I checked 9 sociology journals on Wednesday, December 24, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period December 17 to December 23, I found 15 new paper(s) in 7 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

After DEI: A Different Future for Race, Work, and Policy
Adia Harvey Wingfield
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In the wake of organized backlash and federal opposition, many organizations are taking steps to downplay or dismantle their existing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming. While there are some exceptions, many institutions have largely chosen to retreat from DEI rather than embrace it. This stance has prompted disputes over DEI’s effectiveness, shortcomings, and potential. In this address, I argue that debates over the merits of DEI miss the mark. In an increasingly diverse, multiracial society, the more important question is not whether DEI has value, but what will follow it. Organizational practices in the aftermath of DEI will have heightened significance as work becomes more automated and highly relational, thus producing new ways of maintaining (and challenging) racial hierarchies. To resolve the tension of how best to structure workplaces in an increasingly diverse, yet anti-DEI, climate, I consider various factors that precipitated attacks on DEI and suggest that rethinking policy orientations can help close racial gaps in rapidly changing workplaces. Reducing these disparities can help better equip companies to manage more diverse workforces, creating a more productive economy and maximizing worker potential.

Social Forces

Black–White inequality in earnings losses after job displacement, 1981–2020
Joshua Choper
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While social scientists have devoted significant effort to understanding racial economic inequalities, surprisingly little work has examined inequalities in how Black and White workers recover from job loss. Trends in racial inequalities after job loss have not been systematically examined since the mid-1990s, leaving open questions about how economic restructuring and business cycle fluctuations have shaped racial inequalities in post-displacement outcomes. In addition, extant research on racial inequalities in post-displacement outcomes has focused on inequalities among men. I use data from the 1984–2020 Displaced Workers Supplement to the Current Population Survey to offer the first historical accounting of racial inequalities in earnings changes after job displacement since the mid-1990s. Large racial inequalities in earnings losses are explained by Black workers’ relatively low levels of education, employment in vulnerable segments of the labor market, and disadvantage in finding new jobs, but also mitigated by White workers’ large earnings losses due to lost earnings advantages accumulated at their previous job. Among men, racial inequalities in post-displacement earnings increased substantially during the Great Recession, entirely due to unobserved differences between White and Black men. Using Heckman-corrected models, I demonstrate that standard ordinary least squares (OLS) models substantially underestimate racial inequalities in the effect of job displacement on earnings among men due to racial differences in workers’ likelihood of finding a new job—accounting for racial differences in selection into reemployment reveals significant racial disparities among men in the effect of displacement on earnings between 1981 and 2009.
Strategic family resilience: health declines and intergenerational relationships in multi-child Chinese families
Yang Zhang, Jiaowei Gong, Tianrong Tang, Ting Li
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As population aging emerges as a global concern, health declines among older parents have become prevalent. However, we know little about how intergenerational relationships adapt to declines in older parents’ physical, mental, and cognitive health, considering their multi-dimensional and ambivalent natures and the multi-child family context. Drawing on four waves (2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020) of data from a nationally representative survey, the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey, we found that parent–child relationships became closer after declines in older parents’ physical and cognitive health, while the variation in parent–child relationships across children increased. The greater intimacy was driven by increased functional exchanges and associational connections rather than improved emotional affinity. Compared to families without daughters, the pattern was more pronounced in families with daughters. Moreover, intergenerational relationships were unresponsive to declines in mental health. These findings suggest that Chinese families employ strategic family resilience in response to changing family demands.
Review of “Canaries in the Code Mine: Precarity and the Future of Tech Work”
Adam K Schoenbachler
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Social Networks

Beyond weak ties in prison: An investigation of core support networks of incarcerated persons
Siyun Peng, Martha Tillson, Maria Rockett, Marisa Booty, Carrie B. Oser
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Getting lonely and isolated? Transitions in social isolation profiles over time and factors associated with them among older adults
Pildoo Sung, Angelique Chan, Abhijit Visaria, June May-Ling Lee
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Dissipation and bondedness in networks via conflict-based cohesion
Kenneth S. Berenhaut, Liangdongsheng Lyu, Yuxiao Zhou
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Social Science Research

Gendered reporting of housework across relative spousal income
Joanna Syrda
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Yours, mine, and ours: Childhood disadvantage and late-life social connectedness in marital dyads
Yiang Li, Jason Wong, Linda J. Waite
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Sociological Methods & Research

Benefits of a Pragmatic Approach: Rethinking Measurement Invariance and Composite Scores in Cross-Cultural Research
Christopher Bratt
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Can aggregated composite scores be used to compare countries or other groups despite measurement non-invariance? We propose a pragmatic approach, emphasizing that measurement invariance is valuable but not strictly necessary for all such comparisons. For descriptive analyses of group differences, composite scores may outperform factor-analytic approaches, because they are more intuitive and can capture multiple dimensions. Using data from the European Social Survey (39 countries, 11 measurement occasions, 546,954 respondents), we examined social and political trust. Composite scores aggregated to the country level were practically indistinguishable from countries’ factor scores based on approximate measurement invariance testing. We conclude that composite scores can suffice for simple group comparisons, though their suitability depends on the data. They can, however, underestimate uncertainty, producing overly narrow confidence intervals. We further show that measurement invariance does not guarantee measurement equivalence. Finally, we highlight how researchers can leverage data even if measurement invariance fails.

