Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: The sociology of housing has clear implications for and overlaps with sociological studies of inequality. However, gender is still overlooked and undertheorized in housing research. Drawing on gender scholars, we caution against the tendency to treat gender as a synonym for women, as a variable that compares outcomes to those of men, and/or as synonymous with binary roles (e.g., poor mothers of color versus affluent, White gentrifiers). We demonstrate how a subset of scholars departs from these tendencies and model avenues for further research, for example by viewing housing and gender as coconstitutive. Overall, we argue that the measurement of inequality at the city and neighborhood level stymies focus on gender. However, by taking housing units—and, crucially, the households that they contain—as their unit of analysis, sociologists of housing are well-positioned to merge attention to the importance of gender identities, expectations, and roles with analyses of multiple overlapping levels and sites of inequality. PubDate: 2025-05-13T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This review provides 10 actionable recommendations for advancing the scientific study of structural racism through theoretically grounded and empirically robust measures and methods. By offering conceptual and analytical clarity, these recommendations aim to enhance research rigor on the structure and function of racism. For each recommendation, we (a) delineate key theoretical principles tied to specific features of structural racism, (b) evaluate the strengths and limitations of existing measures and methods, and (c) propose best practices for measurement and modeling that align with theory and rigorous methodologies. Given the complex, multifaceted, and dynamic nature of structural racism, we emphasize the necessity of embracing epistemological and methodological pluralism. Scholars are encouraged to integrate insights through triangulation by leveraging diverse theoretical frameworks, varied data sources, and a wide array of methods. The review concludes by addressing pressing challenges and identifying opportunities for innovative research to deepen our understanding of structural racism and its enduring impacts in racialized societies. PubDate: 2025-04-30T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This review articulates sociology's emerging approach to public administration, building on long-standing interest in bureaucracy. The sociology of public administration aims to understand how public administration perpetuates or mitigates inequalities through how well it performs (or does not) and for whom—balancing interest in performance and inclusivity. Sociological work on public administration has exploded in the past decade, illuminating the internal workings of the state apparatus and interrogating microlevel practices of governance, administration, and the chains by which policy comes to be enacted and experienced in the lives of citizens. This scholarship has concentrated around three themes: (a) public administration as a fragmented patchwork with high variation in performance, including administrative burdens that disproportionately affect marginalized groups; (b) public administration as a social arena with blurred boundaries, with unclear and negotiated jurisdictions for action, and where interpersonal and interorganizational connections have equivocal effects on the work of the state; and (c) understanding public administration as socially constituted, not only by rules on paper but by the people who do the work of the state, bringing identities, experiences, cognition, and cultural understandings to bear. The article also includes a supplemental appendix discussing public administration's role in institutionalizing categories that permeate everyday life, producing both legibility and illegibility. PubDate: 2025-04-30T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Everyone agrees that US Black deaths happen earlier than white deaths on average, but it is surprisingly challenging to find the best ways to summarize, quantify, and compare this gap. This review argues that there are three main strategies for doing so, falling on a spectrum of more conventional (though with many novel variants) to unexpected. Distributional approaches quantify population death rates or lifespans, and there is a proliferation of new, creative distributional measures. Comparative approaches benchmark Black excess deaths against other deaths; some versions can be normatively powerful but rest on normative assumptions that are open to challenge. Meaning-based approaches attempt to measure losses—to decedents, their survivors, and the world—that follow from excess Black deaths. These losses range from lost votes and cultural production to traumatic proximity to death to lost chances for reconciliation. Each approach offers new empirical and theoretical opportunities to better understand unequal lifespans. PubDate: 2025-04-29T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: In this review, we advocate for deeper exploration of Latino racialization by highlighting three core complexities: complexities of racial categorization, state-based racialization, and within-group variation. We review research on these complexities, focusing on the US Census and immigration system as key state mechanisms that have shaped and obscured Latino racialization. Our goal is to review and outline dynamic features of Latino racialization, illustrating that such processes operate both in aggregate forms and in ways that reflect within-group variation, impacting Latinos who are not as frequently centered in the broader Latino category. We propose an expansive definition