International Review of Sociology

The recent economic crisis and mounting budgetary constraints have put severe pressure on social spending, reducing fiscal space for investments in high-quality social services. Given these pressures and in response to a demand for a more ‘efficient’ use of both public and private resources, many studies have thus begun to focus on alternative sources of funding for welfare provision, including ‘impact finance’ tools (McHugh et al. 2013; Dowling, 2016). In several European countries, some banks have launched social bonds to address social issues affecting targeted vulnerable groups or to finance non-profit organizations and social innovation projects. In the same vein, …

Our recent article in the Revue Internationale de Sociologie: International Review of Sociology suggests the journal is opening up as a forum for global sociological analyses of different kinds. The article is titled ‘Comparative colonialisms for queer analysis: comparing British and Portuguese colonial legacies for same-sex sexualities and gender diversity in Africa – setting a transnational research agenda’ (Gomes da Costa Santos and Waites, 2019); and it focuses on the African social contexts of Kenya and Mozambique, as constituted in relation to the imperial nations of the United Kingdom and Portugal.  We are concerned to analyse racist colonialisms with reference …

The traditional dichotomy in sociology of seeing work as either paid (productive or waged) or unpaid (reproductive or unwaged), leads to the marginalization of unpaid work when conceptualizing precarity in both research and policy. This is problematic since it systematically neglects a range of types of unpaid work, both traditional (caring), and emerging (work carried out as a precondition for welfare payments) as well as a totality of economic activities in which workers engage, including those for which people in paid work are not compensated. The situation is still further exacerbated by workers’ need to carry out career development activities, …

How can we explain the growing global problem of tax evasion and tax avoidance? Economic debates often explain these phenomena through models that highlight institutional aspects, such as incentive failures, weak enforcement, or poor legislation that leaves legal loopholes, which are then used to reduce the tax burden. However, if noncompliance was only an institutional problem, all people would respond equally to incentives and enforcement (i.e., appropriate incentives and greater penalties would make us rationally choose to pay taxes). This would also mean that all people have the same motivations: we all want to evade, unless we are controlled and …

Who are the female spies? How does the profession of intelligence changed because more and more women considered this profession as a career opportunity? How to move beyond the “Mata Hari” syndrome: the sexualized, exoticized image of women as the traitors or heroines understanding gender politics of doing intelligence work? Intelligence has always been just like any other paid employment: with time they were gradually integrated in it; and the level of their involvement well reflected the level of women’s emancipation in the given society. Women who worked for the intelligence services got little agency, their progress was slow and …

The crisis of Sociology is nothing new. We have been talking, reading and writing about it since the 70s with Gouldner and more recently with Boudon and Burawoy. The debate in the scientific community has two main parties. The academic purists who reject applied sociology as strongly influenced by policymakers and their interests, and so unable to generate unbiased knowledge. On the other hand, public sociology advocates claim that the passion for social problems, and their study, has always been the legit driving force of this discipline. So, should sociology stick to a role of social phenomena reader & interpreter …

Social media messages are taking a central role in spreading hate speech against women. Insults, threats, verbal attacks published on social media pages, and in online comments are showcases of aggressions moved on the net without filters and controls. According to VOX (Italian observatory on rights)[1] 2020, women remain the real target for discriminatory messages: 63.1% of negative tweets are in fact directed against them. A form of violence that seems unstoppable, as evidenced by the facts that many news continue to report incessantly. The sentiment analysis enables analysts to associate a polarity (positive or negative) to the Tweets published …

“…[O]n the road the police picked us up… and that same night we were here in Jakkalsdrif behind the wire… ‘Because we are not going to have people wandering around being a nuisance’.” John M. Coetzee’s novel Life & Times of Michael K. describes the attitude towards Jakkalsdrif Camp’s residents. By establishing this camp, the authorities aimed to cope with what they perceived as an unbearable situation: people who wander around and are therefore uncontrollable, undermining the social order. At the same time, however, the camp people’s new visibility was seen as a threat by the residents of the adjacent …

What are relational goods? This concept was discovered in the late 1980s and the interest of scholars in it has grown enormously since then. It is a type of goods that are neither material things, nor ideas, nor performances, but consist of social relationships, and for this reason they are called ‘relational goods’. This contribution aims to clarify this concept, used by various disciplines (mainly: sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, political science), then specifying what are the benefits that relational goods can give to a ‘good society’, and in particular to a mature democracy. Two sociological mainstreams, one based on rational …