International Sociology

This article examines the ways in which the urban poor in Argentina help one another in the arduous task of making ends meet when neither the formal labor market nor state welfare policies are able to secure their subsistence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article makes one substantive, one analytic, and one theoretical claim. Substantively, the article argues by way of empirical illustration that the urban poor are hardworking bricoleurs. Analytically, the article demonstrates the advantages of studying poor people’s strategies in a simultaneously historic and ethnographic fashion through joint collaborative fieldwork. Theoretically, the article pushes toward replacing the notions of ‘strategy of survival or subsistence’ with the more encompassing notion of ‘strategy of persistence’.

Based on a comparative analysis of seven youth movements, this article shows the rise of a rhetoric of intergenerational injustice over the past decade, increasingly associated with a direct accusation of older generations and with a generational and global ‘we’. Theoritically, we propose to approach the ‘generational voice’ – rather than the generational ‘presence’ – to shed light on the generational grievances, emotions and identities carried within movements. We draw on the textual analysis of protest slogans (n = 1914) collected directly from: the Indignados (2011), the student movements in Chile and Quebec (2011–2012), the Paris ‘Nuit Debout’ movement (2016), the Hong Kong pro-democracy movements (2014 and 2019), and the Montreal pro-climate march (2019). Using mixed methods, the article shows the existence of four major rhetorics of generational injustice – be it economic, social, political or environmental – associated with an increasingly radical critique of a legacy, deemed too heavy for ‘future generations’.

Based on the dilemma social workers face at the grassroots level in a street social workstation, this article discusses the micro-production mechanism of their professional role in China. Along with the life cycle of the social workstation, three different sets of camouflage schemes have been formed, namely, isomorphism, polymorphism, and heterogeneous isomorphism, to avoid identity crises and continue the survival logic. This study argues that the social workstation can not only be viewed as outsourcing of government social functions but rather bring the possibility of using social work methods as national governance techniques. The camouflage practice of social workers is an important manifestation of the penetration of national governance into society through the flexibility of social organizations. This new form of social work professional practice means that social workers have gradually evolved into stewards of government management, posing challenges to their professional roles and leading to more complex individual actions.

This article analyzes the formation of a media framing of political moralization in Brazil that was consolidated during the decade of 2010, during the peak of an anti-corruption prosecution and the campaign against ‘gender ideology’. This media framing was characterized by the association of the agenda for probity in the conduct of public business with a traditional family morality. The research methodology is anchored in studies of media framing in an analytical perspective that joins sources of digital sociology to political communication studies to analyze an archive collected on platforms of social networks and news media. We contrast the results of the investigation to contributions and gaps of political sociology and gender and sexuality studies focused on either public or private morality. The analysis of the materials shows how the far-right developed a political-communicational strategy on social networks to unite the two dimensions of morality to gain electoral support.

With specific reference to Shanghai city in China, this study investigates elite middle school students’ citizenship competence learning – political identity, scientific spirit, legal awareness, and public participation. The study uses a mixed methodology of questionnaires, classroom observations, document analyses, and interviews to collect data and identifies three patterns of students’ citizenship competence learning. This study provides empirical data that supplement the existing literature on elite students’ citizenship learning in the context of China.

This study explores the phenomenon of digital-social construction in the form of anonymous transactions, asymmetric information, and unlimited access in online marketplace. The study was conducted by processing digital data of 5131 comments, descriptions, and rating records of 1988 IDs of functional food products sold at Bukalapak, one of the largest marketplaces in Indonesia. Using Python and Google Studio software, digital-social interactions are mapped and visualized based on four conceptual frameworks of economic sociology, namely social embeddedness of market, product standardization, intersubjective construction of symbolic value, and willingness to pay. This study marks a new chapter in the study of contemporary economic sociology, in which conventional conceptual frameworks are applied to uncover digital market phenomena using research methods that fully process and analyze big data in the business field.