of racialization and introduce a conceptual model to address racial alignments (and misalignments) among its core elements: racial identification, racial ascription, and shared experiences of structural racism. The model accounts for multiple complex mechanisms by which racialization plays out and demonstrates that Latino racialization mirrors broader patterns in racial formation and is not so uniquely complex. PubDate: 2025-04-28T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Signaling theory (ST) describes how people deal with and overcome uncertainties about others’ attributes and intentions relevant to their interactions. I integrate ST into a multilevel framework to highlight how people's need to overcome these uncertainties shapes collective outcomes and to spell out the different conditions for the theory's predictions. After a nontechnical outline of the integrated ST framework, I review three strands of sociological scholarship that have applied ST, broadly construed: (a) the job market and the education-to-work transition, (b) trust and cooperation in social and economic exchange relations, and (c) signaling norms and boundary making in intergroup relations. After recounting how ST has spurred the sociological imagination, I sketch promising research directions. PubDate: 2025-04-22T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Because all human activity occurs at least partially in physical space, explaining sociological outcomes often benefits from modeling spatial patterns of social activity. This article reviews methods that sociologists may wish to use to analyze sociological phenomena based on three different types of data indexed to space in three ways: areal data indexed to polygons on the Earth's surface, point data indexed to latitudes and longitudes, and spatial ties data that measure relationships between people and place. Issues common to all three types of data, including privacy, changing between types of data, and model assumptions, deserve careful consideration, particularly to understand how those issues introduce systematic biases into analyses of spatially indexed data. The plethora of existing methods offer the chance to improve sociological explanations of spatial patterns of social life. The thoughtful collection of spatially indexed data and the construction of innovative variables that test ideas about how space influences social outcomes offer the best opportunity to improve sociological explanations for the influence of spatial processes in social life. PubDate: 2025-04-21T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Affirmative action began as a bipartisan policy to address racial inequality in the workplace and in higher education. Given its small footprint in college admissions (most colleges never practiced it), its bipartisan support in the early years, evidence documenting its positive impact, and renewed attention to racial inequality since 2020, why did it come to an end in 2023' This review traces the dominant cultural framings of affirmative action in college admissions and their changing usage in US political and legal systems over time, the relationship between framing and public support for affirmative action, and evidence for the central frames used to defend or critique the policy. I argue that understanding affirmative action's framing over time by political actors is key to understanding its demise. During the 1960s and 1970s, university leaders framed affirmative action as a mechanism to promote racial equity. From the late 1970s, advocates reframed the policy as a tool to promote the benefits of diversity. During that same period, critics advanced a reverse discrimination frame. As the reverse discrimination and diversity frames took hold in court, it became impossible for advocates to successfully excavate the earlier equity framing. As such, defenders were left with the diversity frame, a weak defense of a critical policy that eventually fell. PubDate: 2025-04-17T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Word embeddings are language models that represent words as positions in an abstract many-dimensional meaning space. Despite a growing range of applications demonstrating their utility for sociology, there is little conceptual clarity regarding what exactly embeddings measure and whether this matches what we need them to measure. Here, we fill this theoretical gap by clarifying how cultural meaning can be understood in spatial terms. We argue that embeddings operationalize context spaces, where words’ positions can reflect any regularity in usage. We then examine sociologists' embeddings-based measurements to argue that most sociologists are instead implicitly interested in capturing concept spaces, where positions strictly indicate meaningful conceptual features (e.g., femininity or status). Because meaningful features yield regularities in usage, context spaces can proxy for concept spaces. However, context spaces also reflect surface regularities in language—e.g., syntax, morphology, dialect, and phraseology—which are irrelevant to most sociological investigations and can bias cultural measurement. We draw on our framework to propose best practices for measuring meaning with embeddings. PubDate: 2025-04-11T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: An unprecedented recent wave of sport-based activism has brought renewed attention to sport as a force for racial progress and change. Researchers have investigated factors that facilitate protest, analyzed media coverage of and polarized reactions to such activism, and begun to document institutional and societal impacts. In contrast to long-standing sociological critiques, this work suggests that sport can make contributions to racial justice