I checked 9 sociology journals on Sunday, June 21, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period June 14 to June 20, I found 5 new paper(s) in 4 journal(s).

Social Forces

Whose merit, which redistribution? Elites, taxes, and transfers in Brazil and South Africa
Livio Silva-Muller, Graziella Moraes Silva, Matias LĂłpez
Full text
Scholarship often treats two dimensions of meritocracy as interchangeable: if success is due to hard work, poverty must be due to a lack of effort. We contrast elites’ perceptions about their own success with their perceptions about the lack of success of others. We posit that these two dimensions—merit of self and merit of others—are distinct, with different implications for redistributive preferences, and varying salience across national contexts. Using data from elite surveys in Brazil and South Africa, we examine whose merit matters for giving income to policies (transfers) versus taking income from policies (taxation). We show that elites are more likely to credit their own success to hard work than to attribute poverty to lack of effort, and that these two dimensions are independent. Perceiving the poor as effortless, rather than elites as hard-working, predict opposition to transfers. In contrast, elites' perceptions of self play a context-dependent role. In Brazil, they are associated with opposition to taxation but are confounded with political identification, while in South Africa, redistributive preferences are structured primarily by racial identification. We interpret these cross-national differences considering distinct trajectories of state-building and inequality.

Social Networks

Dynamic programming for calculating the triad census
Ryan A. Cook
Full text
Introducing VINA: An engaging and ethically responsible interface to collect social network data including cognitive social structures on smartphones
Tom Nijs, Tobias H. Stark, ZsĂłfia Boda
Full text

Social Science Research

Generic title: Not a research article
Corrigendum to ‘Do sanctuary policies increase crime? Contrary evidence from a county-level investigation in the United States’ [Soc. Sci. Res. 106 (2022) 102743]
Marta Ascherio
Full text
The role of sanitary pads in school achievement in low-income settings
Anoushka Patel, William G. Axinn, Dirgha J. Ghimire
Full text

Socius

Rethinking Platform Capitalism: Mapping the Algorithmic Logics and Labor Control Models of Uber Eats and Fantuan
Tommy Wu, Junyi Zhang, Zachary Gan, Ayra Thomas
Full text
The authors examine how platform companies structure labor control in the food-delivery sector by comparing two major apps operating in the United States and Canada: Uber Eats and Fantuan. Although existing research on algorithmic management emphasizes the emergence of “algorithmic despotism”—opaque, data-driven systems that shape worker behavior through surveillance, nudges, and individualized pay schemes—there is a need to map out the variations in platform control. Drawing on a yearlong ethnography that combined app walk-throughs, participant observation, and semistructured interviews with 34 delivery workers in the greater Toronto/Hamilton area, the authors analyze the key organizational “nodes” of each platform, from onboarding and order dissemination to pay structures and worker surveillance. Our comparative analysis demonstrates that labor control under platform capitalism does not operate as a single, monolithic system. Uber Eats deploys a “dispersive-extractive” model that extracts profit through algorithmic opaqueness and performance metrics throughout the driver’s workflow. Fantuan, by contrast, operates through an “ethnocultural” model in which ethnocultural norms as well as human managerial interventions work alongside algorithmic systems to enforce hierarchy, efficiency, and compliance. By mapping these distinct regimes, the authors develop a comparative framework for understanding the variations within algorithmic management and calls for more research across ethnically diverse platform markets.