Sociological Science

Ambiguous Actorhood: Twenty-First Century Firms and the Evasion of Responsibility
Carly Knight, Adam Goldstein
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Socius

Who Is Black? Black Americans on Multiraciality and Black Identity
Raj A. Ghoshal
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In his classic Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition , James Davis examined the construction of Blackness from the country’s roots through the close of the twentieth century. In this article the author extends Davis’s project by drawing on original survey data that examines present-day Black Americans’ own understandings of Black identity. The author also examines how self-classification as Black alone, Black-White, and Black-other relates to these measures, to open-ended descriptive self-identification, and to classifying oneself as “multiracial.” Black-alone and Black-in-combination respondents largely concur in how they assess the relevance of one’s self-identification and factors related to biological race conceptions when thinking about whether someone is Black. However, the groups diverge on what importance they give to others’ appraisals and cultural and experiential factors when assessing Black identity; they also differ in their own open-ended racial identifications. In contrast to concerns raised in some prior work, Black-alone respondents do not see multiraciality as disqualifying of Blackness. That the identity difference along which views of Black identity split is unrelated to the topics of the split is striking. The author argues that this Black-multiracial identity paradox may help illuminate how intragroup cohesion is possible alongside growing within-group diversity.
Short-Lived Relief: The Racial Geography of Rebounding Eviction Rates in Postmoratorium St. Louis
Anne Brown, Samuel H. Kye, Yi Wang
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This visualization examines time series and spatial trends in eviction case filings in St. Louis and St. Louis County before, during, and after the federal eviction moratorium. Scraping data from the Missouri Courts system for all eviction cases in the region from January 2017 thru December 2024, the authors compare how eviction rates rebounded across majority-white and majority-Black neighborhoods, particularly in light of the moratorium’s documented effects dramatically diminishing eviction rates in high-risk communities. The results show that, in majority-Black neighborhoods, eviction filing rates rebounded aggressively during the moratorium and to an even stronger degree afterward, even despite emergency rental assistance protections. By contrast, rates rebounded to a more modest degree in majority-white neighborhoods and only after the moratorium’s end. A spatial representation of case filings illustrates the disproportionate degree to which eviction filings endured in majority-Black neighborhoods during the moratorium, setting the stage for pre- and postmoratorium portraits of eviction that were effectively indistinguishable. As a whole, these findings indicate that racialized patterns in the rebound of evictions in the region quickly eroded, and eventually eliminated, the relative parity in eviction filings between white and Black neighborhoods observed in the very early stages of the moratorium.
Counting Race, Miscounting Identity: The Census and Hispanic Racial Self-Identification
Kyle E. Waldman
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Scholarship posits that the state is the most powerful actor in “race-making” via its institutionalization of racial categories, especially through national censuses. Yet whether census ethnoracial categories correspond to experientially existing social groups crafted through everyday boundary making is an empirical question. When census categories misalign with micro-level boundaries, inferences drawn from census data may seriously misrepresent intergroup relations. Using unique, multidimensional data on self-classified Hispanics in the United States, the author estimates the degree and correlates of (mis)alignment between Hispanics’ racial self-classifications on a closed-ended, census-style race question and their racial self-identification on an open-ended question. The author finds substantial misalignment between racial self-classification and self-identification, with self-rated skin tone and reflected appraisal particularly important for white (mis)alignment and immigrant generation status strongly associated with the use of hyphenated American identifications. The author concludes that although the state exhibits “race-making” power, reliance on census race categories alone misrepresents Hispanics’ ethnoracial boundary making practices, distorting inferences about the larger U.S. racial structure. Including a Hispanic option on the census race question improves overlap between state and everyday racial categories, but a Hispanic racial self-identification is by no means a universal convention.
Delayed Legal Status Incorporation among Student Visa Holders
A. Nicole Kreisberg, Jennifer Van Hook, Hannah Persaud
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Student visa holders reflect a large and growing share of the higher educated immigrant population. Although historically considered legally protected, student visa holders’ current precarity raises important theoretical questions about their incorporation. Yet we know very little about student visa holders’ legal status trajectories over time, which is important if we are to understand their opportunities for social and economic incorporation. Using longitudinal data from the National Survey of College Graduates, and multidecrement life table methods, the authors find that half of foreign-born students remain in the United States after 10 years. Yet students have limited transitions to lawful permanent residence. Indian student visa holders are among the least likely to transition to permanent residence. The authors attribute this pattern of “delayed legal status incorporation” to immigration policies, which increase permanent residence wait times for individuals from high-sending countries such as India. More broadly, the authors argue that these results reflect a mismatch between the policy intentions of the “temporary” student visa program and students’ real intentions to stay in the United States long term. The authors discuss the implications of this mismatch for this growing share of young people who are in high demand in the high-skilled labor market, but who face limited pathways to permanent residence.