I checked 9 sociology journals on Tuesday, April 21, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period April 14 to April 20, I found 23 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

American Journal of Sociology

Skill Diversification Beyond High-Paying Jobs
Siqi Han, Siwei Cheng
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Shift, Not Stasis: The Geography of Post–Civil Rights Racial Inequality
Robert Manduca
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Diversity and Prosociality in NYC Neighborhoods: Evidence from a Lost Wallet Experiment
Shannon Rieger, Delia Baldassarri, Maria Abascal
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Reach and Retrenchment of the Environmental State: Global Climate Politics in the Amazon Rainforest
Livio Silva-Muller
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Annual Review of Sociology

Discrimination and Health Inequalities
Martin Aranguren
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Although theory suggests that discrimination generates health inequalities in a variety of ways, research today concentrates almost exclusively on one particular mechanism: the conscious experience of unfair treatment, often termed “perceived discrimination.” To rethink perceived discrimination as one among other mechanisms, this review draws on the social stress model, reinterpreted as a macro-micro-macro sociological explanation. This reframing additionally reveals that the social stress model rests on an implicit theory of the emotional actor that provides no guidance to distinguish psychiatric illness (an individual problem) from nondisordered but painful emotional responses to external adversity (a social problem). To prevent this confusion, the review puts forward an account of the emotions that emphasizes their rootedness in the social world. On the empirical front, the review covers ethnic differences in depression and psychosis, as well as recent studies indicating that only a small portion of discriminatory treatment surfaces in the target's consciousness as perceived discrimination.
Sending Money Home: Understanding the Social Dynamics of Migrant Remittances
Hasan Mahmud, Min Zhou
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This article synthesizes major strands of scholarship on migrant remittances, addressing the central question of what motivates migrants to remit and how these motivations vary across social, temporal, and structural contexts. We review classical and neoclassical theories, the migration–development nexus, and the New Economics of Labor Migration, highlighting analytical limits in their economistic assumptions. We then examine sociological and transnational approaches that reconceptualize remittances as socially embedded practices shaped by gendered obligations, kinship norms, moral economies, sending-state regimes, and digital mediation. Building on this literature, we outline a multilevel sociological framework that situates remittance behavior at the intersections of microlevel familial subjectivities, mesolevel community expectations and transnational networks, and macrolevel political–economic structures. This framework underscores the recursive relationship between the causes and consequences of remitting, illustrating how remittances simultaneously sustain households, reshape social relations, and reproduce state and global dependencies, thereby challenging linear models prevalent in development discourse.
The Architecture of Global Capital: Elites, States, and the New Geography of Wealth
Kimberly Kay Hoang, Camille Biron-Boileau
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This article reviews the sociological and interdisciplinary literature on the global architecture of elite wealth, emphasizing structural transformations in the global political economy following the 2008 financial crisis. First, we review the literature on wealth stratification and its limits for studying the current structure of elite wealth. Second, we highlight the dimensions central to this new landscape and examine the reorganization of global production and capital flows, including the outsourcing of manufacturing and the rise of new economic centers in East and Southeast Asia, which challenge nation-bounded analyses of wealth. Third, we show how both democratic and authoritarian states strategically partner with private capital, blurring political distinctions and enabling elite consolidation. Fourth, we trace the expansion of offshore finance that fosters the rise of a transnational elite supported by professional intermediaries. We conclude by calling for new theoretical and methodological tools to study elite power, hidden capital flows, and their implications for inequality and governance.

