I checked 9 sociology journals on Wednesday, June 03, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period May 27 to June 02, I found 24 new paper(s) in 8 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.

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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The code of cohesion: adolescent network centrality, offending, and the downside of school cohesion
Nicolo P Pinchak
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Paradoxical to numerous theories and policies, adolescents attending schools high in student cohesion do not reliably exhibit less involvement in offending. Coleman’s arguments about status and norms and the broader literature on adolescent networks suggest that this paradox is partially attributable to high-status males having more leeway to offend when attending schools high in student cohesion, which over time reinforces their engagement in offending. Here, an initial test of this “code of cohesion” hypothesis is conducted using data from high school students in Waves I–III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Adolescents’ status positions at school are identified using multiple measures of network centrality, and high-cohesion schools are identified as those high on measures of student friendship network density or school social climate. Consistent with the hypothesis, results indicate that the positive association of male adolescents’ network centrality with offending becomes increasingly evident over time when they attend high-cohesion schools and diminishes over time after exiting these schools. Among schools of low/moderate-cohesion, the association of males’ network centrality with offending is less evident and does not persist after exiting schooling whatsoever. These findings support Coleman’s arguments about status and norms enabling leeway and illuminate a key reason why efforts to reduce offending by fostering student cohesion have had limited success. Additionally, this study highlights the need for research assessing how school relational dynamics among teachers, administrators, and parents, in addition to adolescent social systems, shape adolescents’ behavioral trajectories.
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 “Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center”
Tad Skotnicki
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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.
Review of “Is Inequality the Problem?”
Christopher Wimer
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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 Networks

Stability of egocentric social networks in children: Personal and functional dynamics across microsystems
Karl Titze, Christian Elting, Roswitha Sommer-Himmel
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Social Science Research

Professional patterns: Occupation-Specific health behavior profiles
Connor Sheehan, Fred Pampel, Paul Espinoza
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and perceived intergenerational mobility in Czechia and Uruguay. An unexpected event during survey design study
Maik Hamjediers, Patrick Präg, Alexi Gugushvili
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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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Sociological Methods & Research

Discovering Preference Structure Using Randomized Paired Comparisons in Surveys: A Topic Modeling Approach
Jeong-han Kang, Eunrang Kwon, Junmo Song
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Randomized paired comparisons (RPC) for social values have various advantages over a matrix format of multiple items; however, their use cannot exhaust all possible pairs if there are too many items to compare one-to-one. This article proposes (1) applying a dimension reduction method, structural topic modeling (STM), to RPC survey data by restructuring answers into ordered pairs to estimate latent answering patterns, (2) visualizing them into directed graphs, and (3) interpreting them as respondents’ preference structures among social values. For empirical validation, we randomly divided 920 respondents into RPC and matrix-format groups and asked about the seriousness of ten social problems. Our STM from the RPC group revealed five preference structures beyond a linear order among the 10 items, which are interpretable and incorporate statistical tests with respondents’ traits as covariates. We also discuss how to improve topic modeling with RPC and contribute to various research streams, such as cultural value networks and gamification, by pairwise wiki survey.
Identification and Sensitivity Analysis for Teacher Bias Designs Based on Administrative Data
Julian Schuessler
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A series of papers uses administrative data on school students’ grades to assess whether teachers discriminate against certain demographic groups. Often, differences in teacher and test grades are regressed on student-level variables. However, it is unclear under what circumstances such an estimation strategy is valid. We conceptualize teacher bias as a direct causal effect of student-level attributes on teacher grades, fixing student ability. Standardized tests merely proxy for student ability; additionally, there may be confounders of ability and teacher grade. Accordingly, teacher bias is nonparametrically unidentified. However, we suggest substantive and parametric assumptions that ensure identification using difference-in-grades estimators. Estimators based on regression control for test grades are shown to be inconsistent even under these strong assumptions. We then develop a parametric sensitivity analysis that allows researchers to investigate the consequences of departures from critical assumptions. We illustrate our methodology using administrative data from Denmark.

Sociological Science

Family Networks and Childcare Choices: A Predictive Machine Learning Approach
Nicolás Soler, Tom Emery, Agnieszka Kanas
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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.
Resource Stratification and Income Segregation in Brazilian and Chilean Universities
Danilo Kuzmanic
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Wealthy universities enjoy advantages in accessing resources, disproportionately benefiting high-income students who are overrepresented in these institutions. Using administrative data from 2017 to 2019, the author analyzes the relationship between resource inequality and student income segregation across universities in Brazil and Chile. Both countries have significantly expanded higher education through the entry of new private institutions while introducing large-scale equity policies. The findings show comparable levels of resource inequality in both countries but greater student segregation in Chile. As a result, high-income students in Chile attend universities with 1.7 times more resources than their lower income peers compared with 1.3 times in Brazil. The public sector exhibits larger resource disparities in both countries, which is closely connected to differences in research intensity. High-income students are concentrated at well-funded public institutions that conduct most of these countries’ research, while public universities serving lower income students are more likely to be underfunded. In contrast, research disparities play a more minor role in the private sector: private universities targeting high-income niches access more resources regardless of their research capacity. The concentration of resources in a few institutions that primarily enroll high-income students is likely to lessen the equity implications of increasing participation in higher education.
Group Differences in Income Distributions, Poverty Gaps, and Poverty Buffers: Inequalities between the Children of Swedish-Born and Migrant Parents
Siddartha Aradhya, Raffaele Grotti, Rense Nieuwenhuis
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Conventional approaches define income poverty as a binary status, implying that being poor or nonpoor is equivalent across groups. The authors propose a novel visualization that moves beyond head count rates to display group-specific income distributions relative to the poverty threshold, simultaneously illustrating poverty prevalence, poverty gaps, and what the authors term poverty buffers: the distance above the threshold capturing income security. The authors apply this approach to all children aged 0 to 18 years in Sweden in 2022, by mother’s country of birth. The visualization reveals three patterns obscured by standard indicators. First, head count poverty rates vary dramatically, from 8 percent to 77 percent across groups. Second, average poverty gaps are surprisingly similar despite vast differences in prevalence, reflecting stark stratification by parental migration background. Third, poverty buffers reveal cumulative advantage: lower poverty rates coincide with substantially greater income security. By rendering gaps, buffers, and full distributions in a single figure, this visualization exposes dimensions of inequality that no single poverty measure captures alone.