Poverty analysis is in the midst of a multidimensional “turn” due, in part, to the growing awareness of the limitations of relative income measures of poverty. In this paper, we argue that the conceptualisation of poverty remains a neglected aspect of this multidimensional turn to date, and demonstrate that the counter-intuitive results which flow from relative income analyses are not problems of measurement, but are entirely consistent with the conceptualisation of poverty under Peter Townsend’s dominant Poverty as Relative Deprivation framework. In response to these problems we articulate an alternative framework, Poverty as Capability Deprivation, drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach, and argue that this provides more persuasive explanations as to why some nations have greater poverty than others and why poverty remains a problem even in the richest nations.

We analyze a network of 3,590 interpersonal credit ties among Renaissance Florentine elite households to determine how Florentine personal credit was socially structured. We assess the network in light of various social and economic motivations Florentines might have had to exchange credit with each other. We explore the extent of participation by people from different categories, such as neighborhoods, factions, and guilds, and we determine whether loans flowed primarily within or between such groupings. We observe considerable homophily within families and neighborhoods, but also extensive circulation of credit among the most commercially and politically active Florentines. The overall connectivity of this network of interpersonal credit transactions resembles the social structure of other contemporaneous Florentine networks, such as marriage and business, suggesting that interpersonal credit was an important and distinct domain in which elite membership was confirmed and elite social solidarity achieved.

The liberalisation of religious practice after the fall of the Soviet regime and the support by the Russian state to the Russian Orthodox Church have contributed to the enormous growth of the church economy. Controversies within and without the Church interrogate commercial and gifting practices. The relationship between the expansion of church commerce and the operation of moral boundaries, underlined by critical stances, has been determined by culture and history, with the post-Soviet transformation having played a key role in shaping popular notions of selflessness and profit-seeking. Moreover, as people participate in the church economy they mobilise perceptions of the differential moral valence of gift and commerce in order to communicate concerning the power of the Church, its controversial image, Russia’s social stratification, and to deploy ethics of equity and honesty.

What, in fact, is the Welfare State? This article traces the emergence of the welfare state as a specific mode of government, describing its distinctive rationality as well as its characteristic forms, functions and effects. It identifies five sectors of welfare governance, the relations between them, and the various forms these take in different times and places. It discusses the contradictory commitments that shape welfare state practices and the problems associated with these practices and contradictions. It situates welfare state government within a long-term account of the changing relations between the social and the economic spheres. And it argues that the welfare state ought to be understood as a “normal social fact”—an essential (though constantly contested) part of the social and economic organization of modern capitalist societies.

“Weak ties”, a valuable aid in getting a job, are generally work ties. One reason for this feature is not that former colleagues increase one’s information but rather that they value the pursuit of past collaboration. We examine the consequence of the collaboration ties hypothesis in the financial industry labor market. In finance, the labor market values the assets that financial operatives take with them from one firm to another, such as knowledge, know-how and customers. Since assets are to a certain extent shared among co-workers, it is worth hiring business relations and former colleagues or moving in teams: this enables a better transfer of assets such as idiosyncratic work routines, distributed knowledge, or joint customers. To demonstrate our claims we rely on an online survey launched with eFinancialCareers.fr collected in September 2008 among French financial employees. This questionnaire shows that working at the core of financial markets favors the accumulation of key moveable assets on the one hand and of collaboration ties on the other. That is, collaboration ties and key moveable assets are strongly correlated. The moving of key assets, collaboration ties and notably the combination of those two dimensions all result in increased wages.

This article looks at three Italian mafia organizations (Cosa Nostra, Camorra, and ‘Ndrangheta). It applies an organizational approach to the understanding of violence in mafia organizations by studying the relationship between their organizational orders and their criminal behavior. The article identifies two different organizational orders, vertical and horizontal, and demonstrates that Italian mafias, although operating in similar environments, can greatly differ from each other, and over time, in terms of their organizational model. Findings suggest that mafias with a vertical organizational order, due to the presence of higher levels of coordination, (1) have greater control over conflict, as proved by the lower number of “ordinary” murders; and (2) have greater capacity to fight state repression, as testified by the greater number of “high-profile” assassinations (e.g. politicians, magistrates, and other institutional members) that they carry out. Evidence is provided using a mixed-methods approach that combines a qualitative, organizational analysis of historical and judiciary sources, in order to reconstruct the organizational models and their evolution over time, with a quantitative analysis of assassination trends, in order to relate organizational orders to the use of violence.