Social Forces

Can earned income tax credits earn their keep?: earned income tax credits and in-work poverty in comparative perspective
Daniel Fredriksson
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Do earned income tax credits (EITCs) reduce in-work poverty? EITCs are tax instruments that promote income from work over income from transfer systems and is a fiscal policy increasingly used by many welfare states to achieve poverty reduction and increase work incentives. I argue that effects on in-work poverty may depend on how EITCs are organized. Building on previous research on the poverty impact of transfer systems, I develop unique macro-level indicators of EITCs across three dimensions: income targeting, generosity, and universalism. These indicators are combined with individual-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study and show that when EITCs are more generous, in-work poverty risks increase. The latter seems to primarily be the case in systems where EITCs are relatively similar across the income distribution and not low-income targeted. There are indications that poverty risks are lower when EITCs are low-income targeted, but effects are less pronounced. Overall, these results indicate that the “paradox of redistribution”—which suggests that low-income targeting of transfers is less effective at reducing poverty than universal approaches with higher transfer shares—does not hold in the context of fiscal welfare policies like EITCs.
Review of “Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality”
Adam Burston
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The spatial logic of racial devaluation in the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation
Megan Evans
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While scholars highlight the racial legacy of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) residential security maps, less is known about how race shaped HOLC appraisers’ perceptions of the neighborhoods they assessed. Drawing on racialized organizations theory, this study examines how racial schemas within the housing industry became institutionalized in appraisal practices. Using the case of Chicago and a mixed-method approach, it interrogates the racialized discourse in HOLC neighborhood area descriptions, revealing how appraisers used a racialized geographic imagination that positioned Black residents as inherent threats to property values, even when they were not physically present in a neighborhood. Content analyses reveal appraisers’ acute spatial awareness of where racialized groups lived and their engagement in anticipatory devaluation. Regression analyses confirm that appraiser discussion of Black residents, rather than actual demographics, primarily shaped risk assessments, underscoring the interpretive role of appraisers as they transformed neighborhood demographics into racialized valuations. This study shows how race structured the institutional habits of thought on which places held value in the city. Findings have broader implications for residential segregation, stigma, and institutional racism, as the racial-spatial ideology around neighborhood value would shape and legitimize decades of racially unjust norms in the US housing market.
Belonging and blame: cultural and moral correlates of anti-Asian scapegoating for the COVID-19 pandemic
Christopher Seto
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Violence and discrimination targeting Asian Americans increased substantially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and perpetrators have frequently used scapegoating language (e.g., “China virus”) or otherwise expressed blame for the pandemic as motivation. However, little empirical research has explored these pandemic scapegoating beliefs—or the preexisting beliefs, values, and narratives that support them—which is likely an important step toward understanding and addressing anti-Asian hate. This study began with an exploratory factor analysis of representative, original US survey data (N = 1941) to construct a novel measure of pandemic scapegoating beliefs. Next, drawing on theories of group threat, nationalism, and morality, multivariable regression analyses examined how (1) Christian nationalism and (2) moral foundations were linked to these pandemic scapegoating beliefs and associated language, above and beyond sociodemographic, religious, and political controls. Among non-Asian Americans, endorsement of Christian nationalism tended to be associated with heightened scapegoating, but with some differences across race and ethnicity. Individualizing moral foundations (i.e., care and fairness concerns) were associated with lower scapegoating, while binding moral foundations (i.e., loyalty, authority, and sanctity concerns) were associated with heightened scapegoating. Notably, these measures largely explained differences in scapegoating beliefs and language across political affiliations, highlighting the importance of moral culture to how outgroup scapegoating narratives become politically polarized and resonant. Implications for scholarship on contemporary anti-Asian hate and other instances outgroup scapegoating are discussed.
Weaving uncertainty: backloaded institutions and calculated improvisation in children’s fashion production
Linzhuo Li
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This study examines the cultural logic of uncertainty in China’s children’s fashion industry, and shows why familiar coordination devices, such as Order Fairs, remain peripheral to this market. I identify a “backloaded institution,” a system where post-production exchange provides the footing for production itself. Producers operate under high uncertainty regarding both meaning and relation, making goods without orders or guarantees. Their risk-taking holds because a secondary clearance market emerges to provide massive, culturally grounded liquidity. This study thus identifies an institution that does not function to predict the future, but to create a liquid present in which multiple futures can be tested.
Explaining gender-specific trends in income mobility: the role of education
Xiaojie Xu
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Rising income inequality has aroused widespread concern about potential decreases in intergenerational income mobility. Recent research reveals that income mobility has remained stable among men while declining among women, though the reasons for these disparities remain unclear. This study explores whether gender-specific mobility trends can be explained by gender differences in changes in educational inequality and returns to education. Using Swedish register data for cohorts born between 1958 and 1979, this study confirms gender-specific trends: the intergenerational rank association in income has decreased and then stabilized for men while increasing steadily for women. Decomposition analyses of mobility trends indicate that, for men, decreased educational inequality was the primary factor driving increased income mobility, while returns to education were stable and had limited effects. For women, decreased educational inequality also increased mobility, but this was counteracted by rising direct income associations net of education across cohorts and increasing educational returns among younger cohorts. In summary, through rising educational returns, education has increasingly driven women’s intergenerational income persistence but not men’s. These findings offer new insights into the role of education in driving changes in income mobility within the broader context of evolving gender equality.

