Individualization Thesis Research Articles

Performing the self in contemporary rural China: voice from a villager

ABSTRACT This paper provides the voice from a villager who participates in the art-led rural reconstruction in southwest China, and in so doing, to highlight the contemporary vernacular creativity embodied by villagers participating in art. Existing studies tend to understand villagers as merely responsive agents of the state-led or artist-initiated artistic practices, overlooking the inherent agency of villagers in artistic production. Drawing on the individualization thesis in Chinese society, this paper examines the project Yangdeng Art Cooperative in the rural area of Guizhou Province, China with a special focus on the individual perspective of villager Linghu. Findings show how Linghu's quest for self-identity infiltrates the collaborative practices with artists and gives rise to the autobiographic performance that is characterized by everydayness, improvisation, and relationality. Autobiographic performance of Linghu demonstrates an endogenous approach to artistic production and further concretizes a hybrid rurality that is always ongoing.

Pursuing individualism without feminism: Leisure life and gender politics of young female bar-goers in urban China.

Drawing upon fieldwork data collected among young female bar-goers in China, we examine the gender politics manifested by their leisure activities and argue that these young women are pursuing individualism without feminism. By analyzing the act of bar hopping, we reveal the internal tension of individuation, which urges women to engage in gender labor in order to obtain preferential treatment regarding consumption and a competitive advantage in esthetic femininity. This indicates that the central axis of Chinese women's individualization is a hybrid of neoliberal individuals and essentialist gender roles. It encourages women to see themselves voluntarily as subordinate subjects in market transactions and feminized objects under male scrutiny. The pursuit of individualism without feminism prevents women from overcoming the highly gendered settings of bar scenarios, or imagining the female as a whole group with communal solidarity. The Chinese female individual manifests herself as a hostage of the collusion between the commodification of social life and a conservative gender regime. The case of China brings the individualization thesis out of its original compressed-modernity framework and indicates that East Asia's quest for modernity must address the compressed conditions of individualism and feminism simultaneously.

Desistance and the State: Revisiting the Individualization Thesis in Criminology and Criminal Justice

The growing influence of neo-liberalism in crime policy and practice has resulted in the responsibilization of individuals: criminality and risk tend now to be seen as operating at the individual level, rather than the structural level. Individuals are solely responsible for their actions, not only in starting offending but also in stopping, and are to blame for their own predicament (an epistemological fallacy). Herein, we argue that structural barriers to rehabilitation and reintegration were erected by political decision making from the 1980s. This resulted in criminal justice practitioners increasingly focussing on individual-level factors (cognition, agency, employability) and neglecting the structural causes of offending. We thus propose that the state take a more proactive stance in reducing reoffending and fostering opportunities for reintegration through broader social welfarism, rather than penal policies.

How do Hong Kong fans choose their favourite overseas football club? Origins of transnational fandom in late modernity

Despite the importance of transnational fans to the globalisation of European football, there have not been many studies that aim to understand why they support specific overseas clubs. On the basis of qualitative interviews with transnational fans in Hong Kong and supplemented by findings from an online fan survey, I argue that most of them lack genuine choices when choosing their favourite overseas clubs. Even when all English Premier League matches are shown live in Hong Kong and with information about many European clubs available on the Internet, transnational fans tend to support teams that they were familiar with when they were still young, and clubs that star players play for. Such clubs are usually the richest ones that can help them achieve success on the pitch. Also, family members and peers can be influential to the origin of football fandom, but there is little pressure to support the same overseas club as their family members or peers. The choices of transnational fans based in Hong Kong should also be understood by taking the historical context of the city into account. Such findings suggest that globalisation has freed Hong Kong football fans from geographical constraints, but the individualisation thesis in the late modern era needs to be qualified since the wealth of European clubs and fans’ immediate social context do often have important impacts on their decision to support an overseas club.

L’appartenance catholique des femmes au Québec: Pour une approche genrée du rapport à la religion

While the place of women in Quebec Catholicism was brought to light by feminist research, it has mostly remained absent from the study of Catholicism, or has been centred on the relation to the Catholic institution. This article explores the gendered dimension of Quebecois’s relationship to religion through examining women’s belonging to Catholicism. An analysis of interviews with women and men identifying as Catholics permits a typology of ways of women’s belonging to Catholicism while highlighting three distinguishing aspects: religious socialization, transmission and relation to the Catholic institution. The modalities of belonging identified indicate that women’s belonging is less individualized and more relational compared to that of men. These results provide possible ways of rethinking an individual’s relationship to religion by taking a gendered approach, thus providing further nuance to the exculturation and individualization thesis by underlining its relational dimension.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Class Dynamics from Socialism to Post-Socialism

