International studies using the European Social Survey (ESS) reveal higher support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) in poorer countries with less generous welfare systems, and among individuals with ...lower income and education, and leftist political leanings. We present data from the 2019−20 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes mirroring the ESS question. Australia falls in the middle of European opinion, with 51% supporting a UBI, increasing slightly during the onset of Covid-19. We also find higher support among two different groups: (1) those facing greater 'material' precarity, including younger, low-income, unemployed, suburban renters, and (2) those who have more post-materialist concerns, including Green-left voters and those favouring redistributive values. Unlike in other countries, higher education predicts more support, while homeownership predicts less. The article concludes with challenges to introducing UBI to Australia, including potentially contradictory strategies for different support bases (material vs post-material), ongoing commitments to means-testing, and negative framing in the media,
Contemporary governments employ a range of policy tools to ‘activate’ the unemployed to look for work. Framing unemployment as a consequence of personal shortcoming, these policies incentivise the ...unemployed to become ‘productive’ members of society. While Foucault’s governmentality framework has been used to foreground the operation of power within these policies, ‘job-seeker’ resistance has received less attention. In particular, forms of emotional resistance have rarely been studied. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed welfare recipients in Australia, this article shows that many unemployed people internalise activation’s discourses of personal failure, experiencing shame and worthlessness as a result. It also reveals, however, that a significant minority reject this framing and the ‘feeling rules’ it implies, expressing not shame but anger regarding their circumstances. Bringing together insights from resistance studies and the sociology of emotions, this article argues that ‘job-seeker’ anger should be recognised as an important form of ‘everyday resistance’.
Social networks play an important role in helping people find employment, yet extant studies have argued that unemployed ‘job-seekers’ rarely engage in ‘networking’ behaviours. Previous explanations ...of this inactivity have typically focused on individual factors such as personality, knowledge and attitude, or suggested that isolation occurs because individuals lose access to the latent benefits of employment. Social stigma has been obscured in these debates, even as they have perpetuated stereotypes regarding individual responsibility for unemployment and the inherent value of paid work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed Australians, this article argues that stigma-related shame is an important factor in networking decisions. First, it demonstrates that stigma is ubiquitous in the lives of the unemployed. Second, it identifies withdrawal from social networks and disassociation from ‘the unemployed’ as two key strategies that unemployed people use to manage stigma-related shame, and shows how these strategies reduce networking activities.
Social network dynamics are complex in the context of Chinese overseas migration because of the unique dynamics of guanxi, which are distinctly different from 'Western' social capital. The few ...migration studies comparing guanxi and social capital suggest that the former largely consists 'strong ties', while the latter is comprised of 'weak ties'. However, most apply only a cursory comparison of one network facet. We review core literature in the two fields to contrast what each says about network norms, structures and practices. We find that: (i) guanxi is characterised by dynamics of 'face' and renqing; (ii) guanxi has core and peripheral aspects that grant it bonding and bridging qualities; (iii) weak ties in social capital networks are more beneficial for acquiring non-redundant resources, and for joining civic/voluntary associations; (iv) while strong, face-based guanxi ties better mobilise valuable resources, these ties are rarely transformed into social capital.
Recent quantitative investigations consistently single out considerable gender variations in the experience of loneliness in Australia, and in particular how men are especially prone to protracted ...and serious episodes of loneliness. In 2017 the Director of Lifeline implicated loneliness as a significant factor in suicide among Australian men - currently three times the rate of suicide among women. Compared to women men also struggle to talk about loneliness or seek help from a range of informal and professional sources. We know very little about men's experience of loneliness or why they are so susceptible to it currently and research is urgently needed in order to design specific interventions for them. To date, psychology has dominated the theoretical research on loneliness but in this article we argue that sociology has a key role to play in broadening out the theoretical terrain of this understanding so as to create culturally informed interventions. Most researchers agree that loneliness occurs when belongingess needs remain unmet, yet it is also acknowledged that such needs are culturally specific and changing. We need to understand how loneliness and gender cultures configure for men; how they are located in different ethnic, class and age cohort cultures as well as the changing social/economic/spatial/public/institutional bases for belonging across Australia. Theoretical enquiry must encompass the broader social structural narratives (Bauman, Giddens and Sennett) and link these to the changing nature of belonging in everyday life - across the public sphere, the domestic sphere, work, in kinship systems, housing and settlement patterns, associational life, in embodied relationships and online.
