I checked 9 sociology journals on Thursday, May 28, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 21 to May 27, I found 16 new paper(s) in 5 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

The Influence “Paradox”: When More Network Ties Lead to Less Change
Yuan Hsiao, Nicholas A. Christakis
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The diffusion of behaviors and ideas is a core concern in many fields and highly relevant to collective action and innovation adoption. A common assumption is that well-connected individuals within social networks are especially influential and so are good targets to initiate behavioral interventions. Here, we argue that the effectiveness of network-based targeting depends on how social ties are organized within a network. We theorize that there is a structural “network paradox”: when social ties are concentrated around a small number of well-connected individuals, a focus on targeting those individuals becomes less effective at generating broad diffusion. We further argue that this paradox is especially pronounced for behaviors that require high levels of social reinforcement to spread. We conducted a three-part study including theoretical analysis, empirical analysis based on a randomized field trial of health practices in Honduras, and simulations. Across all three studies, the results highlight the critical role of network structure in shaping diffusion dynamics under targeting protocols that privilege individuals with more ties. Such protocols may fail when those individuals are clustered together. Our findings have implications for understanding leadership and influence, innovation, public health and developmental economic interventions, and marketing.
Countervailing Powers: Labor Unions Against the Buyer Power of Walmart Supercenters
Joshua Choper, Lukas Lehner, Zachary Parolin
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Power is central to sociological accounts of economic inequality; however, buyer power—market conditions in which one or a few dominant employers can limit workers’ outside options for employment—has received little attention relative to worker power. We study how the entry of Walmart Supercenters, the archetype of a high-buyer-power employer, affects the size and protective strength of union membership (a key dimension of worker power). We analyze (1) whether greater worker power dissuades Walmart Supercenters from entering a local labor market, (2) whether a successful Supercenter entry subsequently erodes local union membership, and (3) whether unions provide a protective effect against declining earnings after a successful Supercenter entry. We apply stacked difference-in-differences estimates based on county-year variation in Walmart Supercenter openings using restricted-access Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. We find that Walmart Supercenters are less likely to enter a local labor market that has high levels of union membership, even when conditioning on attempted Walmart entries. When Walmart Supercenter openings do occur, union membership declines by an average of 3.5 percentage points, and this is channeled through declining union membership in retail. Remaining union members are not protected against Walmart’s downward pressure on earnings; in fact, annual earnings among workers who were unionized pre-treatment decline faster than for non-union members after a Walmart Supercenter opens. Worker power can be effective at preventing a rise in buyer power, but conditional on increases in buyer power, worker power tends to decline in terms of both size and protective strength. The sociological study of labor market power ought to consider how prevailing levels of buyer power can moderate the ability of organized labor to achieve its social and economic aims.
Between Two Rituals: Face and Effervescence as Moments of Social Life
Anders Vassenden, Nicholas Hoynes, Taylor Price, Iddo Tavory
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Many of the social outcomes and patterns located at the very center of sociological inquiry are grounded in interaction ritual dynamics. Yet, while broadly used across subdisciplinary divides, such rituals are depicted in radically different ways. Drawing from a Durkheimian tradition, and following Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, we distinguish between what we term “rituals of face” and “rituals of effervescence”—rituals aimed at defending the self, and rituals that produce emotional entrainment. Leveraging two very different empirical research projects—patterns of ethnoracial stigmatization in Norway and an ethnography of creative songwriting sessions in Canada—we show that these two kinds of rituals are simultaneously at play. Using the first empirical case, we show how actors ritually segregate their social worlds, saving face with white audiences while often producing effervescence with minority audiences. Using the second, we show how rituals of face and of effervescence are recursively intertwined. We then argue that distinguishing these interaction ritual forms, and attending to their situational dynamics, allows us to ask new empirical questions and to develop a better understanding of the interactional structure of diverse processes: from social movement dynamics to discrimination.
Performing Nationalism: Celebrity Politics and Audience Boundary Work Under Authoritarianism
Lingxiao Chen
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How do citizens in authoritarian contexts interpret nationalist messages embedded in everyday life? While research shows that nationalism is reproduced through routine practices, less is known about how audiences interpret, adapt to, or contest official messages—and why. I argue that outward nationalist alignment persists not through uniform conviction, but because divergent interpretive pathways converge on surface-level conformity. This study examines China’s entertainment industry, where the state mobilizes celebrities to amplify nationalist messages. Using a two-stage mixed-methods design, I first survey internet users ( N = 2,211) to show that audiences judge celebrities’ nationalist transgressions as significantly more severe than non-political misconduct, with systematic variation across social groups. To uncover the interpretive logics behind this heterogeneity, I draw on 55 in-depth interviews, identifying four orientations shaped by individuals’ primary information repertoire and lived experiences of positioning within the national community. These orientations range from emotional affirmation to pragmatic compliance to tactical reinterpretation that enables indirect critique. By revealing how everyday encounters with celebrity culture—such as scrolling past a star’s nationalist post—normalize nationalist expectations, I demonstrate that the ideology endures even where internalization is limited. Grounded in the Chinese case, the study advances debates on cultural governance, audience reception of official messaging, and symbolic boundary-making in authoritarian settings.

