“Some people work a bit more than me, and so we tease them”: the production of an elite student community in an elite French higher education institution

This article presents the results of an ethnographic study of student humor in a French elite higher education institution, specifically how students in the student community use the term polard. The data was collected between 2014 and 2018 in one of France’s most prestigious elite higher education institution. There are two main ways this term is used as humor, indirectly mocking students, notably those outside the student community, a practice that constructs the polard as a foil figure of a student who spends all their time doing schoolwork and refrains from participating in extracurricular activities, and teasing friends and acquaintances in interactions following a devalued behavior, seeming over-concerned with studies. Furthermore, there exist interactional scripts students can use to successfully navigate these teasing interactions without losing face. Finally, this humor is discussed in relation to the elite setting, as it is linked to the social closure of these elite higher education institutions, and it contributes to the production of an elite student community, by socializing students to privileged self-presentations characterized by ease and by creating distinctions between students, separating the truly elite students from the others.

The Organization and Use of Household Space for Work in Early Modern England: 1550–1750

This paper explores the neglected topic of the organization and use of household space for work (paid and unpaid) during the early modern period. It engages critically with the concept of ‘the open house’ in relation to recent arguments about processes of spatial and social closure of houses and households in the early modern period associated with the development of a capitalist socio-economic system. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, autobiographies, inventories and court records the analysis considers how work was organized in the domestic context and how experience varied according to gender, age, status and location as well as time of day, week or year. The paper argues that a perceived dichotomy between an open house and a closed home secluded from the social and business world of community and commerce is inadequate in the consideration of space and attitudes in this period. Individuals in larger houses could control access to certain spaces at specific times and work could be concentrated in certain rooms. But in practice in most households the complicated demands of the household economy required openness to outsiders that rendered the boundaries of houses more permeable and potentially more unstable than they are today. The analysis considers the case of England and compares rural and urban homes in a particular regional context, but it opens up several ways for historians to think about the relationship between work and home in other European regions.

Citizenship as a caste marker: How persons experience cross-national inequality

Extrapolating a recent conceptualization of caste from India to the global level, this article argues that persons experience cross-national inequalities via their citizenship as a caste marker. Rather than imagine castes as features of the fixed pre-modern Hindu social order, the article posits that castes are variable modern ascriptive social hierarchies subject to contestation and change in which economic and social distinctions are maintained through physical and symbolic violence. The study shows how, globally, nation-states exert physical and symbolic violence to normalize cross-national inequalities instituting a global citizenship-based caste order. This approach recognizes the importance of both global material relations emphasized by world-systems approaches and of symbolic structures central to global institutionalist approaches. The study also underscores persons’ positions and experiences confronting nation-states’ might. Power struggles concentrated on nation-states result in variability of global relations’ mutually reinforcing material and symbolic dimensions. The author uses caste features that appear ‘essential’ (i.e. ascriptive social closure, ‘ethnic,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘purity’ distinctions) as heuristics for identifying possible locations of caste construction and contestation, and identifies citizenship rules, nation-states’ territorial nature, nationalism, and visa, border, and naturalization rituals as such caste development sites. Vulnerable groups (stateless persons, refugees, migrants) both challenge the citizenship caste order and experience viscerally its physical and symbolic violence.

Social integration of people with a migration background in Swiss sport clubs: A cross-level analysis

Sport clubs are considered an ideal setting for the social integration of people with a migration background. However, they can also be a place of social closure practices, where assimilative ideas and ethnic boundaries are present. Besides the individual characteristics of the members, adequate club organizational structures are relevant for preventing social closure and facilitating social integration. Thus, the role of organizational structures for social integration might differ between natives and people with a migration background. Based on data from 42 Swiss sport clubs and 780 sport club members, with and without a migration background, we analyzed individual (migration background and membership biography) and structural factors (situational, club goals, and club culture) using multilevel models and tested cross-level interactions between structural variables and migration background. The results reveal that membership biography (e.g. membership duration and volunteering) and migration background are relevant for social integration. The estimated cross-level effects reveal that, unlike for natives and second-generation people with a migration background, structural conditions are especially relevant for first-generation people with a migration background. For example, social integration increases with a higher proportion of people with a migration background in the club or a less assimilative club culture.