In many Indian villages, the Dalits (Scheduled Castes or former Untouchables) are victims of daily atrocities at the hands of the dominant castes. With respect to the 2006 murder of a family of Dalits by their village’s ruling caste, we show how the police, the medical profession, the courts, and the authorities combined to deny them justice and obstruct the enforcement of laws that are aimed at protecting them – with the involvement of many Dalit officials. In conclusion, it would seem that none of the options or strategies pursued by researchers or activists is likely to improve conditions for the Dalits in the near future: a caste system that is highly adapted to globalisation is far from disappearing; nor is the "practice of untouchability" prohibited by the Constitution (1950).

Exceptional cases are at odds with the typical: they stand out as bizarre and rare. What then could justify their systematic analysis? Elaborating the analytical distinction between anomalies, exceptions and outliers, this paper outlines three potential epistemic contributions of exceptional cases. First, exceptional cases reveal the limits of standard classification categories. In so doing, they problematize usual classificatory grids. Their input is critical. Second, exceptional cases point to new classes of objects. They acquire paradigmatic status when they exemplify the characteristic features of these new classes with utmost clarity. Third, exceptional cases magnify relational patterns that in more mundane contexts lack visibility. Here their contribution is heuristic. These three contributions become possible when we put at bay normative expectations of what should happen, and specify cases by reference to an analytical space of constitutive dimensions. To underscore the general significance of these observations, I draw on examples borrowed from different quarters of the social sciences: the sociology of organizations, ethnomethodology, comparative historical sociology and the history of science.

Informed by nearly six years of teaching experiences in high poverty schools of New York and Amsterdam, this ethnographic comparison examines the following question: Even though they often say they “know better”, why do so many teens from low income neighborhoods behave in aggressively disruptive ways that contribute to the further destruction of their own schools? This article suggests that the long dominant oppositional black culture approach to such questions related to life in distressed urban schools promotes overly mentalist and therefore superficial analyses. A more fully incarnated, collectively impassioned, relational, and processual way of thinking about the gradual socialization and immediate coping processes behind the further devastating of physically violent schools is offered. Interrogating the state and process that students in both settings referred to with terms like “coming hard”, this article brings to life the temporarily seductive yet ultimately maladaptive embodied stress responses of two male students effectively forced to sever visceral connections to themselves. Probing deep into how hardening was both habituated and situated on opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean can help us advance our grip on—and perhaps even our attempts to deal with—the ways in which teenagers’ feelings of empathy and abilities to “think straight” are crowded out during the moments that matter most in and around our worst schools.

This article discusses the room for accommodating religious diversity offered by the particular configuration of secularity existing in Denmark. Theoretically, the article adopts Jose Casanova and Mark Chaves’ proposals to separate analytically between the core elements of secularisation, and to leave open for empirical analyses the development and potential connections between these in different geographical and geo-political contexts.

From this perspective, the article discusses the conditions for accommodating religious diversity offered by the peculiar combination prevailing in Denmark of a low level of structural differentiation combined with a high level of rationalisation, generalisation, and privatisation of religion. The article argues that the legal inequality existing in Denmark between religious communities stemming from the existence of a state supported church (i.e. a low level of differentiation) matters less for the accommodation of religious diversity than do widely held and strongly embedded popular sentiments and imaginations of the public sphere as strictly secular (i.e. a high level of rationalisation, generalisation and privatisation of religion).

Studies of xenophobia have focused either on socio-economic context that accentuates xenophobic attitudes or on perceptions of immigrants, namely symbolic and realistic threats as well as on social distance from immigrants. This study examines closely the relationship among various components of xenophobia and their contribution in the formation of particular xenophobic groups. The analysis identified four different xenophobic groups, i.e. a) The distant xenophobic group, b) The core xenophobic group, c) The subtle xenophobic group and d) The ambivalent xenophobic group. The groups’ profiles are synthesized through negative, neutral and positive properties of overall attitudes towards immigrants, perceived threats, political xenophobia, social distance, authoritarian attitudes and individual social characteristics. The survey results demonstrate that a multidimensional conceptualization of xenophobia is needed both at the level of objective social condition and of individual and collective perceptions.

The terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011, carried out by a right-wing extremist, was a shocking event, leaving 77 dead and dozens seriously wounded. It soon gave rise to a range of interpretations and explanations as to the causes and implications of the attack. Engaging with classical anthropological and more recent sociological literature on trust and blame, the article shows that there was no hegemonic narrative or explanation of the attack, and similarly no broad agreement over the steps to be taken in order to reduce the chances of future attacks. Six different attempts to account for the terrorist attack are described, but only two correctly identify demographic change, migration and the rise of xenophobic politics as the underlying causes of the terrorist attack. This suggests that the high level of trust characteristic of Norwegian society is likely to be reduced as a result of accelerating change and accompanying social fragmentation.