Introduction to the Special Issue on Class Dynamics from Socialism to Post-Socialism

Participation in non-formal education in risk society

ABSTRACT The participation of adults in lifelong learning has undergone significant development in the last few years, with the percentage of adults participating in non-formal education (NFE) risen dramatically. Within this empirical context, this study conceptualises and interconnects the theory of Ulrich Beck’s risk society with the main trends in contemporary NFE. Based on a secondary analysis of data from the LFS and AES, we test four complementary thesis derived from Beck’s theory. Firstly, if adults participating in NFE with the precarious job contract gradually increase. And if automation plays a more critical role in the prevalence of job-oriented NFE. Secondly, we focus on Beck’s individualisation and market-dependence thesis: Do adults in the CZ tend to individualise more in their participation in NFE during the last decade and do they more dependent on market forces? We found that Czech adult education system exhibits a significant level of individualisation that is not based on the classical class categories, but instead on integration into the job market as well as to a lesser extent on the ownership of cultural capital. Subsequently, individualisation is driven by market forces and dictated by company policy. According to the available data, industrial automation has only an indirect effect on participation in job-oriented NFE.

‘Peripheral youth’ talk back: work, the self and the ‘good life’ in India and the U.K.

ABSTRACT This paper presents constructions of ‘work’ through a comparative charting of the manner in which young people across rural India, urban India, and the urban UK account for their educational and work trajectories. The comparison grounds an interrogation of the individualisation thesis and the reflexive biography, an influential analytical framework for examining youth biographies in the Global North, bringing it into conversation with theoretical traditions that study youth identities/biographies in a global framework such as development studies and human geography. Employing a conceptual framework that places youth subjectivities as it forms and is formed by place (material and structural features) and cultural norms concerning ideal selfhood, I analyse the accounts for the reflexive management of biographies, the cultural/structural resources that participants draw upon in constructing these, and the moral frameworks underlying aspirations for the ‘good life’ in these accounts. Responding to calls for dialogues between the Global North and Global South in youth studies, the aim is to de-valorise reflexivity and choice in biographical management by highlighting some psychological penalties associated with these modes of self-construction in late modernity and thereby to ‘talk back’ to some of the assumptions underlying youth studies in/from the Global North.

Through ‘thick and thin’ as long as it is healthy: shared meanings of commitment in long-term couple relationships, whether married or not

ABSTRACT Social theorists have suggested relationship practice changes such as rising rates of nonmarital cohabitation imply external anchors are lifting with relations become increasingly individualized and fragile. These suppositions are in part based on theories of commitment which have taken conventional characteristics of marriage as a blueprint from which to compare. Reporting findings from an in-depth qualitative study in England, in this paper, what it means to be committed and how commitment is displayed within 10 long-term (15 plus years) couple relationships across forms (same-sex, opposite-sex, married, civil partnership, cohabitant) is explored. The findings challenge conventional signifiers by which cohabitants are deemed less committed than married couples. In line with the individualization thesis, couples described an importance attached to autonomy and equality. Instead of public promises for a lifetime together, sexual intimacy and financial interdependence, couples displayed commitment through mutual reciprocity. However, these' individualized' relationships were not sustained only to the extent of personal satisfaction. Moral consistency values to stick together through adversity, unless the relationship became unhealthy, signified what it meant to be committed; whether the relationship was formalized or not. Further research is needed to develop theories of commitment which better reflect the diversity of contemporary relationship practices.

Practicing autonomy in a local eduscape: schools, families and educational choice

ABSTRACT Portraying a localised educational system as part of broader global flows of policy ideas and practices emanating from multiple sources – an eduscape– the paper focuses on family practices shaped by global policy flows and the return impact of families on the translation of these policies into local school formations. Under scrutiny are the decentralising or devolutionary directives, linked so often to choice and competition, which took hold in Western jurisdictions in the 1980s, the influences of which are still strongly felt. The conceptual links spread to a mobile ‘second modernity’, implicating many a family in movement associated with choices they are obliged to make, and which are often correlated to family achievement and success. The observations reported here are framed conceptually by an interest in the synthesis of Beck’s individualisation thesis and Bourdieusean practice approaches in order to portray and comprehend social being and social change.