Positional competition in a binary system: the case of Finnish higher education

Positional competition in the labour market entails graduate opportunities that depend not only on graduates’ skills, experience and abilities, but also on how their educational credentials compare to those of others. In this study, we examined the positional competition in the Finnish labour market and compared the influence of different ‘degree types’ on the probability of obtaining high-paid, high-status jobs. We used a register-based 5% sample of 25–45-year-old Finnish higher education (HE) graduates from 2010 to 2012 (N = 63 486). It was expected that the relative position of graduates would be affected by the degree level as well as the educational field and the binary division (university vs. non-university) of HE. Therefore, master’s and bachelor’s degree levels in all educational fields from universities versus universities of applied sciences (UASs) were included. The method of analysis was logistic regression. According to our results, the binary divide structured the opportunities to enter high-paid, high-status jobs within different fields of education. The university master’s degree graduates had the highest probability of succeeding in the Finnish labour market, and their status/rank elevated them above the competition by regulating access to certain professions or occupations through specific qualification requirements (i.e., credential social closure). Moreover, our results demonstrated how the degree rankings and the relative distance between university and UAS degrees vary in different fields. The Finnish case offers a valuable point of comparison to other HE systems with a binary structure.

Professionals and Volunteers: The Importance of Recognising Diversification in the Healthcare Division of Labour

In sociological research on relationships between professionals and volunteers, professionals are often contrasted with volunteers as abstracted, distinct and homogeneous groups. Focusing on healthcare in selected modern societies, and adopting a neo-Weberian and complementary boundary work perspective, this essay argues the landscape is more complex than between paid groups with exclusionary social closure and the unwaged in the market. First, diversification exists within health professions themselves based on social closure, with hierarchies and differential scopes of practice. Second, unpaid volunteers vary in responsibility depending on factors like employment sector and social background, including qualifications and experience. Third, in the paid workforce, there are interstitial non-professionalised health occupations, such as the neglected, lower educated health support workers, forming the largest, most heterogeneous healthcare labour force. Drawing on studies of healthcare, it is argued that recognising the diversification and interplay between professionals, volunteers and support workers is vital for enhancing health policy.

Licensed professions: a new look at the association between social origins and educational attainments in Italy

It has long been known that Italy is characterized by the highest levels of professional regulation in Europe, but little attention has been given to the link between professional regulation and educational stratification. This article investigates the association between social origins and education by focusing on fields of study within tertiary education and by disaggregating the upper class of social origin into different micro-classes of professionals. Thus, since these professions are regulated in the first place by educational fields of study, it assesses how processes of social closure enhance occupational intergenerational immobility in the professional employment in Italy. Recently, deregulation of liberal professions in Italy has been central in many public and political debates. It contributes to these debates by examining the micro-level dynamics in the professionals’ social reproduction and related practises of social exclusion, which may have strong implications for policy interventions. By using ISTAT’s “Sbocchi Professionali dei Laureati” survey (2011), and employing multinomial logistic regressions, it shows how social selection into highly regulated fields of study is guided by parents’ professional domain. The analyses indicate that both sons and daughters of licensed professionals are more inclined to graduate in a field of study that is in line with the father’s profession and that this propensity is stronger among children of regulated self-employed professionals.

Social closure and the reproduction of stratified international order

This article investigates how the means by which actors compete for position in the management of international society stratifies international order. Advancing scholarship on hierarchies, it applies a theory of social closure to examine two status groups, The Family of Civilised Nations and the G20, arguing that stratification is reproduced by a dynamic interplay of top-down collectivist exclusion on the part of superiorly positioned actors and bottom-up mimicry performed by those inferiorly positioned. As such, the same means of closure which used the Standard of Civilisation to exclude outsiders from the Family of Civilised Nations in the past stratifies non-state actors today, particularly international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) seeking to play a role in-the G20. This article offers amendments to closure theory in IR, demonstrating its utility for analysing contemporary international politics, engaging in trans-historical analysis, and in incorporating non-state actors into enquiry.