JCS Focus | Sociological Research Online最新目录与摘要

The Journal of Chinese Sociology

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社会学·国际顶刊

Sociological Research Online

最新目录与摘要

Sociological Research Online（简称SRO）是经同行评审的国际期刊，旨在促进社会学学者之间的快速交流，不限制主题和方法。该期刊发表高质量的应用社会学研究，重点关注理论、实证和方法的讨论，也会涉及对当前政治、文化和思想议题的辩论。SRO发表的文章将社会学分析方法应用于公共领域和私人领域都共同关注的问题，展现了社会学研究和理论所具有的广泛的社会相关性及其对理解当代社会问题的重要意义。

Sociological Research Online 为季刊，最新一期（Volume 29 Issue 2, June 2024）分为“Special Issue Editorial”“Special Section Research Articles”和“Research Articles”三个栏目，共计14篇文章，详情如下。

Special Issue Editorial

Re-Thinking Therapeutic Cultures: Tracing Change and Continuity in a Time of Crisis and Change

Daniel Nehring, Mariano Plotkin, Piroska Csúri, Nicolás Viotti

该内容过长，不便呈现。如需阅读，点击文末“阅读原文”即可跳转SRO官网，谢谢！

‍Special Section Research Articles

Digital Therapeutic Cultures and Their New Regime of Psychological Truth

Rodrigo De La Fabián

The article focuses on contemporary digital therapeutic cultures’ new regime of truth. This entails describing and critically analysing the sociomaterial apparatuses that distinguish truth from false and produce specific modes of subjectivation. The article shows that the digital regime of psychological truth is heir to the behavioural mistrust of subjectivity and the epistemological shift from the causal-comprehensive model towards the probabilistic-predictive one. However, the psychological subject has not been excluded, but her role has changed. The article introduces the distinction between valuable and spurious truths to analyse this shift. Algorithms do not need the psychological subject to produce true outcomes, but they depend on her and psy-knowledges to distinguish significative from irrelevant truths. Following Maurizio Lazzarato, the article concludes that digital therapeutic cultures share one of the main features of contemporary capitalism: to produce value at the intersection of processes of subjectivation and de-subjectivation.

The Self in Self-Help: A Re-Appraisal of Therapeutic Culture in a Time of Crisis

Daniel Nehring

In this article, I analyse constructions of the self in bestselling self-help books in the United Kingdom. In doing so, I offer a re-appraisal of contemporary therapeutic culture. Therapeutic culture has long been associated with neoliberal governance, and scholars have argued that popular therapeutic narratives promote neoliberal accounts of an autonomous, masterful ‘entrepreneurial self’, able to thrive in the world on its own. However, beginning with the international financial crisis of 2008, neoliberalism has entered a period of serious and accelerating crisis and contestation. The question therefore arises to what extent popular therapeutic narratives might have changed during this period. In response, I analyse narratives of the self and self-improvement in UK self-help bestsellers between 2008 and 2022. Given their high sales and consumption, self-help books are prominent in the constitution of popular therapeutic discourse. I focus on the UK as an emblematic case, given its history of neoliberal politics, the latter’s recent crisis, and the salience of therapeutic culture in the country. Across the analysed period, my findings point to the emergence of alternative, survivalist and spiritual, therapeutic discourses that move beyond the model of the entrepreneurial self, while ultimately retaining its core assumptions about rational, autonomous behavioural modification.

The Psychologization of Student Subjectivity in the Finnish Academia

Antti Saari, Kristiina Brunila, Saara Vainio

Public debate and media attention concerning mental health problems, stress, psycho-emotional vulnerabilities, and anxiety among university students has reached record level. Informed by media representations, student mental health guides, and our observations, we focus on the ethos of vulnerability as an articulation of psychologized student subjectivity in Finnish academia. We explore the multiple registers in which the ethos of vulnerability tends to operate as an assemblage to depict and govern student subjects.

Constructing a Crisis: Mental Health, Higher Education and Policy Entrepreneurs

Ashley Frawley, Chloë Wakeham, Kenneth McLaughlin, Kathryn Ecclestone

In 2018, the UK Conservative government issued a ‘non-negotiable’ instruction for universities to make ‘positive mental health’ a strategic priority. This was responding to growing pressure from a variety of stakeholders including mental health organisations, student groups and higher education (HE) management who claimed a worsening crisis of student mental health in the UK. We conducted a qualitative media analysis (QMA) of public discussions of student mental health as a social problem in a sample of (a) newspapers and (b) policy documents produced in the UK between 2010 and 2019 using a contextual constructionist approach and Kingdon’s policy streams framework. It identifies expansive definitions of mental illness, assumptions that precede evidence-gathering, ‘professional exes’ as policy entrepreneurs, and solutions that spread risk across institutions. We conclude by discussing the shift away from autonomous subjectivity towards more heteronomous constructions. In so doing it provides an important contribution to sociological understandings of contemporary subjectivity and social policy regarding mental health in HE.