The rise in the network society might lead to a decline in face-to-face contact as people substitute it with more mediated forms, or an increase in both face-to-face and mediated contact as ...complements, with unknown consequences for social support. This article examines trends in social contact, mediated contact (phone, online, etc.), and social support in 2002, 2006 and 2010, using aggregated ABS General Social Survey data. Results show an aggregate decline in face-toface contact and rise in mediated contact in Australia between 2002 and 2010, but no aggregate decline in perceived social support, and a strong positive individual-level association between both forms of contact and social support. There are, however, signs of an emerging class-based digital divide, with low-income older men and less educated respondents reporting lower levels of mediated contact and social support by 2010.
This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ...ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/ philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating ‘emotional sharing’ and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms; and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the ‘politics of fear’ around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology.
The contradictory work environments of new economies in late modernity are associated with a range of emotional experiences, requiring diverse emotion management strategies. Late modernity offers the ...capacity to pursue happy, safe, rewarding, and meaningful work for the privileged few; a potential trade-off between stressful meaningful and boring precarious work for a greater number; and the prospect of non-meaningful, precarious work for many in the new economy characterised by short-term contracts, gig work, precarity, and anxiety. This study draws on data from the 2015-16 Australian Social Attitudes Survey to examine workers' emotions in various combinations of meaningful and precarious employment, and the degree to which these emotions are managed. It finds that it is best to have secure meaningful work, worst to have 'highly precarious' work, and slightly better to have 'safe but alienating than risky meaningful' work, in terms of avoiding often hidden negative emotions.
Research focusing on the management of emotion features prominently in studies of employee attrition, gender inequality and workplace satisfaction, but rarely in research on worker solidarity. ...Against a backdrop of increasing individualisation within late modern society, research about workplace management of emotion has become bifurcated along sociological or organisational psychology lines. Within the sociology literature, management of emotion is theorised as a commercialised, relational and (often) alienating experience. Within organisational psychology literature and research, the emphasis is on harnessing individual traits and skills (e.g. emotional intelligence) to regulate emotions for increased productivity and employee retention. In this article, the authors call for a new research agenda that prioritises the examination of solidarity between workers alongside the analysis of emotion management. This call is based in a critical reading of the sociological and organisational psychology scholarship addressing the management of emotions. Through the example of teaching work, the authors provide a critique of scholarship on workplace strategies that promote highly individualised understandings of managing emotions through resilience training and other simplified techniques. They argue that workplaces should recognise the dangers of uncritically adopting individualised strategies for managing emotions, and propose a research agenda that seeks to understand how emotion management can affect worker solidarity.
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to show that numerous studies have advanced social capital research over the past decade. Most studies have accepted the theoretical distinction between bonding ...and bridging social capital networks. Many, however, tend to agglomerate empirical research under the one catch-all social capital concept, rather than classifying it according to the bonding bridging distinction. Furthermore, most studies make little distinction on the basis of methodology, between qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigating social capital. These omissions need to be addressed.Design methodology approach - This paper reviews definitions and applications of bridging and bonding social capital, classifies empirical studies according to each network type, and produces a further breakdown according to methodological approach.Findings - The result is a four-part "grid" of social capital research, encompassing bonding and bridging, and quantitative and qualitative aspects. This paper finds that most qualitative research examines non-excludable and excludable goods and is relevant to bonding social capital, whilst most quantitative analysis looks at civic networks and norms of trust, and relates to bridging social capital.Research limitations implications - Results advance the task of clarifying and measuring social capital.Practical implications - Further development of the bridging bonding social capital conceptual pair should allow for a more precise measurement of a community, or region.Originality value - No review paper to date captures the above empirical and methodological "grid" clearly.
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