I checked 9 sociology journals on Sunday, May 31, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 24 to May 30, I found 18 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.
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

Sociology of Medicine: Orderly Heterogeneity Among Once-Settled Categories
Daniel A. Menchik
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In the half-century following its mid-century emergence, the sociology of medicine in the United States has been constituted by a theoretical vocabulary anchored in concepts of roles and professions, and a methodological commitment to ideal types. More recently, research has called attention to these foci in ways that prompt close attention to categories once considered relatively homogeneous. After briefly discussing the key emphases of early work, I review contemporary literature's most active areas and intersections, especially organizations, professions and labor, and science and knowledge. In particular, the review demonstrates the behavior of the literature's key stakeholders—such as doctors and hospitals—as displaying a certain orderly heterogeneity. That is, although variation and diversity are characteristic of medical work, this heterogeneity is not random. Rather, I show that practices are organized systematically to reflect and constitute local and global communities of health care users and providers. I identify how the corpus suggests that more work could be done across key topics of the sociology of medicine to enable theoretical synthesis of these empirical results.

Social Forces

Review of “Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India”
Manjusha Nair
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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 “Shadows of the Enlightenment: The Hidden Politics and Ideology of the Natural and Social Sciences”
Michael Roberts
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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.
Organizational status and online-offline mobilization cycles
Jack G R Wippell
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Scholars of social movements and culture are increasingly interested in the dynamic relationship between online discourse and offline mobilization. Although prior work typically frames online discourse as a precursor to offline activism, emerging research on right-wing extremist (RWE) mobilization hints at a reciprocal relationship. Recognizing the group-based organizational structure of many contemporary social movements, I put forward a framework for understanding online-offline mobilization cycles by extending status theories of collective action to organizational processes and networks. An analysis of the white supremacist movement White Lives Matter provides preliminary support for the theory, with implications for wider debates in scholarship on social movements, online discourse, and organizational processes.

Social Science Research

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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On your mark, get set, go: A multilevel analysis of racial residential segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas
Nereyda Y. Ortiz Osejo, Amber R. Crowell, Luna Chandna
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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

What Would Jesus Fund? Christian Nationalism and Americans’ Views on Government Spending
Ibrahim Enes Atac, Lena Kunjan, Forrest Lovette, Samuel L. Perry
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Research on government spending focuses primarily on the roles of partisanship, ideology, and in-group self-interest. Beyond these, the authors propose that religiopolitical schemas have an independent (though interrelated) role in shaping Americans’ conceptions of government’s purpose, beneficiaries, and resource allocation. Conceiving of “Christian nationalism” as a religiopolitical schema rooted in “us versus them” hierarchical conceptions of social order and neoliberal ideas of government, the authors theorize Christian nationalism is associated with greater American support for government spending on controlling and punishing problematized populations, less spending on vulnerable populations and out-group interests, and no systematic preference when the in-group or out-group interest is less salient. Data from the 2021 General Social Survey affirm these expectations. Even after accounting for partisanship, ideology, and White victimhood, Christian nationalism is associated with support for greater government spending on crime, law enforcement, and the military and less spending on Blacks, safety nets, science, the environment, and other Democratic issues but is unrelated to spending on parks, highways, social security, and other areas in which in-group distinctions are less salient. Interactions reveal that Christian nationalism is more strongly associated with views on government spending among non-Republicans and nonconservatives. The authors discuss how Christian nationalist rhetoric is associated with spending priorities that reflect inequalities across multiple domains.
The Self-Other Gap in Perceived Automation Risk: Evidence from the United States and Canada
Paul Glavin, Scott Schieman, Alexander Wilson
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This visualization shows a systematic misperception in how workers judge automation risk. Drawing on the 2026 Measuring Employment Sentiments and Social Inequality study, the authors compare paired measures of perceived automation likelihood for self and most others, using nationally representative samples of American and Canadian workers. Approximately three quarters of study participants in both countries rated their own jobs as at low risk of automation in the next few years, yet more than 70 percent believed that most other workers face at least some likelihood of automation. The pattern aligns with pluralistic ignorance: most workers hold one view of their own automation risk while assuming that most others hold a different one. The self-other gap is invariant across occupational categories and across two distinct national contexts, consistent with an informational asymmetry in which beliefs about others’ risk reflect prevailing public narratives about artificial intelligence rather than workers’ direct experience.