More Than “Peasants Without Land”: Individualisation and Identity Formation of Landless Peasants in the Process of China’s State-Led Rural Urbanisation

In the course of state-led rural urbanisation over the past few decades, millions of Chinese peasants have been expropriated and relocated. After establishing a definition of these “landless peasants” as a heterogeneous social group connected mainly by the fact that its members had to give up their land-use rights, this article sets out to examine subsequent processes of identity formation – a topic that has been largely neglected in existing research. Drawing on Beck’s individualisation thesis, I suggest that structural and institutional changes in the process of rural modernisation have initiated a further thrust of individualisation in people’s lives which manifests not only in the objective domain of life situations but also in the subjective domain of identity. This hypothesis is substantiated through an ethnographic case study based on seven months of fieldwork (2016–2018) in Huaming Model Town in the Dongli District of Tianjin. As a first step towards conceptualising what landless peasants are becoming, I will propose to start focusing on recombinant identities and class differentiations evolving among the people.

Sociologies of Personal Relationships and the Challenge of Climate Change

The substantive concerns and theoretical insights of sociologies of family, intimate and personal life ought to place this body of work in closer dialogue with environmental sociology over the ‘big issue’ of climate change. However, its research active practitioners typically have a narrower repertoire of engagement with global issues and those who are outside the topic area often miss the value of its contributions. This article discusses common ground between this specialist area and sociologies of environmental issues in unpacking processes of social change through empirically grounded theoretical work. This includes the renewed theoretical emphasis on relationality, empirically based critique of the ‘individualisation thesis’, uses of ‘practice’ to transcend ‘micro’–‘macro’ and ‘social’–‘natural’ divisions, and interest in I/we boundary shifts. More fully recognising the potential of this overlapping territory may help leverage more effective sociological responses to the global challenge of climate change.

The intersection of nationalism, Confucian familism, and queer in Katherine Hui‐ling Chou's He's My Wife, He's My Mother

AbstractThis article examines the transnational and cross‐cultural imagination in Katherine Hui‐ling Chou's 2009 play Shaonian Jinchai Nanmengmu (He's My Wife, He's My Mother), which adapts the seventeenth‐century Chinese writer Li Yu's homoerotic short story “Nanmengmu Jiaohe Sanqian” (A Male Mencius's Mother Educated His Son and Moved Three Times) while also referencing Caryl Churchill's 1979 archetypical queer play Cloud Nine. He's My Wife, He's My Mother epitomizes the layered complexities of the intersection of nationalism, Confucian familism, and Western queer epistemology. This intersection not only rearticulates Chinese transnational history and reinterprets Chinese cultural resources by absorbing the fruition of Western queer paradigm. It also seeks to transfigure the horizon of queer studies currently limited by the individualization thesis, by deploying the Confucian idea of qing as an originary human affect to emphasize the significance of connectedness and care. Chou's literary vision thus offers both a fresh angle to grasp the cultural discourses in transnational circulation and a reflective perspective to spot the limits and conceivable transformations for the theoretical formation and political praxis concerning queer and Confucianism.

Disney’sHigh School Musicaland the construction of the tween audience

This article explores how the Disney Company scripts what it is to be a tween through the High School Musical trilogy. While children’s perspective is of pivotal concern within childhood studies, it has traditionally left out the material aspects and rather focused too narrowly on the subject and the social. I found that the trilogy was watched several times by tweens, thus in addition to exploring children’s voices and perspectives on media content, we also need to examine what the audience is served. The High School Musical trilogy is about teenagers as they attend high school, while it is the younger age group, tweens, who are the main target audience. Implicitly, this tells us that the Disney text configures its audience as aspiring teenagers. The article sets out to explore how Disney configures its tween audience by looking at how identity and age are scripted in the trilogy. Through the lens of the individualization thesis drawing on Beck and Beck-Gernsheim the article analyzes how age, identity, and individuality is portrayed in the trilogy. The article finds that the paradox of becoming a unique individual on one hand, and social obligations on the other hand, are present in the trilogy subsequently abiding in an ambiguous configuration of tweens through the High School Musical trilogy.

Youth and Family in Southeast Europe: Patterns of Individualization Along with the Lines of Human Development

The individualization of family life is one of the crucial ideas among leading theorists dealing with late modernity (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992; Bauman, 2000; Beck-Gemsheim, 2002). The individualization thesis was applied in a study of youth attitudes and actions relating to individualization in family life. Data were gathered through surveys on representative samples of young people from nine countries in Southeast Europe. The Human Development Index (HDI) was used as an indicator of the general level of modernization. Analyses revealed that young people from countries with higher HDI tend to (1) be substantially more autonomous in their decision-making and in their plans for the future; (2) perceive relationships with their parents as more conflictual; (3) perceive decision-making in their family as less patriarchal; and (4) be substantially less inclined to marry. With the notable exception of Slovenia, there is also a strong tendency for youth from more developed countries to leave their parents’ households earlier. With some important reservations, these findings lend important empirical support to the individualization thesis relating to family life.