Annual Review of Sociology

Diversity as a Dominant Social Value
Clayton Childress, Omar Lizardo
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Over the past half-century, sociologists working across subfields and analytic levels have documented the downstream implementations of diversity as a dominant social value. We synthesize this research, paying special attention to scholarship examining five key analytic contexts: class, taste, interactions, organizations, and cultural objects. The literature suggests that, despite persistent hierarchies of valuation and worth, a “conspicuous openness to diversity” has become particularly institutionalized among organizations and elites, operating as a foundational schema. We conclude with three directions for future research: exploring both historical and contemporary backlashes to diversity on the local and global scale, the impacts of diversity as a dominant social value for both non-elites and those who are cast as visible evidence of diversity, and the underlying mechanisms behind conspicuous openness to diversity, given well-documented gaps between discourse and action.

Social Forces

Do occupations confer equal prestige on female and male incumbents?
Maik Hamjediers, Ferdinand Geissler, Johannes Giesecke, Markus Schrenker
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While common measures of occupational prestige target shared beliefs about occupations at the aggregate level, little is known about whether these apply equally across potentially different incumbents of the same occupation. We address this gap by asking whether occupations confer the same prestige to female and male incumbents. Therein, occupational prestige provides an empirical lens on the evaluation of gendered labor market positions, allowing us to test theories of the devaluation of women’s work and perceptions of incumbents in gender-atypical occupations. We conducted a survey experiment that signals occupational incumbents’ gender via grammatically gendered occupational titles in German and collected about 64,000 prestige ratings for 106 occupations that cover half of the employed workforce. Findings indicate less prestige assigned to feminine compared to masculine occupational titles, suggesting that female incumbents face a prestige disadvantage. This applies foremost to male-dominated occupations, supporting theories on the devaluation of women’s work among them. However, these within–occupation gender prestige gaps are relatively small compared to prestige variation between occupations and unlikely to undermine established prestige measures in most empirical applications. These insights shed light on how gender and occupations relate in conveying prestige and contribute to the methodology of surveying occupational prestige, especially when faced with grammatically gendered languages.
Review of “Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia”
Tania DoCarmo
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Review of “The Police, Activists, and Knowledge: The Struggle Against Racialized Policing in France”
Pamela Jackson
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Review of “Who Cares About Parents?: Temporary Alliances, Exclusionary Practices, and the Strategic Possibilities of Parenting Groups”
Bailey Brown
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Review of “Inside Data Science: Hackers and the Making of a New Profession”
Justin Sola
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What we talk about when we talk about guns: four decades of firearms coverage in the New York Times
Brett C Burkhardt, Aimee DinnĂ­n Huff
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Guns are potent cultural objects in the United States, a fact that has spurred much recent social science research. Much of that work examines the beliefs, discourses, and actions of gun enthusiasts. Less understood are the cultural dimensions of guns in the wider population, where gun owners are in the minority. This paper considers the cultural life of guns by studying the language used to depict them in a prominent US mass media outlet over four decades. We use structural topic modeling to describe the New York Times’ coverage of guns from 1980 to 2019. The analysis reveals that the coverage centers danger and societal responses to it, albeit in different ways over time. Whereas local street violence and criminal punishment dominated coverage during much of the time period, high-profile mass shootings and efforts at federal legislation have become more salient in recent years. In examining depictions of guns in mass media, the paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the cultural life of guns in US society.