and change. However, these contributions necessitate deliberate contestation and are mainly symbolic and communicative; more concrete, institutional change requires other, nonsport movements and organizations. Also, athletic activism can be co-opted by the sport industry's complicity with profit and its fraught relationship with politics, and it often provokes backlash that can have unintended, countervailing effects. Ultimately, sport's multifaceted, mostly cultural contributions are best analyzed when situated in a broad sociopolitical field and theorized via a critical-dramaturgical framework where sport serves as a platform for the public display of social struggle. PubDate: 2025-04-09T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Bereavement—the loss of a loved one through death—is a common and consequential life course experience. Although bereavement, and matters of death and dying more generally, have long remained on the margins of sociology, in the wake of contemporary mortality crises, sociological research on bereavement has flourished. This review synthesizes the new sociology of bereavement. To contextualize contemporary advancements, we first describe the earlier dominance of psychopathology perspectives on the topic. We then review recent sociological contributions, describing recognition of the structural systems that underpin bereavement and shape its wide-ranging and long-lasting consequences for individuals, families, and communities. We emphasize how bereavement experiences provide a microcosm for understanding social inequalities, and that a life course perspective can provide an integrative framework for a comprehensive sociology of bereavement. We conclude by identifying promising areas for future advancements in this emerging field. PubDate: 2025-04-09T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Online nonprobability samples provide social scientists with opportunities to conduct surveys and experiments on large, diverse samples at modest prices. Researchers may find bewildering the options offered by the many commercial entities that provide research participants, and our review seeks to orient researchers to key issues about their use. We discuss principles and evidence regarding estimates from nonprobability samples versus those from probability samples. We also describe methods for addressing certain types of problem participants that one encounters in these samples: professional respondents, participants who are inattentive or have low linguistic competence, and bogus participants (increasingly in the form of bots). We urge researchers not to take data quality for granted, not to rely on indirect information to vouch for data quality, and to proactively build methods that allow for the evaluation of data quality into their instruments. PubDate: 2025-04-09T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Scholarship on finance has flourished in the aftermath of the Great Recession. While the sociology of finance typically centers developments since the financial turn of the 1970s, a burgeoning body of interdisciplinary scholarship sheds new light on the evolution of financial practices, institutions, and relations in earlier years. This review explores key contributions and themes from the new histories of finance, focusing on works published in the past decade that offer valuable insights for sociologists. We first review new contributions on ancient, medieval, and early modern finance, which illuminate the origins of money and credit, the development of financial thinking, and the relationship between finance and imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Second, we survey new work on the development of modern financial markets in the long road to the financial turn of the 1970s. Together, these studies reveal how money, credit, and finance are embedded in political and legal institutions, and how financial systems act as tools of social policy, economic growth, war, and racial subjugation. Finally, long-run perspectives on finance provide an important reminder that borrowing, lending, and the management of attendant risks are not new phenomena unique to our neoliberal era. PubDate: 2025-04-08T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between biography, chance, and persistence in accounting for the assembly of an American sociologist. It traces the accumulation of experiences involved in a research journey aimed at explanation of social behavior and institutional change. The process of discovery leading to a new theory may arise from serendipitous observations gained through fieldwork, while new combinations of ideas also emerge from social interactions with acquaintances, colleagues and friends. Cross-disciplinary intellectual trade offers rich opportunities for advances in the social and behavioral sciences. PubDate: 2025-03-27T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This article discusses how my lived experiences led me to become a sociologist studying the civil rights movement and the sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. It explains my rejection of dominant movement theories and the formulation of my own social movement framework to explain the civil rights movement. It proceeds with my transition to studying the sociology of Du Bois. I cover the origins and substance of Du Boisian sociology. Finally, I conclude by addressing an attempted coup on Du Boisian sociology and defend the viability of this new sociological approach. PubDate: 2025-03-24T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This review article examines how politics shape healthcare. In addition to formal law and policy, the politics of healthcare include the larger cultural frameworks that politicize health