‘Families and Relationships’ e-Special Issue Introduction

This ‘Families and Relationships’ e-Special Issue contains a selection of 10 articles previously published in Sociology. In this Introduction, we first outline the broader sub-disciplinary context and explain our selection criteria. The increased popularity of families and relationships as a focus of sociological study is reflected in the dominance of articles published in the 1990s and later. Our selection highlights the following developments within the field: the shift from the sociology of the family to a sociology of families; the debates surrounding late modernity and the individualisation thesis; increased diversity regarding types of family and kinds of issue that have been researched; and continued theoretical development that has widened the scope of study. We include reflections on how the selected articles speak to developments in the discipline at large and in the field of families and relationships, as well as what the future might hold for the field.

From Generation to Generation: Changing Dimensions of Intergenerational Farm Transfer

AbstractThe transfer of managerial control between generations on the family farm has long been understood as a critical and often problematic phase, with implications for both the individual farm business and more broadly, the sustainability of family farming systems. Drawing on empirical data from interviews with prospective successors and farmers in Devon, England, the article provides a contemporary analysis of the transfer of managerial control on family farms. Although in line with traditional conceptualisations, findings reaffirm how many prospective successors were delegated tasks of increasing responsibility, with limited access to the higher responsibility financial management tasks, an emergent cohort of younger prospective successors enjoyed a contrasting progression towards managerial control, involving varied involvement across all aspects of farm management. With reference to late modernity and the individualisation thesis, the article explores how unconstrained by tradition the emerging cohort described a wealth of off‐farm experiences, including what the article terms short‐term diversions, which the analysis reveals have informed and shaped their progression towards managerial control. In view of these findings, the article offers an alternative and up‐to‐date conceptualisation of the transfer of managerial control in the form of the succession matrix, before considering the potential applications and some avenues for future research.

Self-Identity and Its Discontents: Sociology in the 1990s

This article introduces one of four e-special issues designed to celebrate 50 years of Sociology by showcasing the depth of material in the journal’s archive. ‘Identity’ was chosen as the focus for an e-special issue about the 1990s as this was an important period in the development of public and academic discussions around this slippery concept. A review of the journal’s content from that era reveals a surprising dearth of work on the politics of group identity. In contrast, British sociology’s growing interest in questions of self, subjectivity, lifestyle and life course is well represented. Much of this work was developed in critical dialogue with the ‘individualization thesis’ that argued that people increasingly acted as choice-making individuals in control of their own lives. Through sophisticated use of theory, research and case studies many of the articles included in the e-special challenge the simplifications of this thesis. The selected articles are grouped in four sections: the first looks at attempts to theorize self-identity in late modernity; this is followed by three articles on consumerism and lifestyle; the next section contains articles on biography and the life course. The selection finishes with two articles that reflect on how sociology teaching and research might be reconfigured to acknowledge explicitly the experiences and identities of those involved.

Reflexive Transformation of Intimacy in Late Modernity Theories: Some Critiques and Conceptual Alternatives

The last decades have seen a growing trend towards researching intimacy. A considerable amount of literature has been published based on the reflexive transformation of intimacy framework. This paper starts from the premise that, recently, more and more scholars have criticized the idea that detraditionalization and individualization led to the transformation of intimacy during reflexive modernity (late modernity). Critics question the ability of late modernity concepts to offer a crosscultural and nuanced image of contemporary particularities of private life and intimate relations. The purpose of this study is to show the current state of knowledge in the social sciences on individualization thesis and detraditionalization thesis, the main theoretical criticisms of the two theses and conceptual alternatives to them. To achieve these goals, we conducted an interpretive synthesis of 16 articles from international literature, published between 1999-2014, in the thematic area of social changes brought by late modernity into the domain of private life and intimacy. In the

Family bond and family obligation: Continuity and transformation

In examining family relations in contemporary China the article reports the findings of an empirical investigation, which are discussed in terms of recent accounts in the specialist literature. While the individualization thesis suggests that the bonds between family members are diminishing and that family obligations are similarly less significant than they used to be, it is shown here that family bonds and obligations remain strong, even though the grounds on which they are performed and the attitudes and emotions associated with them have undergone change since China’s marketization from the 1980s. The individualization thesis neglects the process of reinterpretation and re-negotiation of filial obligation, and fails to appreciate that modification of filial behaviour is initiated not only by the younger generation but also by the older. The article shows that contemporary filial relations are less concerned with authority, and more directed to financial and emotional support for parents, and from parents to children both adult and dependent.