I checked 9 sociology journals on Thursday, April 23, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period April 16 to April 22, I found 24 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

American Journal of Sociology

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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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.
The Making of Meritocratic Status Orders
Fabien Accominotti, Michael Sauder
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This article surveys a growing body of work examining the concrete consequences of implementing meritocracy in social life. To date, this work remains compartmentalized into the separate subfields of cultural sociology, economic sociology, organizational science, and the sociology of education and stratification. We bring these literatures together by arguing that they describe the consequences of constructing merit-based status orders, or merit orders. Merit orders are status hierarchies—sets of relations of value superiority, equality, or inferiority people perceive among others—based on assessments of others’ merit, achievement, or performance. We explore the nature of merit orders, argue that they exist as cultural objects and cultural schemas, and explain how they can be studied for their shape and for their sharedness. Most importantly, we show that a focus on merit orders enriches our understanding of how meritocracy enters social stratification processes. Meritocracy, this approach highlights, shapes stratification not only by sorting individuals into unequal social positions, but also by creating merit orders that have stratifying effects of their own. In particular, the making of merit orders has a tendency to moralize inequality by framing disparities in social advantage as differences in individual merit, it teaches observers to perceive quality differences among social actors in hierarchical terms that undermine egalitarian beliefs, and it can directly exacerbate inequality in merit-based rewards when the architecture of merit orders is more hierarchy-like.
Cross-Border Intimate Mobilities Between the Global South and North: Resetting the Research Agenda Beyond Marriage Migration
Paul Statham, Sirijit Sunanta
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Three decades ago, influential marriage migration perspectives emerged that importantly transformed the agenda for studies on how women from the Global South experience intimate relations with men from the wealthier North. Applying feminist gender perspectives, this field centered on a woman's subjective lived experiences of her asymmetrical, unequal union with a foreign man, focusing on reproductive labor and questions of hypergamy. It remains the dominant analytic lens, but we advocate a rethink. First, we argue for extending the marriage migration frame to cross-border intimate mobilities, so that it includes a fuller range of this type of gendered, sexualized, and unequal intimate social relationship. Second, it is necessary to account for the important contextual backstory—opportunity structures—that facilitates the evolution of significant pathways for intimate mobilities between specific Southern and Northern places over time. We demonstrate by reference to Thailand, one of the largest sources and locations for cross-border intimate mobilities.
Legacies of Racialized Social Control
David Cunningham
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Research on legacies of racialized control recognizes and examines how historical violence continues to exert effects on contemporary inequalities. Focused predominantly on histories of enslavement and lynching in the US South, studies have demonstrated the continuing hold of these institutions on a wide range of racialized outcomes, including income inequality and poverty, violent crime, incarceration and other criminal legal consequences, political polarization, residential segregation, and educational and health disparities. Over the past two decades, the literature has matured significantly, evolving from studies demonstrating these durable temporal connections to more recent robust attention to a unified theoretical framework and the mechanisms that enable legacy effects to persist over long time periods. This review emphasizes recent refinements associated with parsing sources of persistent inequalities, accounting for interrelationships among modes of control, and identifying factors that interrupt as well as produce durable legacy effects. It concludes with recommendations to more directly engage the systemic nature of racialized control, take fuller advantage of leverage provided by expanding methodological foci, and thicken connections to parallel work in cognate fields.

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.
The selectiveness of inclusiveness: exploring the influence of traditional religious visage on contemporary cultural tastes
Wen Ma, Ying Li, Yunsong Chen
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A substantial body of literature examines the cultural strength of religion, yet there is a scarcity of work exploring how religion exerts an impact on the broader population of a secular society. Focusing on contemporary China, this study examines the relationship between religious visage, measured by the cumulative presence of Buddhist and Taoist temples, and cultural inclusiveness, captured by cultural taste entropy constructed from 749,545,472 search indices related to 38,312 song titles. Panel analyses reveal contrasting effects: Buddhist visages are associated with more selective cultural patterns, whereas Taoist visages are linked to greater diversity in cultural tastes. This demonstrates that despite world religions’ doctrinal emphasis on inclusiveness, an inherent selectiveness can still impact cultural practices in secular lives through the broader cultural environment. By shifting attention from individual religiosity to the spatial presence of religion, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between religions and contemporary cultural practices in secular contexts.
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

