Over the last three decades, fruitful new lines of research and theorizing have revealed the inadequacy of secularization and rational choice explanations of religion. This article argues that sociological understandings of religion can best advance now by building on the empirical findings that have emerged under the banner of “lived religion,” but grounding that work in theories of social practice

The concept of values is currently enjoying renewed interest in sociology; indeed, many claim that it must be treated as central to any theory of action. As introduced to American sociology from Europe by Parsons, it was transformed from a condition of possibility into an intrinsic element of the action system that could link abstract cultural imperatives to patterns of concrete behavior. When Parsons’s

In popular accounts, stories of environmental refugees convey a bleak picture of the impacts of climate change on migration. Scholarly research is less conclusive, with studies finding varying effects. This article uses an agent-based model (ABM) of land use, social networks, and household dynamics to examine how extreme floods and droughts affect migration in Northeast Thailand. The ABM explicitly

Much literature on peer influence has relied on central tendency–based approaches to examine the role of peer groups. This article develops a distributional framework that (1) differentiates between the influence of depressive peers and that of a majority group of nondepressive peers; and (2) considers the multilayered nature of peer environments. The authors investigate which segments of the distribution

The classic urban ecological paradigm envisioned the articulation of the social organization of neighborhoods with that of the city as a whole. This article offers novel empirical evidence in support of this proposition. We analyze the microrelations of governance across two key urban domains, politics and nonprofit organizations, and identify the district-based politician as a key actor linking neighborhood-based

It is known that greater social cohesion increases a group’s ability to enforce cooperation. Despite this, defectors often go unpunished, and groups with social structures that are a priori favorable often fail. A critical distinction is required between the structural effect on ability versus willingness to punish. The authors develop a theoretical framework in which variation in a group’s social

Previous research has described the criminal justice system as a “labor market institution.” In recent years, however, research on the relationship between the criminal justice system and the labor market has focused primarily on the negative impact of criminal justice involvement on an individual’s ability to find work postrelease. This article explores how workers’ exposure to the criminal justice

In the early 20th century, police departments across America’s cities enhanced their infrastructural power by adopting various tactical, operational, and organizational innovations. Based upon a nested cross-city analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including a negative binomial regression analysis of the determinants of militarization, this study reveals that these innovations constituted

Drawing on an original data set of over 15,000 in-text citations, we use quantitative and qualitative techniques to analyze 37 award-winning publications in historical sociology between 1995 and 2015. We show that historical sociology comprises no fewer than four distinct analytic architectures that rely on different kinds of sources and use evidence and theory in different ways. We find suggestive

How do right to work laws affect the distribution of economic resources? While sociological theories would predict inequality to increase following their passage, previous research finds these laws to be largely inconsequential. The author compiles a unique data set of 77 years of income and wage inequality data from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. census, the U.S. Union Sourcebook, and the

Many social commentators posit that children’s social skills are declining as a result of exposure to technology. But this claim is difficult to assess empirically because it is challenging to measure “social skills” with confidence and because a strong test would employ nationally representative data of multiple cohorts. No scholarship currently meets these criteria. The authors fill that gap by comparing

Widespread reliance on credit increasingly defines realities of economic citizenship in American society. This article theorizes the racial politics of credit expansion. It examines the federal initiative in the 1960s and ’70s to broaden financial access for poor renters in communities of color, which unintentionally sparked the rise of new state-level credit agencies. Drawing on historical evidence

How do parents weigh police presence and police activity in their assessments of a neighborhood’s suitability for raising children? How do place-bound institutions relate to neighborhood frames? This article introduces located institutions as a way of articulating how certain institutions—here, the police—become a lens through which parents make meaning of places and thus express preferences for particular

Social networks affect individuals’ ability to solve conflicts between individual and collective interests. Indeed, the ability to seek out cooperative others is a key explanation for the high levels of cooperation observed in social life. In contrast to existing research on cooperation and networks, sorting in the real world is typically driven by homophily, or similarity on socially significant attributes

Focusing on police chiefs in three states, this study revisits the Weberian presumption of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. Seventy-nine interviews with police chiefs in Arizona, Michigan, and California allow for an examination of their understanding of gun policy. Analysis reveals that they selectively embrace two frames of the state’s relationship with legitimate violence: gun militarism

Colorism research often suffers from endogeneity issues related to human capital outcomes and researchers’ inability to compare the effects of skin tone to those of racial classification. Furthermore, colorism research focuses on intraracial differences in skin tone inequality while insufficiently considering skin tone inequality across racial groups. Using data from video broadcasts of the National

Whereas research has demonstrated how social cues appearing as disinterested social validation can skew valuation processes, interested promotion may be at least as important. This factor is examined here via the premature death of 720 elite life scientists. Especially when scientists are young and their articles have received little attention, their deaths stimulate a long-lasting, positive increase

This article draws on 11 months of multisite ethnographic fieldwork and 103 interviews to investigate how teachers in school faculty of varying racial compositions form and use their social ties to secure professional, political, and emotional resources at work. Findings show that, in general, white teachers in the numerical minority in their schools secured all resource types through their same-race

How courts make decisions during national emergencies has been a key focus of legal scholarship, yet we know comparatively little about how courts respond to national crises in one of their core functions—criminal sentencing. This article addresses this gap by leveraging the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to examine the punishment of foreign nationals before and after a national emergency

This study advances understanding of gender pay gaps by examining organizational variation. The gender pay gap literature supplies mechanisms but does not attend to organizational variation; the gender and science literature provides insights on the role of masculinist culture in disciplines but misses pay gap mechanisms. A data set of federal workers allows comparison of men and women in the same

