Palgrave Macmillan has recently published Agents of Migration: Institutional Embeddedness of Labour Brokerage in Nepal by Sandhya A.S. Based on the author’s dissertation at the MPIfG, the book centers on the agents and intermediaries that play a growing role in facilitating labor migration. In her examination of market organization, the establishment of its practices, and struggles over legitimacy, the author shows how brokerage changes the relationship between state and market, governance structures, and migrant labor processes.

MPIfG postdoc Bryan Boyle and his co-author Vandebroeck are the recipients of this year’s Distinguished Scholarly Article Award of the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Their award-winning paper, “The Labor of Distinction: Butlers, Service Work, and the Production of Elite Lifestyles,” explores how elites use the labor of service workers to produce and reproduce distinct lifestyles.

Germany’s education system is in the midst of privatization. In a historical and legal context that favors public schooling, parents are navigating between what is generally accepted as good for society and what they believe is the best for their children. In a new MPIfG Discussion Paper, Karen Lillie and Luisa Hideg examine what is at stake in this struggle: whether school choice becomes a “legitimate” part of the German education system, in a Bourdieusian sense. If it does, it risks strengthening social class closure mechanisms and heightening resultant social class anxiety.