An intersectoral structural network intervention to expand social care in-and-with community: Key mechanisms of an intersectoral dementia community investment initiative
Melissa Park, Keven Lee, Sarah Piombo, Marie Christine Le Bourdais, Seiyan Yang, Arnaud Francioni, Thomas W. Valente
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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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Social influences in network and households’ e-commerce entrepreneurship in rural China
Tianyu Qiao, Zeqi Qiu
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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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Removal notice to “Social welfare expansion and political support during economic slowdown: A panel data analysis of China, 2010–2018” [Soc. Sci. Res. 125 (2025) 103112]
Xue Li, Bingdao Zheng
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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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Socius

The “Most Familiar Stranger”: Chinese Perceptions of the Contemporary Japanese Ethnoracial Hierarchy
Xiaorui Zhang
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Since the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, anti-Asian racism has garnered scholarly attention worldwide. However, this literature focuses primarily on Asian panethnic frameworks in the North American context and obscures the significance of Sinophobia as a distinct facet of global anti-Asian racism across different societies. This oversight is consequential in Japan, where Chinese immigrants constitute the largest immigrant group and are increasingly characterized as highly skilled. Drawing on 54 in-depth interviews with first-, 1.5th-, and second-generation Chinese immigrants in Japan, the author examines their experiences with Sinophobia by investigating how they interpret their position within the Japanese ethnoracial hierarchy vis-à-vis other immigrant groups. Using a relational ethnoracialization framework, the findings highlight that Chinese immigrants found themselves caught in a paradoxical social location. Although many achieve socioeconomic mobility, Japan’s colonial legacy and its geopolitical conflicts with China create distinct marginalization patterns that persistently ethnoracialize them as culturally incompatible, perpetual outsiders lacking “proper” social manners. Consequently, Chinese immigrants believed that they were ranked along multiple social dimensions: ethnoracially subordinate to Whites yet above Southeast Asians along the axis of socioeconomic status. This research contributes to our understanding of ethnoracialization experiences beyond Western contexts and has implications for how Sinophobia complicates social boundaries within East Asian societies.
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.
Are There Service Work-Games of Resistance? “Work-Play” and Relational Resistance in Dance Club Waitstaff Work
Matthew Ming-tak Chew
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This study tackles an important yet marginalized question in the sociology of work: Are there service work-games of resistance? Sociologists kept trying to find them but had little success. Current studies only find service work-games of consent. Building on Lopez’s idea of “successful social interactions” (SSIs), this study searches for service work-games of resistance. The author finds that worker-customer relations resembling SSIs are already reported in some studies, though it remains unclear whether these SSIs are recurrent enough to qualify as work-games and how much they contribute to resistance. Then, the author coins the term work-play to demarcate between ludic informal work routines that resemble play (i.e., work-plays) and those that resemble games (i.e., work-games). After that, the author explains why work-plays have better resistance potential than work-games and why SSIs likely constitute work-plays instead of work-games. On the basis of the qualitative analysis of waitstaff work in a dance club in Beijing, the author found four recurrent SSIs that constitute work-plays and elaborates how these work-plays operated as relational resistance and triggered conventional resistance. These findings confirm the existence of service work-plays of resistance. This study’s data were collected through 19 months of participant observation at a club and interviews with 57 informants.
The Changing Distribution of U.S. Asian Populations across Urban and Suburban Ethnic Neighborhoods
Samuel H. Kye, Zhongze Wei
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Although prior scholarship has highlighted the challenge that suburban ethnic communities pose to traditional theories of assimilation, less attention has been given to how many Asian residents these neighborhoods capture relative to traditional urban enclaves. Without understanding this demographic reach, it is difficult to assess whether suburban concentration represents a modest extension of enclave settlement or a more substantial reorganization of Asian residential patterns. This data visualization addresses that gap by examining trends from 1990 to 2020 in the distribution of Asian populations across urban and suburban ethnic neighborhoods in the 50 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest Asian populations. Although urban ethnic neighborhood shares remain substantial, suburban shares have increased sharply. By 2020, nearly one in six Asians in these metropolitan areas resided in suburban ethnic neighborhoods, and in 16 of 50 metropolitan areas suburban shares exceeded their urban counterparts, compared with just 2 in 1990. These findings show that concentrated Asian settlement is no longer anchored primarily in the urban core but is increasingly distributed across both urban and suburban space, reflecting a broader reorganization of ethnic settlement across metropolitan areas.