I checked 9 sociology journals on Sunday, January 18, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period January 11 to January 17, I found 12 new paper(s) in 4 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

The Social Origins of Effort: How Incentives Reduce Socioeconomic Disparities among Children
Jonas Radl, William Foley, Lea Katharina Kröger, Patricia Lorente, Alberto Palacios-Abad, Heike Solga, Jan Stuhler, Madeline Swarr
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Cognitive effort (i.e., the mobilization of mental resources for task performance) is essential to equality of opportunity and meritocracy because it epitomizes individual agency. However, sociological theories of social inequality in effort are scarce and partial, and available empirical measures of effort are unreliable and lack validity. We fill this lacuna by (1) elaborating a theoretical account of how socioeconomic status (SES) affects children’s cognitive effort, (2) developing a novel research design for measuring effort using simple-yet-demanding behavioral tasks and varying incentive conditions, and (3) presenting evidence based on this laboratory design featuring 1,360 5th-grade students. We theorize that greater material abundance and lower environmental threat reduce the subjective costs of exerting effort for higher-SES children, and that parental socialization emphasizing autonomy gives them more intrinsic motivation compared to lower-SES children. Conversely, we posit that the effort of lower-SES children is more susceptible to material and status rewards. Supporting our expectations, we find that social origin effects on effort are largest when incentives are absent, yet decrease notably when material incentives are introduced. Albeit surprisingly modest and malleable, social origin effects on effort challenge voluntaristic notions of individual agency. Crucially though, providing tangible performance rewards can significantly narrow socioeconomic disparities in effort.
Time and Climate Change: U.S. Media Representations of Climate Actions, Horizons, and Events (2000 to 2021)
Oscar Stuhler, Iddo Tavory, Robin Wagner-Pacifici
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Questions of temporality are at the heart of climate change discourse: Does one think of climate change primarily as an event happening in the present, or as something that will take place in the future? By when must we take action to prevent its worst consequences? This article presents the first large-scale assessment of the structure and evolution of temporalities expressed in U.S. media discussions on climate change (2000 to 2021). To do so, we developed a novel computational framework for detecting and interpreting temporal expressions in textual data. Our analyses yield three main findings: First, temporal horizons for climate change have continuously shrunk since 2000, stably targeting, on average, the year 2060. However, second, while anticipated effects are getting closer, horizons for the coordination of climate action have remained highly stable, averaging around 16 years into the future at any given time. Third, contrasting the stability of explicitly stated horizons, we find a sharply expanding discourse of urgency patterned by outbursts of urgency: sudden surges in calls for immediate action or warnings against climate change’s devastating consequences during events like the 2020 California wildfires. By uncovering this disjuncture of different forms of temporality, we illuminate a crucial aspect of the climate change debate, contribute to the sociological theory of events, and identify some of the conditions underlying climate inaction.
The Changing Role of Mothers’ Status in Children’s College Completion
Christine R. Schwartz, Michael D. King
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Despite vast changes in women’s status in society and in the home, we have little understanding of the changing role of mothers in shaping children’s life chances. Has mothers’ influence on their children’s educational outcomes grown alongside these shifts? Using data from three large nationally representative U.S. surveys, we find that the returns to mothers’ status—measured as their education, occupational status, and earnings—have remained relatively stable and similar to the returns to fathers’ status among children born from the 1930s to the 1980s, thus accounting for little of the observed increase in children’s college completion. This surprising continuity of the returns to mothers’ status aligns with past evidence of relatively stable intergenerational associations in the face of social change. But this does not mean nothing has changed. Our decomposition results show that increases in women’s education, occupational status, and earnings have meant that increased levels of mothers’ status account for more of the increase in children’s college completion than does fathers’ status among cohorts born since the 1960s. That continued increases in college completion have more to do with the rising status of mothers than fathers has been overlooked by previous research.

