I checked 9 sociology journals on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period March 24 to March 30, I found 9 new paper(s) in 5 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

Kinship Interlocks: How the Intimate Exchange of Wealth, Status, and Power Generates Upper-Class Persistence
Shay O’Brien
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How do some families manage to entrench themselves in the upper class for many generations while others do not? Bringing together economic sociology, political sociology, and stratification, I introduce a concept for the study of multigenerational persistence at the top of a stratified society: kinship interlocks. Kinship interlocks are portions of a kinship network that closely combine great wealth, status, and power. Just as board interlocks connect corporate elites through overlapping board memberships, kinship interlocks connect economic, social, and political elites through family ties. Using a mixed-methods analysis, I find that the intimate exchange of resources in kinship interlocks generates upper-class persistence via two primary mechanisms: it protects kin from economic, legal, and social risk, and it propels kin into higher strata. Processes of kin formation and intimate exchange are co-constitutive with systems of gender, sexuality, and race, such that the most durable portions of an upper class are especially heteronormative and racially dominant. The analysis is based on a unique dataset consisting of the full upper class and all economic, political, and social elites in the first 122 years of Dallas, Texas, along with all mutual family ties.

Social Forces

Review of “Beyond Informality: How Chinese Migrants Transformed a Border Economy”
Laura A Orrico
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Narrations of non-motherhood: how context shapes what it means to be childless in the United States and Japan
Holly Hummer
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In our era of low fertility rates, much research has examined factors behind delayed childbearing and childlessness. While scholars emphasize the role of macro-level context in constraining reproductive decision-making, less attention has been paid to how context shapes what it means, subjectively, to remain childless today. For women, whose childlessness has long been theorized as a deviant, stigmatized identity, this question is especially salient. Drawing on 157 interviews with non-mothers in two countries with distinct family landscapes, Japan and the United States, this paper comparatively analyzes how women experience and evaluate childlessness. Japanese participants were more likely to frame not having children as increasingly normalized and justifiable via entrenched gender inequalities whereas American participants were more likely to emphasize the socially isolating and publicly contested nature of childlessness, often drawing on moral logics to justify non-motherhood. To contextualize these divergences, I elaborate on two perceptual processes that emerged as relevant to women’s narratives: their views on the (in)flexibility of becoming and being a “good” mother and their interpretations of national demographic conditions. Together, these findings advance an understanding of childlessness as a status imbued with distinct meanings that are subject to cultural and demographic specificities.

Social Networks

Network threats to causal inference: Variations in network position by participation in randomized controlled trials
Cassie McMillan, Mark C. Pachucki, Jiaao Yu, A. James O’Malley, Anne N. Thorndike, Douglas E. Levy
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What accompanies companionship? Reassessing personal networks and loneliness among young and older adults
Markus H. Schafer, James S. Malo, Brandon M. Brown, Meagan L. McGourty
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Social Science Research

The gender system: A cross-national perspective
Rafael Quintana
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Polluting student test performance: School-based evidence on the adverse effects of air pollution
Maria Rubio-Cabañez, Jonas Radl
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Sociological Science

Socio-Economic Advancement and Long-Term Trends in the Gender Gap in Early Career Occupational Status in France 1860–1960
Wiebke Schulz, Ineke Maas, Marco van Leeuwen
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Are Occupations “Bundles of Skills”? Identifying Latent Skill Profiles in the Labor Market Using Topic Modeling
Marie Labussière, Thijs Bol
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