I checked 9 sociology journals on Tuesday, July 21, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period July 14 to July 20, I found 14 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

The Gendered Intergenerational Transmission of Managerial Status
Nicholas Martindale, Thomas Lyttelton, Lasse Folke Henriksen
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Prior research on managerial attainment highlights inequalities based on gender and ethnicity, but the role of social origins has been neglected. Moreover, past research on intergenerational social mobility does not focus specifically on how parents’ and children’s occupations may be linked. We develop a theoretical model of intergenerational managerial status transmission that we test using event history analysis that tracks managerial attainment (2000 to 2019) for over half a million Danish workers (born 1965 to 1975). Results reveal that children of managers are substantially more likely to become managers than the children of non-managers, and this inheritance is stronger for sons and for those with senior managerial origins. For children of lower-level managers, this is primarily related to advantages in early life (parental economic capital, educational attainment), but descendants of senior managers additionally benefit from advantages that accumulate later (career trajectories, elite social connections). Gender and seniority effects intersect to produce a particularly striking advantage for the sons of senior-managerial fathers. Much of this advantage remains unexplained after testing a large set of potential mediators, implying a considerable role for male-dominated forms of elite cultural and social capital (e.g., membership in exclusive clubs) and underscoring the limits to formal organizational approaches to equalizing outcomes at the very top of the occupational hierarchy.

Social Forces

Reflections on Editing Social Forces, 2010-2026
Arne L Kalleberg
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The magic of secularization
Paul Froese, Isaiah King, Ruiqian Li
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Institutional secularization does not necessitate a secular public. In fact, as church memberships decline, more individualized sources of supernatural belief can emerge. Using a nationally representative survey of American adults (n = 1812), we analyze the popularity of “secular rationalism” and how it relates to belief in non-Divine supernatural causation, i.e., magic. Our findings suggest that belief in magic is not simply the inverse of religiosity or secular rationalism. Instead, belief in magic emerges most strongly among those who are both scientifically oriented and residually religious. Secular rationalism does not erase belief in supernatural mechanisms—it affirms the individual’s agency to decide what they are. In short, magic thrives where reason and spirituality meet, suggesting that modernity’s rational turn does not disenchant so much as release faith from institutional restraints.
Review of “Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China”
Weirong Guo
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University expansion, academic fields, and the match between the degree and the job
Jonathan Horowitz, Sagi Ramaj
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Academic knowledge—such as biology, psychology, and economics—is found both in university majors and specific occupations. When educational attainment expands in the population, does it improve or weaken the academic match between university majors and occupations? Using nationally representative data from Great Britain and Canada, we find heterogeneous effects by field of study that are consistent across countries. Increases in the proportion of individuals with university degrees improves matches for economics, mathematics, and fine arts majors, such that they enter occupations that utilize more of their major-specific academic knowledge. The reverse is true for graduates in philosophy and theology, sociology and anthropology, and several majors in the natural and physical sciences. While some high-status fields see stronger matches between major and occupation as education expands, the natural and physical sciences remain a clear exception. These idiosyncratic results suggest that field-level prestige partly explains the heterogeneous effects of educational expansion on major-occupation matching, but that more research is needed on shifts in academic knowledge usage in the labor market.

Social Networks

Agency within structure: Strategic behavior and network position in explaining premium buyer access in global buyer–seller networks
Quyet-Tien Nguyen
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Social Science Research

Group threat and power-differential theories as differential predictors of religion-motivated hate crimes and the construction of local hate crime statistics
Brendan Lantz, Sylwia J. Piatkowska, Ashton Hoover
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Racial/ethnic and educational disparities in married and cohabiting individuals’ propensity to form interracial unions
Kate H. Choi, Patrick A. Denice
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Sociological Science

Decoupling Inequality and Stratification in the American Wealth Distribution, 1989–2022
Jake Burchard, Lisa Keister
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Quantities of Interest for Interactions and the Pitfalls of Assuming Linear Treatment Effects
Josep Serrano-Serrat
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Categorical Engagement and the Contingent Nature of Typicality Effects
Alex Tyulyupo, Balázs Kovács
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Bending the Heckman Curve: Competing Declines in Learning Capacity and Skill Relevance Over the Life Course
JoĂŁo Souto-Maior, Mitchell Stevens
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Information Diets Are More Diverse in Attention Than in Engagement
Christopher Barrie, Aybuke Atalay, Alia ElKattan
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Socius

The Regional Coloring of Imagination: How Social Categories Shape Marital Partner Selection
Acton Jiashi Feng
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Despite its omnipresence in daily interaction, the role of regional background in the development of social relations remains marginal in sociological research. This article examines how regional background shapes marital partner selection in urban China through a mental imagery model that draws on the sociology of imagined futures and culture and cognition. This new theoretical model helps integrate insights from direct selection and by-product models of marital homogamy. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews and map color-coding exercises with never-married college graduates in Shanghai, I find that people construct strategies of action based on emotionally charged mental imageries of future life with potential partners in the early stages of partner selection. These imageries are constituted by cultural concepts developed from past regional engagements and structured by dominant institutional scripts of marriage, encompassing not only the candidate but also parents on both sides. That people picture their parents’ reactions to potential partners despite their own preferences reveals an indirect model of parental influence over adult children’s marital choice. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical potential of the mental imagery model beyond marital choice.