Research Articles

The Social Production of the Dead Human Body in the Practice of Teaching Anatomy Through Cadaveric Dissection

Jennifer Burr, Nigel Russell-Sewell

The aim of this study is to explore how the dead human body is socially produced through the practices of those involved in teaching anatomy through cadaveric dissection. The perspectives of anatomists learning to teach offer a novel perspective on the existing literature. The study draws on data from interviews with students and teaching staff involved in practical cadaveric dissection during a UK postgraduate anatomy education programme. Interviews addressed participants’ experiences, reflections, and emotional responses during practical dissection of donor bodies. Findings address five areas: anticipation and the ‘imagined body’, ontology and the latent human, detachment, dissociation, and reconciliation, preparation and intentionality, and gratitude and immortalisation. The findings suggest that during the course of practical dissection sessions, anatomists learn to normalise the transgressive activity of human dissection via processes of reconciliation. The transgressive elements are resolved through the agency of the person once living and through a configuration of the anatomist and the donor body in a network of scientific knowledge, pedagogic practice and personal influence.

Explaining Regularities or Individual Outcomes: Chance and the Limits of Social Science

Judith Glaesser

Can we explain individual outcomes by referring to patterns observed in populations? Social scientists generally assume that we can, at least to a certain degree, and they study populations partly with that goal in mind. However, while patterns can be observed on the population level, which suggest that, on average, certain segments of the population are more likely to experience some outcome, it is impossible, on the individual level, to predict who will actually experience the outcome, even if the individual’s relevant characteristics are known. Thus, an interesting tension emerges: on the one hand, individual action and experience produces population-level patterns, while on the other hand, individual experience appears to be ‘inherently underdetermined’ and partly or largely due to luck or chance. Accordingly, this article considers the relationship between regularities and individual outcomes and to what extent it is desirable to construct models which can explain all the variance in outcomes, and the roles of true chance and what one might call ‘as-if’ chance in this. An empirical demonstration based on ALLBUS data explores these issues further. It uses the example of the graduate premium to discuss that, while there is a pattern where, on average, graduates earn more than non-graduates, there is a certain degree of individual-level deviation from this pattern (even after taking account of other relevant factors) which is partly due to chance. Patterns identified in data can provide the upper and lower bounds within which chance plays its part. The article closes with a discussion of implications for research and policy, and for the understanding of research findings by the general public.

A Convergence of Opportunities: Understanding the High Elite University Progression of Disadvantaged Youth in an East London Locality

Joanne Davies

There is growing evidence that London’s disadvantaged youth have a better chance at progressing to elite universities than their counterparts outside the capital. Drawing on case study research in a disadvantaged East London locality, this article suggests that a convergence of structural factors that favour elite university progression may help explain this high progression. These factors include local schools’ valorisation of elite universities and their associated prioritisation of resources and strong framing of university choices to privilege Russell Group progression. Students’ apparent advantageous access to the widening participation provision of elite universities and to internship and networking opportunities arising from London’s corporate philanthropy also appear to play important roles. The article advocates for greater strategic planning by the regulator and further partnerships across all sectors of the economy to enable a fairer distribution of widening participation opportunities nationwide. It concludes with a call to reflect on the wisdom of privileging elite university progression at all costs and asks whether we should really be championing such a narrow vision of social mobility in the first place.

A Fish in Many Waters? Addressing Transnational Habitus and the Reworking of Bourdieu in Global Contexts

Garth Stahl, Hannah Soong, Guanglun Michael Mu, Kun Dai

This article explores the operationalization of transnational habitus by scholars to understand how individuals experience mobilities across borders. Our scoping study of 21 scholarly publications focuses on the various ways in which transnational habitus is defined as well as the different approaches to theorizing a transnational habitus. In critically mapping the relatively short history of transnational habitus, we are interested in what about habitus appears particularly generative to scholars interested in migratory experiences. The study first charts the sociological scholarship to date on transnational habitus and how it is used to understand the ways in which transnational migrants negotiate and navigate their social and cross-border mobilities. Then, to critically appraise these theorizations, the analysis focuses on two key trends in the literature: treatment of clivé/adaptation and the role of time(lag)/temporality before addressing two key silences in the use of transnational habitus – specifically gender and consideration of differences in class background.

Keeping It Real in Chinese Hip-Hop: Everyday Authenticity and Coming From the Street

RYehan Wang

The status of hip-hop in China is being reshaped by the sudden popularity experienced by the genre in the last few years. An aspect that has been overlooked by scholarly research on Chinese hip-hop authenticity is that underground rappers may have to simultaneously assume multiple personal, professional, and social roles while attempting to maintain authenticity. This article provides an empirical account of how authenticity and the ‘keep it real’ motto are understood and negotiated by underground Chinese rappers. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 rappers, this article proposes the notion of everyday authenticity as a means for rappers to draw inspiration from unembellished daily realities while also using music to alleviate everyday hardships. The article also examines the challenges faced by underground rappers in the attempt to retain this type of authenticity in the mainstream, commercially driven environment. The tension is resolved by creating an autonomous realm for rappers that come ‘out of the street’, which allows rappers to claim legitimacy inside and outside the underground. This article provides an extension of the conceptualisation of authenticity in the Chinese hip-hop context, thus critically contributing to the global debate around hip-hop authenticity.

