Dynasties in the making: Family wealth and inheritance for the first-generation ultra-wealthy and their wealth managers

The inheritance practices of the ultra-wealthy play a key role in reproducing socio-economic inequalities across generations. Given this role, we need a better understanding of the individuals and families who own, accumulate and pass on substantial amounts of wealth. This article asks two questions: first, how do parents with profound ownership or control over capital reconcile cultivating dynastic wealth with beliefs in meritocratic achievement? And, second, how do wealth managers justify their commercial value to first generation wealthy clients? The answer to both of these questions involves what I call a pedagogy of inherited wealth. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with first-generation ultra-wealthy parents and their wealth managers, it documents how wealthy parents and wealth managers construct risky futures around inheritance, and their strategies to manage those risks through the control of access to the family’s wealth. In doing so, it explores how they produce two roles, termed here the ‘good inheritor’ and the ‘good client’. Through examining various strategies to manage family wealth and inheritance, the article reveals the legitimating and enabling pedagogy surrounding this process and the paradox at the heart of this pedagogy – which promotes both the value of work among the next generation of inheritors and the preservation of dynastic wealth that will preclude their dependence on income-generating work.

Thinking about generations, conjuncturally: A toolkit

Since the early twentieth century, generation has been a recurrent concept in social analysis. In spite of successive bouts of critique and periods of relative neglect, the category has never been abandoned. In this article, drawing inspiration from a broad range of thinkers – such as José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – we review and fine tune our conceptual toolkit regarding generations, making more explicitly visible its affordances for social analysis in times of crisis. We focus on the problem of intergenerational overlap of contemporaneity and the contradictions that emerge from it. We argue that the notion of coevalness can help us resolve some of these contradictions – for example, the lag between contemporaneity and generational awareness – and introduce, through its horizontal connotations, a decolonising ethical stance. Favouring a processual understanding of generation, we recommend ‘conjunctural analysis’ as the most flexible analytical framework for resolving the intersectional contradictions and overlaps of generational categorisation.

Advantages of upper-class backgrounds: Forms of capital, school cultures and educational performance

In this article, we chart connections between class and educational performance in comparatively egalitarian Norway. While viewing various forms of capital as integral parts of class background, we assess how educational performance is differentiated across the class structure. We use survey and register data to assess differences in grades in three school subjects – mathematics and spoken and written Norwegian – at the individual and school level. We focus on the year of graduation of students at lower-secondary schools in Bergen, Norway’s second largest city by population. Lending credence to Bourdieu’s model of the social space, we find differences according to both capital volume and capital composition. Students from class backgrounds rich in overall capital perform comparatively better than those from humbler class backgrounds. There are also differences within the upper class: those from homes rich in cultural capital perform comparatively better than those from homes rich in economic capital. Although between-school differences are low within the ‘unified’ Norwegian school system, the analysis indicates that grades are associated with the class composition of schools: a high proportion of upper-class students positively correlates with higher grades. In addition, there is some evidence of a collective form of class bias: in one of the school subjects, spoken Norwegian, there is a connection between individual grades and teachers’ perceptions of the culture pervasive at the school in question; this connection is contingent upon a school’s class composition. The analysis thus draws attention to the way in which class bias in grading varies between school subjects.

Articulations of workplace precarity: Challenging the politics of segmentation in warehouse logistics

As critical nodes for global commodity flows, warehouses are an important example of segmented labour regimes which partition workers into groups with different conditions of security or its opposite, precarity. An emerging literature on warehouse work has tended to place segmentation in the context of managerial despotism based upon low wages, high labour turnover and job insecurity. However, the literature has, thus far, tended to pay comparatively less attention to workers’ collective resistance and its relationship to intra-labour divisions reproduced through segmentation. In refocusing attention to this problem, this article addresses the theoretical status of intra-labour groups, the nature of horizontal worker-to-worker relations, and their interaction with workers’ social identities and vertical capital–labour relations. It argues that the Gramscian concept of articulation provides the most promising frame for understanding these networked relations and for addressing how the politics of segmentation can be challenged by building common cause among divided workers.

Asymmetrical understandings of the value of time between Taiwanese Working Holiday Makers and the Australian government: Cultural exchange or serving time?

The impact temporary visa status has on the lives of migrants and their experience of time has been widely discussed. Fewer studies, however, focus discussion on the competing interpretations of the value of Working Holiday Makers’ (WHMs) time and the complexities of disruption and (un)certainties: more specifically the contrast between the value the Australian government places on time spent doing agricultural work in rural areas to become eligible for a second visa, and how this time is perceived by WHMs. This article seeks to fill this gap by comparing data drawn from the government’s rhetoric and interviews with Taiwanese WHMs who had worked in regional areas of Australia for three months. I argue that the government selectively highlights to prospective WHMs the value of cultural exchange and tourism (life-value) while downplaying the labor value (money-value) to WHMs’ time. Furthermore, the government and WHMs are not always talking about the same ‘time units’ (working time and holiday time) when applying these values. This article demonstrates that WHMs are conscious of how their time is spent and perceive the three months of specified work as being ‘suspended’, ‘immobile’, and ‘disrupted’, which undermines their life-values and migration flow in Australia.