Social Science Research

Generic title: Not a research article
Corrigendum to “Educational assortative mating and changing patterns of parental financial investment in children, 1990–2024” [Soc. Sci. Res. 136C (2026) 103347]
Hyo Joo Lee
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No quick fix: Experimental evidence on whether school safety information mitigates anti-black perceptions and preferences for schools
Chantal A. Hailey
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Professional patterns: Occupation-Specific health behavior profiles
Connor Sheehan, Fred Pampel, Paul Espinoza
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Secularization and low fertility: How declining church membership changes couples’ childbearing
Henrik-Alexander Schubert, Vegard Skirbekk, Jessica Nisén
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Socius

Rights of Nature in the United States: An Empirical Analysis of Local Legal Adoption
Raffaele Sindoni, Jesse Callahan Bryant
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The authors present the first comprehensive empirical analysis of rights of nature (RoN) adoption in the United States, a globally growing legal movement asserting that rivers, forests, and ecosystems should be holders of rights. Although RoN is often theorized as a globally emergent, biocentric legal innovation, accounts of its U.S. diffusion remain sparse. The authors analyze all U.S. RoN efforts from 2002 to 2024 and integrate them with county-level social and environmental pollution indicators. The analytic strategy proceeds in three stages: (1) descriptive comparisons between RoN and non-RoN counties, (2) analysis of pollution violation intensity to assess RoN links to environmental burden, and (3) hierarchical clustering to assess RoN county heterogeneity. Contrary to existing scholarship that found U.S. RoN to be overwhelmingly white and conservative, the authors find that RoN ordinances arise in diverse sociopolitical and demographic contexts. The authors also find no link of RoN arising in geographies with heightened pollution violations. Thus, this analysis suggests that RoN adoption, despite its immediate legal radicality, has widespread local appeal in the United States. This breadth of relevance raises important contemporary challenges for sociology and points toward new directions for theorizing legal standing beyond the human.
Keys to the Future: How Gender and Sexuality Jointly Shape Parental Financial Support for Home Ownership
Yiwen Wang, Katherine Alexander, Caroline Wolski, Bridget Gorman, Rachel Kimbro
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Homeownership is a key marker of economic stability, yet rising housing costs have made it increasingly difficult for young adults to purchase homes. Parental financial transfers can help offset these barriers, but such support is unevenly distributed across social groups. Although past research has documented gender disparities in intergenerational transfers, little is known about how these patterns extend to sexual minority individuals or how gender and sexuality jointly shape parental support. Using data from the 2020–2021 Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity, Socioeconomic Status, and Health Across the Life Course study, the authors examine the need for and receipt of parental financial support for home buying across gender and sexual identity groups. Logistic regression models adjust for family background, socioeconomic status, and partnership characteristics. The results show substantial variation in parental support for home purchase across intersecting categories of gender and sexual identity. Gay men and straight women are less likely to receive parental financial assistance for home buying, even after accounting for socioeconomic resources, financial need, and partnership-related factors. These findings suggest that parental support for home buying may reflect heteronormative and gendered expectations, reinforcing social inequalities through unequal intergenerational transfers. Limited access to parental support may constrain homeownership opportunities and contribute to cumulative disadvantage over the life course.