘negros and malattoes’ from formal documentation. Marking a turning point in the legal construction of racialized burial borders, race was used to construct a rigid border privileging whites with burial rights while systematically denying them to Black peoples. This essay interrogates this border arguing that while they were originally erected to extend the racial hierarchies of life into death, African Americans redefined their meaning through acts of resistance. Positioned as a microhistory, this essay focuses intensively on African American burial practices and the legal, racial, and spiritual borders that shaped them in colonial Maryland. This study zooms in on the 1701 Establishment of Religious Worship Act and a particular community’s response: the construction of autonomous burial space and declaration of burial rights. Drawing from slave narratives, the essay introduces the concept of necro-armor. Necro-armor is the author’s term for how African Americans redefined spatial boundaries, not just for protection but also defiance, culminating in the 1807 creation of the African Burying Ground as a symbol of Black self-determination and sovereignty. In doing so, the deeper question of who upheld the border is considered.

Social histories of hospice focus on 1960’s counterculture and emphasize the progressive, anti-institutional bent of death positive activists. Our accepted historical narrative is that what began as a radical, grassroots movement to humanize end-of-life care gradually became part of the mainstream medical marketplace, making it difficult for hospice to fulfil its potential. This essay complicates that narrative with a close, critical reading of Cicely Saunders’ life and work. The death positive movement, I contend, was politically conflicted from the outset. Saunders’ approach was radical insofar as she troubled the gendered distinction between professional and personal care and insisted on the value of care work historically coded as feminine; this humanized dying people and caregivers alike. At the same time, Saunders was preoccupied with interior and intimate experience, and her vision of good dying hinged on performances of white respectability. This made hospice care seem apolitical, even as it advanced middle-class, Christian ideas about labor, gender, family, and moral worth. This analysis highlights the privileged, Eurocentric dimensions of death positive ideology and encourages us to look beyond hospice care as we reposition ourselves to address the challenges of 21st century dying.

In Indian-administered Kashmir, for decades, the funerals of militants were powerful moments of collective grief and resistance, drawing thousands of mourners. The Indian government had long threatened to ban such gatherings, and the pandemic provided a convenient pretext to limit large crowds. In 2020, the Indian Army stopped returning the bodies of the killed militants to their families. Instead, they were buried in remote, heavily surveilled graveyards with only a few select family members. Such funerals are what I term as incarcerated burials or enforced disappearance in death, which reflects the colonial hegemony in continuing imprisonment of dead bodies and punishing those living the aftermath. This paper explores how the Indian government has systematically criminalized mourning in Kashmir, impacting the memory and resistance. This crackdown highlights how collective mourning in Kashmir functions as a “politics of the subjugated,” representing political dissent and the everyday agency of the Kashmiris.

The subimperial formation of ‘South’ Korea, articulated within US imperialism, first emerged in Jeju amid the genocidal violence against Jeju natives since March 1947. While the South Korean state recognized the mass-murdered as citizens following the transitional justice programs in the 2000s, I question whether the recognition of citizenship conferred by the state – the perpetrator – constitutes the sovereign subjectivity that the bereaved Jeju natives have truly sought. To reflect on the possibility of sovereignty of the dead, I think with Indigenous studies scholarship to debate with Agamben and Mbembe. I argue that the sovereignty of the dead is contingent on the extent to which their historical subjectivities are honored through mourning practices. Drawing on photographs and archival materials concerning mourning practices, I illustrate the ways survivors and bereaved families in Jeju sought indigenous sovereignty for the mass-murdered.

Written as a memoir, this essay contemplates who is absent and present in family pictures—who has died and who has outlived the dead—to frame a conversation about how my own Cambodian family has come to speak with one another. I reflect on the incapacity to speak about trauma and the loss of native language skills as braided processes. Drawing inspiration from the practice of Du Boisian autoethnography, as well as the work of Cambodian scholars and memory workers, my memoir offers self-reflection to probe a history of how colonialism and whiteness engendered the Cambodian genocide and shape their sonic reverberations: wounds that repeat within and across generations. Yet a return is more than a reliving of injury. I describe how so through four relationships and their varied returns: with my mother, my father, myself, and my son. Fifty years after the Cambodian genocide, this essay embraces the power of memoir writing in the face of social loss, interrogates empire’s aphasic relationship with Cambodia, turns the gaze on the dark shadows of refugee impairment, and examines how broken language allows me as a language broker to translate forms of affirmation for refugees and their children.

This article seeks to extend the limits that death appears to posit, by tracing the lives, journeys, and deaths of two Central American transgender migrant women (Roxsana Hernández Rodríguez and Johana Medina León) who entered legal ports of entry, requested asylum (in 2018 and 2019), and died under or immediately after being in U.S. custody. Extending Queer Necropolitics’ use, I rely on the Sociology of the Trace to unearth an archive from disparate sources (news coverage, social media, legal reports and cases, responses by activists, and government sources). I focus on their quest for becoming—to be read as women, and their migratory/racialized experiences to be understood—for them to reach spaces where they could live in peace and acceptance. Using absent presences, I trace their lives through superfluous records of their deaths in order to connect to a sociology of the trace’s intent to represent lived experience, as mediated through structural forces.

In the popular imagination, genealogy is typically thought of as a socially inconsequential hobby, albeit one that is practiced by a substantial and growing number of people. Genealogy has had a troubled history, because it was traditionally used by those with privilege or power to trace their lineages, maintain the status quo, or exclude ‘less-desirable others’. But the practice’s contemporary uses are considerably more varied. With a focus on the central epistemological nature of genealogy and its production of genealogical memory and commemoration, I argue that genealogy is now being mobilized to create historical awareness that can transcend the level of family memory. I examine how genealogical memory can influence families’ collective identities, forge emotional connections with dead ancestors, trigger forms of mourning, and complement social history by giving voice to common people who are not usually the subjects of official, state-driven, historical commemoration. I also discuss how genealogical memory may sometimes prompt and support progressive social activism and efforts to promote social change.