Social Forces

Dualization of corporate control: lifetimers, external appointees, and CEO succession in Japan
Jiwook Jung, Eunmi Mun, Hiroshi Ono
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We investigate mechanisms of institutional stability under profound environmental change, using corporate control in Japan as a critical case. Building on the concept of dualization in the comparative institutions literature, we theorize how dualized power relations at the top of the firm sustain insider control. Using data on executive board members of all non-financial firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange from 1993 to 2016, we show that “lifetimers”—employees who spend their entire careers with a single company—continue to enjoy substantial advantages in CEO succession. They maintain their dominance by promoting fellow lifetimers and constraining the prospects of other candidates. At the same time, “external appointees”—organizational outsiders who join the firm directly as executive board members—also benefit from their institutional ties and boundary-spanning roles. Yet, unlike lifetimers, their relative advantages are fragile, as they lack durable intra-firm power bases and are more exposed to shifting external conditions and internal politics. Our findings suggest that resistance by organizational insiders, combined with the selective co-optation of outsiders, can help preserve institutional arrangements in a changing environment.
Navigating white space: how Black and Latine youth deepen their understanding of race and space through community-based education and youth workers as spatial guides
Bianca J Baldridge, Marlo A Reeves
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Guided by theories of racial capitalism, “white space,” and “bodies out of place” as frameworks, and through combined analyses of two studies in the same city with shared participants, the authors argue that Black and Latine youth possess a spatial awareness of white space. Community-based educational spaces (CBES) and youth workers, who are central to the process of sociopolitical development, act as spatial guides, fostering opportunities for youth to: (1) make sense of the spaces they encounter, and (2) deepen their understanding of race and space as a core component of sociopolitical development toward social action. The authors suggest that relationships between youth workers and youth within CBES are essential catalysts for deepening youths’ understanding and navigating white space.
The perceived meaning of eldercare among the sandwich generation of Koreans in Korea and Korean immigrants in the United States
Byung Soo Lee
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Despite a growing body of elder care literature on the Korean population, how the so-called sandwich generation perceives and practices filial norms in the Korean and United States context has not been clearly addressed. Using data from in-depth interviews with 100 Koreans and 136 Korean immigrant adults, this study explores how sandwich generation Koreans and Korean immigrants in the United States perceive filial obligation for their aging parents, what they do to prepare for their own later life and what they expect from their children when they become older and need care from others. The findings indicate that almost all of the study participants maintain traditional notions of filial piety, but they show ambivalent attitudes toward the practice of filial obligation and their expectation from their own children in their later lives in Korea and the United States. Depending on the individual or familial factors, their filial practices have adapted to changing demographic and social realities, constructing the new forms of filial piety.

Social Science Research

State-level gender inequality and couples’ relative earnings following parenthood over four decades
Kelly Musick, Wonjeong Jeong
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The structural fit of personal gender beliefs: A cross-national analysis of its implications for life satisfaction
Francisco Olivos, Yuning Sun, Lok-Sang Ho
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Elementary school discipline lowers students’ sense of belonging
Ha Eun Kim, Amy Gong Liu, Miles Davison, Sharon Z. Bi, Andrew M. Penner
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Socius

Rethinking Work Control and Its Relationship to Health
Zixi Li
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Work control is widely recognized as a core dimension of job quality and a key determinant of worker health, especially in increasingly precarious labor markets. Yet the concept is inconsistently conceptualized and poorly measured. The author reconceptualizes and analyzes work control as a multidimensional, context-sensitive balance between autonomy-enhancing enablers and constraint-imposing barriers, using cross-national survey data from the 2015 International Social Survey Programme Work Orientations IV Module. The author examines how the reconceptualized work control measure relates to self-rated health across 15 countries with varying economic and welfare contexts. Results from survey-weighted and mixed-effects ordered logistic models show that workers with high work control, defined as having more enablers than constraints across control over work hours, time off, and work-family boundaries, report significantly better self-rated health, even after adjusting for job characteristics, household structure, and macro-level conditions. This relationship remains robust across multiple sensitivity tests. Descriptive and validation analyses further indicate that reducing constraints, particularly those from work-family interference, plays a more decisive role for well-being than autonomy alone. By distinguishing meaningful work control from nominal flexibility or perceived autonomy, this study clarifies how effective control is associated with health in the post-2008 labor market and underscores the importance of policies that make control both possible and meaningful in everyday work.
On the Deep, Surprising, and Persistently Gendered Dynamics in Complex Music Tastes
Xiangyu Ma
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Popular and sociological intuitions tell us that men and women ought to have manifestly different cultural tastes. Yet empirical results do not always agree: scholars have often found surprising between-gender homogeneity when it comes to aggregate cultural tastes. Why? In this article, the author argues that such homogeneity is ultimately an artifact of our reliance on affective preference as the first approximation of taste. Building on Bourdieusian work on the unity of taste and data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. residents in 2024, the author shows that there is a deep, surprising, and persistent gendered dynamic to tastes that emerges only when we account for the multidimensional complexity of taste. These gendered dynamics are deep in that they are hidden when taste is approximated in unidimensional form. They are surprising in that they provide only inconsistent support for standing theories on gendered differences in cultural tastes. Finally, these gendered differences are persistent to the accumulation of cultural capital.
Seen as Latino, Assumed Lower Class: Racialized Class and Immigrant Status Perceptions in the United States
Cynthia Feliciano, Zhongze Wei, Maria Abascal, Wendy D. Roth
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Although racial and class stereotypes are intertwined, few studies have examined the degree to which racial perceptions are linked to assumptions about social class. Among Latinos, racial self-identities often do not align with racial classifications by others, complicating debates about their place in the U.S. racial order. This study draws on unique survey data in which respondents classify the race, immigrant status, and social class of people in photographs who self-identify as Latino, Black, or White. In contrast to theories positing Latinos as a group in between Black and White Americans, findings show that self-identified White, Black and Latino observers alike tend to perceive Latinos as lower in socioeconomic standing than Black Americans. However, class perceptions of self-identified Latinos vary by their perceived race and immigrant status. This study suggests that ideas about the hierarchical positioning of racial groups at the macro-level, especially for Latinos, may not correspond to how socioeconomic stereotypes are experienced at the individual level, which vary by perceptions of race and immigrant status.