and illness, rendering some bodies visible while ignoring or erasing others, and the institutions that offer or deny healthcare services. This article highlights both the definitional politics, that is, the contests of power that set the frames of healthcare, and also the politics of implementation and practice that powerfully shape healthcare institutions and experiences. In doing so, this article considers how politics structure the interactions within healthcare systems and around health and illness, and how those engaged in these care relationships must navigate power and politics within these broader organizational and cultural structures. PubDate: 2025-03-19T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This review explores research on the sources of Black and White wealth and debt differentials and how these differentials recreate inequalities in both wealth and nonwealth outcomes. We discuss how the relationship between wealth and life outcomes is bidirectional, yet studies of racial wealth inequality overwhelmingly focus on wealth as an outcome. We suggest that studies that examine the relationship from wealth to life outcomes are necessary to enable full understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the production and reproduction of racial wealth inequality and to identify policies in the United States to reduce racial inequality. We highlight research on entrepreneurship, race, and wealth to illustrate these dynamics. We conclude with a call for scholars to focus on community-level wealth, given scholarly and policy interests in closing the racial wealth gap. PubDate: 2025-03-13T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Social capital is among the most broadly used concepts in social science. Despite its shared understanding as beneficial resources available from the connections between people, authors vary widely in their conceptualizations of social capital. To extract clarity from these disparate perspectives, we offer a systematic framework for conceptualizing social capital, which identifies three primary theoretical dimensions of scholars’ conceptualizations of social capital: (a) where beneficial resources reside, ranging from within individuals to the relationships between individuals; (b) beneficial network structure, differentiating closure from brokerage arrangements; and (c) the level to which rewards accrue, distinguishing individual from collective benefits. We illustrate how combining these dimensions produces a unifying perspective that fosters reintegrating social capital's disconnected conceptualizations. Finally, we draw on this framework to both reconcile seeming contradictions and gaps in social capital scholarship, and provide a principled means for prioritizing questions for future developments of social capital. PubDate: 2025-03-12T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Research on Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) populations in the United States has been shaped by a fundamental paradox: MENAs are statistically invisible in the administrative data infrastructure yet socially hypervisible in other domains. This review outlines key demographic characteristics of the MENA American population and argues that by addressing the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox through innovative research questions and methods, previous scholarship has advanced sociology in three areas: identity, racialization, and integration. As upcoming changes to federal race and ethnicity standards take effect, the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox may shift as sociologists more easily collect and analyze data about MENA Americans. However, this information may be misused, misinterpreted, or handled unethically without sufficient background context and responsibility to community members. Future research will require data disaggregation to explore intersectional and intragroup minority issues, examination of the evolving content and meaning of MENA panethnicity, and ongoing assessment of the MENA group's relative racial position. PubDate: 2025-02-27T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Unauthorized immigration status profoundly shapes the social and economic outcomes of migrants in the United States, with wide reaching impacts on wages, work life, physical and mental health, and integration into schools, neighborhoods, and local communities. These effects accumulate across the life course, reverberate across generations, and systematically undermine the social mobility of immigrants and their families, limiting their incorporation into mainstream institutions. While research on these associations is vast, knowledge gaps persist due to enduring methodological and data limitations, as well as an unauthorized population that is growing more diverse in its origins and its range of status protections. We review research on the impacts of immigrant legal status, describe persistent methodological obstacles, and explore new approaches and directions for advancing sociological research. PubDate: 2025-02-19T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Why has India, the world's largest liberal democracy, joined the global turn toward authoritarianism' Drawing on the sociological literature on Indian politics, we argue that India's authoritarian turn emerges from the difficulty of sustaining democracy within an unequal society. The Indian state historically managed this difficulty by balancing the interests of opposed social groups: responding favorably to underprivileged groups’ demands for welfare and rights while simultaneously maintaining elite power and privilege. This approach ensured that everyone enjoyed some wins but also faced some disappointments. For