Bryan Boyle
@bryanboyle.bsky.social
1.8K followers 730 following 53 posts
Sociologist. Post-Doctoral Researcher @mpifg.bsky.social. Labour, culture & elites. Ethnographer of butlers.
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bryanboyle.bsky.social
Mine and @dvandebroeck.bsky.social’s paper on ‘The Labor of Distinction’ is out now in ASR. Drawing from an ethnography that involved training and working as a butler, we tell a larger story about elites and inequality (1/18) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
aresherman.bsky.social
🚨 New paper: Who climbs the Ivory Tower? 🏛️ Together with Nicolai Borgen and Astrid Sandsør (@astridsandsor.bsky.social), we find that the chances of becoming a professor differ enormously by family background. Here’s what we find 👇

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
mpifg.bsky.social
📣 New call for postdoctoral researchers!

We are seeking candidates with a doctorate in the social sciences for our research areas Political Economy (Prof. Dr. Lucio Baccaro) and Economic Sociology (Prof. Dr. Jens Beckert).

Please share widely!

s.gwdg.de/ySJx5p
Application Deadline: December 15, 2025
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
thesociologicalreview.org
We are excited to announce the launch of #lessonplans tied to our #Uncommonsense #podcast. Each highlights relevant AQA & Cambridge OCR modules, and shares recommended reading. You can find all episodes listed in this news story, here. Engage! Enjoy! Share!
thesociologicalreview.org/announcement...
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
guyshrubsole.bsky.social
Ben, wholly agree.

Organise with colleagues to:
- Force the government to leave X.
- Take legal action against Musk for inciting violence.
- Get the PM to actually condemn the far right
- and when he fails to do this, replace him, fast
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
brunocousin.bsky.social
"For large parts of the world’s population, the apocalypse does not point to a distant future but represents a (very real) lived experience in the present."
ephemerajournal.org/current-issue
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
giselinde.bsky.social
The Culture and Inequality Podcast is back!

In five new episodes, a briliant cast of sociologists discuss the newest insights about elites, climate risk, our digital economic lives, women and the far right, and the cultural politics of meat.

All found here: pod.link/1533967764

>>
Culture & Inequality Podcast
How does culture feed into inequality? And the other way around? In Culture and Inequality, cultural sociologists from universities across the world explore these topics in-depth from various perspect...
pod.link
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
iansociologo.bsky.social
Yesterday I used this "AI -Free Statement" in a conference talk for the first time. Still trying to figure out the exact language.

Feel free to borrow, modify, etc.
At no point in this study did I use AI. This includes the literature review, logical organization, writing, analysis, and proofreading. I do not cite any studies that use AI, to the extent that it is possible to know.
bryanboyle.bsky.social
👀 👀 👀
dithomps.bsky.social
Delighted to see my article, "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory," in print in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social. It is my favorite thing I've written, and I hope you'll read it.

Like most people, I learned in school that political theory began in Athens in the 5th c. BCE. This is wrong. (1/)
The abstract for the article titled "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political
Theory: Administrative Labor in the 'Other Half' of the History of Political
Thought," which reads: The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. In doing so, the article expands political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by calling for a new research agenda that will recover questions of public administration as a major thematic throughline in the 5,000-year global history of human political ideas. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their public administrators and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of enchantment and wonder. Revealing public administration to be an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic rhetorical claims in contemporary democracies that the “administrative state” is a recent alien imposition.
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
gerryhassan.bsky.social
England is not a modern country. The graphic below by
@guyshrubsole.bsky.social in today's Observer underlines this fact.
bryanboyle.bsky.social
‘The sound of difference’ (Manchester University Press) is Kristina’s new book; ‘Born to Rule’ (Harvard University Press) is the book by Aaron and @samfriedman.bsky.social
bryanboyle.bsky.social
Huge thanks to The Culture and Inequality podcast team, including Kobe De Keere, @luuc.bsky.social and Sanne Pieters!
bryanboyle.bsky.social
How do elites navigate a world with meritocratic expectations and calls for diversity? I had the absolute privilege to talk to both Kristina Kolbe and @aaronreeves.bsky.social about their new books that address these very questions! Listen to the podcast here:
open.spotify.com/episode/1t5V...
The Sound of Elites: How Elites Navigate a Meritocratic and Anti-Elite World
Culture & Inequality Podcast · Episode
open.spotify.com
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
aaronreeves.bsky.social
This conversation with @bryanboyle.bsky.social from the Culture and Inequality podcast was lots of fun. Really appreciated the chance to chat about 'Born to Rule' but the best bits are Kristina Kolbe discussing her fantastic new book 'The sound of difference'. open.spotify.com/episode/1t5V...
The Sound of Elites: How Elites Navigate a Meritocratic and Anti-Elite World
Culture & Inequality Podcast · Episode
open.spotify.com
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
magneflemmen.bsky.social
Why is environmentalism class divided?

My new paper in The British Journal of Sociology maps attitudes to green issues in the social space of economic and cultural capital. Spoiler: it’s not just about being rich.

🧵https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.13231
Reposted by Bryan Boyle
suttontrust.bsky.social
As part of our analysis, we ranked constituencies in England according to a range of measures across the life-course.

You can use our interactive map to see how constituencies rank in terms of access to opportunity for disadvantaged young people ⤵️

www.suttontrust.com/opportunity-...