Standing in the space between fields: The interstitial power of elites in Italian banking foundations

In this article, I explore interstitiality – a concept based on Gil Eyal’s notion of ‘spaces between fields’ – as a potential heuristic lens for observing contemporary elites, applying it to high-ranking figures in the Compagnia San Paolo (CSP). CSP is a banking foundation ( Fondazione di origine bancaria or FOB) that was set up in the 1990s arising from the privatization of the Italian banking sector. After outlining the theoretical underpinnings of interstitiality, I bring the construct to bear on my own empirical work. First, I elucidate what FOBs are and why they may represent a valuable interstitial observatory on a significant segment of power elite. Second, I examine CSP as an emblematic instance of an FOB. Third, I illustrate the main characteristics of CSP’s elites, suggesting that these groups reflect the features of interstitiality insofar as: they merge logics and grammars of justification from different fields; and, given their high degree of mobility across fields, they contribute to disseminating discursive and governmental practices of hybridization. My aim, as advocated for by Mike Savage and Karel Williams, is to enrich the sociological debate on elites by introducing a new conceptual tool.

The neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia and its ethnicity problem

Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have been promoted, as evident in government, third sector and research trajectories. From the 2000s, engagements with ethnicity have played an increasingly important role in these trajectories. Minority ethnic (ME) populations have emerged as a new type of dementia problem. Observations about diagnosis rates and timings, medication and nursing support (including care home admission) are normatively appraised to associate minority ethnicity with poor dementia outcomes. These outcomes are then attributed to purported cultural shortcomings of these populations. The emergence of (minority) ethnicity as a problem supports a neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia, wherein citizens must govern their conduct accordingly so as not to become like the imagined ‘ethnic’ antagonist. Ultimately, dementia’s newfound ethnicity problem may not serve the interests of people affected by dementia so much as researchers in the field, who should therefore reflect on their own contributions.

Cultivating shenti in everyday life: Self, relationality and embodied masculinity in China

Reading through the concept of shenti (body–self), this article examines the everyday processes by which Chinese young men make sense of and articulate ideal embodied masculinity as situated in different relationships. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with urban young men, I argue that the Chinese masculine self is essentially constitutive of and constructed through shenti during the men’s ordinary daily experiences. I highlight the relational formation of shenti as lying at the core of constructing ideal Chinese manhood, teasing out the different layers of body–self and relationality underpinning an individual man’s bodily practices and social interactions. Engaging with traditional cultural values of the ideal body–self and a feminist interactionist approach to gendered embodiment, shenti provides an important analytical lens that will enable us to expand ethnocentric discourses of the sociology of the gendered body by revealing the embodied and experiential aspects of culture in everyday practices. In doing so, this article contributes to enriching the existing debates around cultural variations in the male body and embodied masculinity by offering a Chinese perspective.

Mrs Hinch, the rise of the cleanfluencer and the neoliberal refashioning of housework: Scouring away the crisis?

This article extends sociological and feminist accounts of housework by examining the social significance of the rise of the ‘cleanfluencer’: online influencers who supply household cleaning and organization tips and modes of lifestyle aspiration via social media. We focus on ‘Mrs Hinch’; aka Sophie Hinchliffe from Essex, the ‘homegrown’ Instagram star with 4.1 million followers who shares daily images and stories of cleaning and family life, and has a series of bestselling books, regular daytime TV appearances and supermarket tie-ins. We argue that, within neoliberal culture, housework is now often refashioned as a form of therapy for women’s stressful lives: stresses that neoliberalism and patriarchy have both generated and compounded. The argument is developed through three sections. First, we locate Mrs Hinch in relation to longer classed, gendered and racialized histories of domestic labour and the figure of the ‘housewife’, and the re-writing of domestic narratives to find new ways of ensuring women’s willingness to participate in unpaid domestic labour. Second, we analyse the contradictions of cleanfluencing as a form of ‘digital identity labour’ representing offline housework, which in this case is precarious and classed. Finally, drawing these themes together, we show how ‘Hinching’ recasts housework as part of a neoliberal therapeutic promise to ‘clean away’ the instabilities, anxieties and threats of contemporary culture.

Raising children in hostile worlds in Santiago de Chile: Optimism and ‘hyper-agentic’ mothers

Based on an ethnographic research on early mothering with a small and heterogeneous group of women living in different areas of Santiago, Chile – and a follow-up study six years later – in this article we look closely at how mothering takes place through a sense of optimism while living in a hostile world, contrasting our findings with similar research in northern countries. Rather than waiting for opportunities to present themselves, women’s sense of optimism is based on their own difficult experiences of learning to cope in a hostile world, and how this requires organizing their children’s education to face challenges beyond their immediate family circle. We claim the existence of hyper-agentic motherhood – one that articulates traditional maternalism, increasing societal demands on parenting and the specific take on individuation detached from institutions in neoliberal Chile. Mothering through optimism in a hostile world questions the possibility to import classed parenting models. We identify a resonance with Adrie Kusserow’s description of hard individualism in which children are taught how to navigate the hostile world in the search for success, but with the difference that children in this context are brought up with the idea that mothers will be there for them in the long run, regardless of what actually takes place. This longitudinal study of parenting provides information on the usually silent processes of subjectification and emergent values that can be overlooked in times of social transformation.