citizenship

Although the study of citizenship has been an important development in contemporary sociology, the nature of rights has been largely ignored. The analysis of human rights presents a problem for sociology, in which cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction have largely destroyed the classical tradition of the natural-law basis for rights discourse. This critique of the idea of universal rights was prominent in the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber.

This article responds to dual calls for researching and theorising everyday social phenomena in postcolonial studies on the one hand, and serious engagement with the postcolonial within the discipline of sociology on the other. It focuses on the everyday lives of asylum seekers living on asylum seeker welfare support in the UK. Asylum seekers offer a good case study for exploring the postcolonial everyday because they live in poverty and consequently experience daily harms at the hands of the state, despite the UK fulfilling its obligations to them under human rights law.

This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Susan Coutin's "legal nonexistence." It questions black-and-white conceptualizations of documented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area of "liminal legality" and examines how this in-between status affects the individual's social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants' lives, and the broader domain of artistic expre

Citizenship rights are the result of specific political bargains between different collective actors and state authorities (Tilly Theory and Society 26(34):599–602, 1997). The political bargains for rights are encoded in institutions, and these institutions develop independently from each other and take organizational characteristics that make certain rights easier to adopt than others.

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this article examines the growing complexity and the internal tensions of state protection in Western Europe and North America. Beginning with Charles Tilly's theory about state building and organized crime, the discussion follows with a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's article on citizenship.

The racial and gendered politics of the 1996 welfare reform movement incorporated an anti-immigrant stance that fundamentally altered non-citizens' access to public benefits. This article focuses on community mobilization efforts to reframe the discourse of the “immigrant welfare problem” in order to restore benefits in the aftermath of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Drawing from two years of participatory research in community organizations, I found immigrant rights groups engaged in a variety of counter-rhetorical strategies.

A temporal overlap involving the constructivist turn in sociology and national and transnational human rights struggles has transformed human rights into an important research topic within political sociology.

Over the past several decades, citizenship status has become more important in immigrant lives and communities in the United States. Undocumented adults who arrived as children, the 1.5 generation, comprise a growing percentage of the immigrant population. Although they are similar to children of immigrants born in the United States (the second generation) they face a variety of barriers to integration due to their lack of legal status.

Poverty amidst affluence, chronic unemployment, political apathy and cynicism, crime and corruption, sexism, racism, and a moral climate of widespread hedonism-- these are evils familiar to all of us. The above is the first sentence in my recent book, Toward a Just Social Order. In that book I use theoretical ideas from sociology and ethical philosophy to locate and defend those institutional arrangements appropriate to a just social order. My book is an exploration in social theory. More specifically, it is a work in normative sociology. 

Scholarship on the dissemination of human rights norms and principles has focused predominantly on the socialization of nation-states into the values which have been widely endorsed. I argue in this article that the socialization mechanisms, discussed by such scholars as Meyer et al. (1997) and Risse and Sikkink (1999), do not capture the complex processes of the negotiation of more controversial rights.