I checked 9 sociology journals on Sunday, December 28, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period December 21 to December 27, I found 11 new paper(s) in 5 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

Seeing Like a Company or a Customer: Selective Empathy in Pricing
Barbara Kiviat, Carly R. Knight
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Sociologists have long shown that moral beliefs are key to sustaining market arrangements. Yet surprisingly little research has examined how groups may assess the fairness of taken-for-granted market practices differently. In this article, we draw on three survey studies to examine Americans’ moral beliefs about risk-based pricing, a pricing institution in which consumers who are predicted to be costly are charged more. In markets for both insurance and consumer loans, we uncover a pattern in which higher-income individuals are consistently more likely than lower-income individuals to accept the moral legitimacy of tethering prices to a person’s behavior, irrespective of economic self-interest or ideology. To explain this pattern, we introduce a novel theoretical lens we term “selective empathy”—that is, in evaluating pricing arrangements, individuals disproportionately direct their empathy to one exchange partner or the other, taking the perspective of either the company or the customer. We find that wealthier individuals are more likely than lower-income individuals to empathize with companies—and less likely to empathize with high-risk consumers. These findings cast risk-based pricing as a classed form of economic rationality. Moreover, they bring attention to the role of affect in pro-capital attitudes.

Social Forces

Strategic family resilience: health declines and intergenerational relationships in multi-child Chinese families
Yang Zhang, Jiaowei Gong, Tianrong Tang, Ting Li
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As population aging emerges as a global concern, health declines among older parents have become prevalent. However, we know little about how intergenerational relationships adapt to declines in older parents’ physical, mental, and cognitive health, considering their multi-dimensional and ambivalent natures and the multi-child family context. Drawing on four waves (2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020) of data from a nationally representative survey, the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey, we found that parent–child relationships became closer after declines in older parents’ physical and cognitive health, while the variation in parent–child relationships across children increased. The greater intimacy was driven by increased functional exchanges and associational connections rather than improved emotional affinity. Compared to families without daughters, the pattern was more pronounced in families with daughters. Moreover, intergenerational relationships were unresponsive to declines in mental health. These findings suggest that Chinese families employ strategic family resilience in response to changing family demands.
Review of “Canaries in the Code Mine: Precarity and the Future of Tech Work”
Adam K Schoenbachler
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Social Networks

Getting lonely and isolated? Transitions in social isolation profiles over time and factors associated with them among older adults
Pildoo Sung, Angelique Chan, Abhijit Visaria, June May-Ling Lee
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Using social network analysis to understand residents’ social connection in a Singapore neighbourhood
Yohei Kato, Francine Chan, Belinda Yuen
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Dissipation and bondedness in networks via conflict-based cohesion
Kenneth S. Berenhaut, Liangdongsheng Lyu, Yuxiao Zhou
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Social Science Research

Gendered reporting of housework across relative spousal income
Joanna Syrda
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Family background and school-to-work trajectories in China
Xiaoguang Li, Yao Lu
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Yours, mine, and ours: Childhood disadvantage and late-life social connectedness in marital dyads
Yiang Li, Jason Wong, Linda J. Waite
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Socius

Short-Lived Relief: The Racial Geography of Rebounding Eviction Rates in Postmoratorium St. Louis
Anne Brown, Samuel H. Kye, Yi Wang
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This visualization examines time series and spatial trends in eviction case filings in St. Louis and St. Louis County before, during, and after the federal eviction moratorium. Scraping data from the Missouri Courts system for all eviction cases in the region from January 2017 thru December 2024, the authors compare how eviction rates rebounded across majority-white and majority-Black neighborhoods, particularly in light of the moratorium’s documented effects dramatically diminishing eviction rates in high-risk communities. The results show that, in majority-Black neighborhoods, eviction filing rates rebounded aggressively during the moratorium and to an even stronger degree afterward, even despite emergency rental assistance protections. By contrast, rates rebounded to a more modest degree in majority-white neighborhoods and only after the moratorium’s end. A spatial representation of case filings illustrates the disproportionate degree to which eviction filings endured in majority-Black neighborhoods during the moratorium, setting the stage for pre- and postmoratorium portraits of eviction that were effectively indistinguishable. As a whole, these findings indicate that racialized patterns in the rebound of evictions in the region quickly eroded, and eventually eliminated, the relative parity in eviction filings between white and Black neighborhoods observed in the very early stages of the moratorium.
Immigration and Public Support for Social Policy: Accounting for the Gender Composition of Immigrant Populations
Achim Edelmann, Friedolin Merhout, Amie Bostic
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With increasing global mobility, scholars have debated whether immigration undermines welfare states. So far, no conclusive evidence of a consistent association between immigration and social policy support has emerged. This might be due to treating immigrants as a monolithic mass. To begin addressing this, the authors account for the gender composition of immigrant populations. Drawing on research on attitudes toward immigration, immigration policy, and gendered tropes of immigrants, the authors develop two hypotheses detailing how the share of women among immigrants moderates that population’s impact on individuals’ social policy support. Testing these hypotheses on International Social Survey Programme and United Nations data, the authors find no evidence of a predominant demographic or coexisting immigrant threats. Instead, the results show a consistent pattern between immigration and social policy support aligning with a dominant trope of “deviant immigrant men” posing a criminal threat. Specifically, increasing immigrant populations predict reduced support as the share of women among them decreases.