I checked 9 sociology journals on Saturday, May 09, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 02 to May 08, I found 17 new paper(s) in 5 journal(s).

American Journal of Sociology

The Race of Politics: Partisan Affiliation and Ethnoracial Boundary Crossing
Samuel Thomas Donahue, Adam Reich
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Social Forces

The role of graduate education in the rising wage premium for professional and managerial occupations, 1980–2019
Felix Busch, Paula England, Wenhao Jiang
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Part of the rise in US wage inequality comes from a widening gap between professional/managerial (PM) and other occupations (NPM). We examine the role of education in the trend in this gap from 1980 to 2019. Prior research typically combined all college graduates in one category, but we highlight the distinctive role of graduate degrees. Since 1980, NPM occupations have never had as many as five percent with a graduate degree, but by 2019, thirty-six percent of individuals in PM occupations had a graduate degree. Using a decomposition-of-change technique, we show that the increased gap between NPM and PM in the proportion of their workers with graduate degrees explains nineteen percent of the growth in the gap. A two-way fixed-effects analysis shows that those occupations that increased their proportion of workers with a graduate degree more had steeper wage growth. Wage returns rose modestly for BA/BS degrees and dramatically for having a graduate degree. However, a BA/BS degree was less likely to get one a PM job in 2019 than in 1980, whereas a graduate degree was just as likely to get one PM job in 2019 as in 1980. We discuss how our findings fit predictions from three theoretical perspectives emphasizing skill-biased technological change, the expanding knowledge economy, and increased credentialism.
Is it good to work with? Workability and the meaning of non-native species in urban policy
Tyler J Bateman, Daniel Silver, Alicia Eads, Charlotte Kafka-Gibbons
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Research on social problems often analyzes how different groups think or act in relation to a single issue. Less frequent are studies of how a single group thinks or acts in relation to many phenomena, any of which may be construed as problematic to a greater or lesser degree. We take this multiple phenomena – single social position approach and analyze why the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), a supra-municipal government agency, discusses some non-native species as more “invasive” than others. We use word embeddings to measure variation in the strength of association between different species and invasiveness in 599 of the TRCA’s policy documents and employ generalized additive models to explain this variation. We find that the “invasive” meaning is more strongly associated with species that are easier to observe, access, control, or manage in the TRCA’s urban context, which we term workability. Species that are terrestrial, sessile, and moderately abundant are more strongly associated with invasiveness than mobile, aquatic, and hyperabundant species. These findings suggest that problem managers conceive of issues they are responsible for managing according to how actionable problems appear. We propose workability as a key analytic lens for understanding how problem managers make decisions and construct meaning. We situate this contribution in the context of four research designs for studying social problems that we term comparative problem-solving designs.
The role of self-employment in immigrants’ economic assimilation: a longitudinal analysis
Andrés Villarreal, Christopher R Tamborini
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Immigrants have been shown to have higher self-employment rates than the native-born. However, unlike socioeconomic outcomes such as education and earnings, for which a narrowing gap with natives signals a positive outcome, immigrants’ high self-employment rates have a more ambivalent meaning. Self-employment may reflect problems in the economic assimilation process if it is used as a strategy by immigrants who are underpaid in the wage/salary labor market or if self-employment leads to lower earnings growth in the long run. We use a restricted dataset in which respondents of the Current Population Survey have been linked with their tax records to examine the self-employment trajectories of immigrant men who arrived as adults over their first 20 years since arrival. The longitudinal information allows us to test whether immigrants who transition to self-employment are those who are underperforming in the wage/salary labor market. We are also able to assess the long-term impact of self-employment by comparing the earnings growth of immigrants before and after becoming self-employed. Our findings indicate that immigrants who turn to self-employment are underpaid in the wage/salary labor market. Self-employment also often leads to lower long-term earnings growth although there are important differences among immigrants by race and ethnicity and level of education.
Examining the relationship between male-breadwinning and divorce: the impact of work-family policies in the United States
Kimberly McErlean
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There is ongoing debate as to whether gender specialization, historically considered to be the most efficient family arrangement, or gender egalitarianism, now typically seen as more economically and ideologically desirable, is more negatively associated with divorce in the contemporary United States. In the context of a stalled gender revolution, I draw upon gender equity theory to explore whether differential levels of institutional support for gender equality in the home, operationalized as state-level work-family policy supports, help explain why traditional gender arrangements are still often associated with marital stability among different gender couples. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1995–2019) merged with state policy information to test the hypothesis that gender specialization primarily reduces the risk of divorce when institutional support for balancing work and family life is low, using an indicator I term structural support for working families, especially among married parents. Findings support this hypothesis: male-breadwinning and gender specialization reduce divorce risk when structural support for working families is low, but there are no differences across work-family arrangements when support is high. By integrating micro- and macro-level views on gender, public policy, and family life, this study helps us understand how gendered institutional structures have shaped the progression of the gender revolution in the United States.
Review of “Everyday Futures: Language as Survival for Indigenous Youth in Diaspora”
Andrea GĂłmez Cervantes
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Social Networks