decades, the Indian state's ability to sustain this juggling act was credited for the success of India's liberal democracy. Over time, however, the Indian state's attempt to appease opposed social groups became perilous for democracy. The more the state catered to elite and nonelite demands, the more empowered both groups became to express their dissatisfaction and demand more. Elites, resentful that their privilege was being chipped away to make room for nonelites, and nonelites, frustrated with continued poverty and marginalization at the hands of elites, both began seeking solutions from an alternative, authoritarian-style regime. Recent events suggest that one ray of hope for a more just future in India resides in the social movements that emerged from India's democracy and have recently tried to hold its increasingly authoritarian regime in check. By tracing the social basis of India's democratic fluctuations, sociological literature on India provides important insights for other unequal democracies, where similar elite resentments and nonelite frustrations are fueling authoritarianism. PubDate: 2025-02-14T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: US immigration policies have profound impacts on immigrant families. In a robust field of study across disciplines, scholars have documented how the multi-layered, complex immigration regime opens and closes doors to opportunity, health, education, safety, and peace. With a rise in harsh and unpredictable enforcement practices, immigrant families—including undocumented, liminally legal, and US citizen members—navigate the contradictory laws at the federal, state, and local levels to thrive as best as they can. In our review, we encourage scholars to extend their analysis to what happens during the migrant journey and at the border, as these experiences are also impacted by US immigration policies and potentially impact families long after they settle in the United States. The ever-changing labyrinthine legal landscape and its expansive reach provide fertile ground for further research, and we urge scholars to center ethics in their work with immigrant families made vulnerable through immigration laws. PubDate: 2025-01-23T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Survey experiments are an underutilized but powerful tool for sociologists interested in studying causal research questions. Survey experiments can yield insights into the breadth of causal relationships, by studying treatment effects in population samples or across subgroups, and can yield a deeper understanding of causal processes that are not readily observed with other social science methodologies. In this article, we begin by considering the conditions under which survey experiments are a uniquely useful method and highlight emblematic examples of recent sociological research. We then discuss some of the challenges and limitations of survey experiments as a research method before offering a brief practical guide to sociologists interested in conducting survey experiments. We conclude with reflections on the future of survey experimental research in sociology. PubDate: 2024-12-23T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Skill-based selective migration policies are a dominant contemporary form of migration governance in labor receiving countries. Researchers have critiqued these policies, noting discrepancies between their intended goals and the actual labor market outcomes for immigrants. The social construction of skill offers a sociological interpretation of this migration phenomenon, emphasizing that skills and their categorization in international migration are intrinsically political. Skills are socially constructed by actors in specific local, national, transnational, and global contexts. This article reviews scholarship that explores these dynamics from Asian perspectives. It identifies the various positions that countries in Asia occupy in skill mobility and highlights the critical issues related to both outbound and inbound skill migration in this region, as well as intraregional mobilities. The concluding section cautions against a reproduction of skill hierarchy in social science research and advocates a social construction approach to analyzing skill mobilities in different world regions. PubDate: 2024-12-17T00:00:00Z
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Zakiya Luna; Melissa C. Brown, Maria S. Johnson y Whitney N.L. Pirtle Abstract: ResumenLa teorización feminista negra se desarrolló fuera del mundo académico formal para satisfacer las necesidades de las mujeres negras, pero no terminó ahí. Esta reseña ofrece acceso a algunas “guerras” y debates actuales acerca de las políticas del conocimiento sobre teorías, conceptos y praxis feministas negras que se han profundizado dentro de la sociología y se extienden cada vez más a paneles de conferencias en vivo, debates en línea y legislaturas. Las características compartidas dentro del feminismo negro incluyen una atención persistente y crítica a la producción de conocimiento, el poder y el cambio social de las mujeres negras, pero hay mucho más que eso. Basándose en la sociología y otras disciplinas, esta reseña del feminismo negro/interseccionalidad cubre familias de feminismos negros, tendencias de citación disciplinaria, consideraciones metodológicas y tensiones en torno a la encarnación en las demandas sobre el feminismo negro y la interseccionalidad. En las conclusiones proponemos rumbos para destrabar conflictos, desestabilizar guerras y avanzar hacia la alegría y la liberación mientras la lucha continúa.An English translation is available online at https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090123-032434 PubDate: 2024-08-12T00:00:00Z
Subscription journal