Social Networks

From hidden populations to social structure: Evolution of the Network Scale-Up Method, Aggregated Relational Data, and their applications
Miranda J. Lubbers, Beate Völker, Michał Bojanowski
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Introduction to the Network Scale-up Method
Christopher McCarty, H. Russell Bernard
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Social Science Research

Educational assortative mating and changing patterns of parental financial investment in children, 1990–2024
Hyo Joo Lee
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Gendered work and family trajectories: How do STEM graduates fare in the labor market?
Rosa Weber, Camilla Härtull, Jan Saarela
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Social and emotional skills and young people's expectations of social status and mobility
Francesca Borgonovi, Seong Won Han
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Do social networks help or hurt? Accessed status and tie strength across occupational status and mental well-being
Lijun Song, Zhe Zhang, Philip J. Pettis, Meagan Rainock
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Beyond Black and White: Racial stereotyping and support for racial redress policies
Eric Silver, Kerby Goff, John Iceland
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Three decades of interethnic marriage in China: Ethnic boundaries, educational sorting, and status exchange
Yanwen Wang, Zheng Mu
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Socius

The Sociology of “Dirty Research”: Interresearcher Positionality, Marginalization, and Stigma Management
Eran Shor
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Although social science research has thoroughly reflected on researchers’ positionality vs. their field and informants, interresearcher positionality has been less rigorously explored. The author examines stigma management and positionality surrounding “dirty research.” He develops a theory of “dirty research” that expands the definition of this concept, identifies its core tenets, and reflects on its consequences and perils for a wide range of scholars. This theory examines the fluidity of “dirty work” and, by extension, “dirty research,” suggesting that the latter should also extend to the study of “dirty people” and “dirty activities.” The author also assesses the academic and personal consequences and perils potentially associated with conducting “dirty research” and the ways in which these consequences vary by researchers’ intersecting identities and demographics. The author then reflects on his own positionality and experiences in conducting “dirty research,” noting both his privileged position and the challenges that nevertheless persist. The author ends with thoughts about future directions for scholars who engage in “dirty research” given the serious challenges of stigmatization and marginalization.
Power, Status, Legitimacy, and Shame in Organizations
Joseph Dippong, Stephanie Moller, Leah Ruppanner, Jill Yavorsky
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The power-status theory of emotions posits that emotions arise out of a process in which people compare the levels of status and power that they experience against some standard of status and power adequacy. Power-status theory is effective at predicting emotions, but it does not formally specify a structural mechanism that explains how actors determine what constitutes adequate or inadequate power and status. The authors argue that legitimacy, or the notion that actors have a right to expect compliance and deference, serves as this mechanism. Focusing on shame, the authors illustrate that perceived losses in legitimacy mediate a substantial portion of the links among status loss, power loss, and shame. The authors also find that legitimacy mediates the relationship between a person’s position within an organization and the shame they experience when their status and power are challenged. These findings advance power-status theory by providing a structural standard for status and power adequacy that explains how losses in status and power generate emotional outcomes.