Safety and Security Battles: Unpacking the Players and Arenas of the Safe Standing Movement in English Football (1989–2022)

Mark Turner, Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen

This article advances recent debates on social movement (relational) fields, outcomes, and successes by suggesting that the analysis of such fields as a whole must be temporal. The relational interpersonal and intersubjective choices made by interdependent actors in social life take place in fields of interaction, but these interactions and their networks of social relations have a history. Hence, the social movement field is characterised by multiple temporal periods through which the actions of activists both shape and are shaped by the long-term socio-political environments in which they are embedded. To develop this analysis, we identify a football supporter-movement in England, ‘Safe Standing’, revealing the complex interplay of cultural and technological patterns of interaction across the compelling timeframes and orientations of a 30-year movement field. Adopting a theoretical framework which synthesises research on the strategic interactions of movement ‘players’ and ‘arenas’, and sport-focused security fields, we identify a series of compound and sub-players across the political, symbolic, mediatised, technological, and legislative arenas which constitute the security field of contention, in what is an under-researched lifeworld in sociology.

Nested Narratives: Biographical Accounts of Unlived Experience Across Three Narrative Orders

Susie Scott, Nina Lockwood

Studies of narrative identity have focused on positive formation: stories of ‘becoming’ who we are because of events that happened, people we met, and things that we said, did, or had. However, identities can also be negatively defined by things that we miss, lose, choose against, or events that never happened. Drawing on the sociology of nothing, this paper explores some ways in which biographical subjects may story their unlived lives and paths to unbecoming. We demonstrate this by analysing the same extract of data through three interpretive lenses, revealing different narrative orders: the intrapersonal, intertextual, and performative. Respectively, these refer to how nothing is narrated: self-reflexively by the experiencing subject, regarding a particular instance; as a sequence of thematically connected episodes, contextually emplotted within a general life story; and as a communicative act of telling, directed towards an imagined audience. Authors can move between these narrative orders, taking different temporal perspectives and producing ‘nested’ stories of alternative non-selves.

‘I’m Not Victim-Blaming, But . . .’: Young People’s Discourses in Understanding Sexual Violence Against Women

Robert Bolton, Claire Edwards, Máire Leane, Fiachra Ó Súilleabháin

This article explores the discourses that young people (aged 18–24) in Ireland use in understanding men’s sexual violence against women (SVAW). Drawing on a two-part vignette used in interviews with young people to elicit a corpus of data, we deploy critical discourse analysis to unpack the nuanced argumentative structures, interpretive repertoires, and subject positions used in apportioning blame for SVAW. We find that when blame is placed solely on men as perpetrators, young people draw on critical discourses that recognise the socially constructed basis of SVAW. In contrast, those who in some way blame women for their victimisation draw on disclaimers and essentialist repertoires that discursively normalise SVAW. We also identify a ‘rights discourse’ that young people use in their attributions of blame and responsibility for SVAW.

Broken (Again) – Making Sense of Ankle Fracture, Hospitalisation, and Early Recovery: An Autoethnography

Sally Dowling

There is little research on the experience of recovering from acute injury, with most first person accounts of illness about chronic ill health. Ankle fracture is a common, distressing injury with short- and long-term life-altering impacts. In this article, an autoethnographic approach is used to tell a story of ankle fracture, surgery, and subsequent early recovery. The story is told and examined from one person’s multiple perspectives – as a patient, healthcare worker, and healthcare educator – and thus reflects on both the delivery and organisation of healthcare, and the personal experience of receiving care. The impacts of ankle fracture and recovery are considered and related to other research on the experience. Common factors include pain, loss of independence, isolation, loneliness and depression, changed personal and social identities and engagement, and lack of understanding of the trajectory of recovery. Illness and injury narratives can provide valuable contributions to healthcare education and the delivery of care, as well as being used to support those living through similar experiences. This article argues that the combination of sociological thinking and patient experience has a valuable contribution to make to healthcare education.

《中国社会学学刊》（The Journal of Chinese Sociology）于2014年10月由中国社会科学院社会学研究所创办。作为中国大陆第一本英文社会学学术期刊，JCS致力于为中国社会学者与国外同行的学术交流和合作打造国际一流的学术平台。JCS由全球最大科技期刊出版集团施普林格·自然(Springer Nature)出版发行，由国内外顶尖社会学家组成强大编委会队伍，采用双向匿名评审方式和“开放获取”(open access)出版模式。JCS已于2021年5月被ESCI收录。2022年，JCS的CiteScore分值为2.0（Q2），在社科类别的262种期刊中排名第94位，位列同类期刊前36%。2023年，JCS在科睿唯安发布的2023年度《期刊引证报告》（JCR）中首次获得影响因子并达到1.5（Q3）。