Socioeconomic homogeneity in acquaintance networks: Occupational prestige, education, and intergenerational mobility
Alejandro Espinosa-Rada, MatĂ­as Bargsted, Francisca Ortiz Ruiz
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Understanding the formation of interdisciplinary collaboration networks with an ERGM approach
Jinqing Yang, Xingyu Luo, Siyu Yao, Yuhan Wei
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Rigid boundaries, selective salience: How classroom gender composition shapes adolescent friendships
Eszter Vit, Isabel J. Raabe
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If all friends are perfectly reliable, then one friend always suffices: How non-reciprocity creates the Dunbar circles
Alexander V. Gubanov, Ivan V. Kozitsin
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Embedding-based synthetic control for causal inference in dynamic networks
Eunsung Yoon, Zhuofan Li
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Ownership networks, financing and firm growth
Robert Petrunia, Linh Phan, Leonardo Sánchez-Aragón
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Social Science Research

Socioeconomic divides in curricular pathways: Unpacking decision-making mechanisms and peer effects
Nicola Pensiero, Carlo Barone, Jan Germen Janmaat
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Job loss and births. A couple-level study of Norwegian plant closures
Rishabh Tyagi, Elisa Brini, Daniele Vignoli
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Answering the call: How changes to the salience of job characteristics affect college students’ decisions
Carly D. Robinson, Katharine Meyer, Chasity Bailey-Fakhoury, Amirpasha Zandieh, Susanna Loeb
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When do educational expectations motivate effort? Expectation-opportunity alignment and study time across 27 countries
Anna Yong
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Socius

Visualizing the Spatial Distribution of Aging Places in the United States, 2000 to 2020
Paige E. Price, Paige Kelly, Ryan P. Thombs
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Population aging has important sociological implications at the community level, including reductions in local workforce size, greater demand for health and social services, and changing housing needs. Communities also differ in their ability to support aging populations, such as in rural areas, where population decline and limited-service infrastructure may result in challenges due to these population changes. This data visualization describes the spatial distribution of aging places in the United States across two decades, comparing 2000–2010 and 2010–2020. The authors categorize counties into three types of aging places: (1) nonaging counties, (2) aging-in-place counties, and (3) retirement destination counties. For 2000 to 2010, the authors show that aging counties were relatively limited in number and most counties were classified as nonaging. The 2010–2020 map reveals a striking transformation driven primarily by the expansion of aging-in-place counties. This shift reflects not only the addition of new aging-in-place counties but also the reclassification of many retirement destinations as aging-in-place counties. In total, the number of counties classified as aging increased from 476 to 1,353, showing a broad diffusion of aging county status across the United States. These maps provide a spatial foundation for examining how demographic pathways to aging shape inequality and well-being among older adults.