This article examines the structural conditions that shape ethnic boundary making in the school setting. While previous work has focused on the ethnic composition of student bodies, this study places schools in their institutional and local contexts. The authors argue that the formation of identities and networks varies across local areas depending on the extent of ethnic stratification across schools

This article examines how exposure to violent crime events affects employers’ decisions to hire black job applicants with and without a criminal record. Results of a quasi-experimental research design drawing on a correspondence study of 368 job applications submitted to 184 hiring establishments in Oakland, California, and archival data of 5,226 crime events indicate that callback rates were 11 percentage

Book Review: Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq: Sierra Leonean Labor Migrants at U.S. Military Bases. By Kevin J. A. Thomas. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2017. Pp. viii­­­­­+243. $110.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper)

This article uses the reading patterns of New York’s earliest elites—including a significant number of the founding fathers—who checked out books from the New York Society Library (NYSL), to evaluate the shifting meaning of political affiliation in the years between the ratification of the Constitution and the War of 1812. The reading data come from two charging ledgers spanning two periods (1789–92

Highly educated women’s likelihood of combining childrearing with continuous employment over the life course has increased among recent U.S. cohorts. This trend is less evident in many postindustrial countries characterized by very low fertility. Among such countries, Japan and Korea have exceptionally low proportions of women who remain employed after having children, despite aggressive government

Between 1915 and 1970, millions of black and white southerners migrated north in search of better lives for themselves and their children. Using novel, longitudinally linked 1940 and 2000 census data, we investigate whether this mass migration corresponded to improved neighborhood attainment outcomes for the black and white children of Great Migration migrants in their adulthood. We find that black

The authors propose and test the concept of categorical manipulation, a process in which subordinate group demands for greater access to high-status categories are met with reversals in the hierarchy of existing categories. The analysis addresses a school district’s response to pressure from a racial desegregation movement to improve black access to a high-status majority-white disability category

Recent scholarship expresses concerns that U.S. corporations are too focused on short-term performance, undermining their long-term competitiveness. The authors examine how short-term strategies and performance, or short-termism, results from the dissolution of the American corporate elite network. They argue that the corporate board interlock network traditionally served as a collective resource that

Across a wide variety of topics and methodological approaches, researchers find that meaning is segregated along sociodemographic lines. Using real-world data, this article evaluates and helps reconcile the often-theorized but rarely tested mechanisms that segregate meaning. Shared meaning is defined as both greater agreement on a cultural object’s interpretive dimensions and a similar schema organizing

Since the 1980s, neoliberal policies have been diffused around the world by international institutions established to support a very different world order. This article examines the repurposing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become the world’s leading promoter of free markets. Social scientists commonly point to two modes of global-level institutional change: formal and fundamental transformations

The retrenchment of court-ordered school desegregation has been more variable and incomplete than often acknowledged, challenging common accounts that blame changes in federal policy and legal precedent. This study supplements these accounts by examining local factors that influenced whether and when desegregation orders were dismissed between 1970 and 2013. After accounting for federal policy changes

Social influence may lead individuals to choose what is popular over what is best. Whenever this happens, it further increases the popularity advantage of the inferior choice, compelling subsequent decision makers to follow suit. The author argues that despite this positive feedback effect, discordances between popularity and quality will usually self-correct. Reanalyzing past experimental studies

The fascination for scientific misconduct is as old as science itself, however, the sociology of science has only scratched the surface of the phenomenon. Some historical examples can illustrate the multiple ways in which science and misconduct are implicated: As a practical epistemical problem, the founders of the Royal Society were highly interested in who can be trusted as a reliable truth-teller

A large literature examines the global diffusion of institutions and policies, yet there is much less systematic research on how cultural tastes, consumption preferences, and other individual interests spread across the globe. With a data set that tracks the most popular Google search terms in 199 countries between 2004 and 2014, and drawing on Gabriel de Tarde, this article introduces a theoretical

A multiple causes perspective contends that economic development and poor health contributed to early 20th-century southern race-related differences in fertility. The authors link the 1910 IPUMS to the 1916 Plantation Census (1909 data), southern disease (malaria and hookworm), and sanitation indicators to examine fertility differentials, while accounting for child mortality (an endogenous demographic

Women have become increasingly economically self-reliant, depending more on paid employment for their positions in the income distribution than in the past. We know little about what happened to men, however, because most prior research restricts changes in self-reliance to be “zero-sum,” with women’s changes necessitating opposite and proportionate changes among men. This article introduces a measure

Using time-varying, prospectively measured income in a nationally representative sample of baby-boomer men (the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979), the authors identify eight group-based trajectories of income between ages 25 and 49 and use multinomial treatment models to describe the associations between group-based income trajectories and mental and physical health at midlife. The authors

This article examines tenant exploitation and landlord profit margins within residential rental markets. Defining exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of a property, the authors find exploitation of tenants to be highest in poor neighborhoods. Landlords in poor neighborhoods also extract higher profits from housing units. Property values and tax burdens are considerably lower

Studies of secrecy argue that criminal conspiracies are discovered when they fail to control the leakage of incriminating information. Yet, corporate crimes often remain secret even after crucial information has become public. To explain such cases, this article shifts attention from secret keepers to their audiences and proposes a relational theory of complex secrets, whose discovery requires finding

Scholars who study immigrant economic progress often point to the success of Southern and Eastern Europeans who entered the United States in the early 20th century and draw inferences about whether today’s immigrants will follow a similar trajectory. However, little is known about the mechanisms that allowed for European upward advancement. This article begins to fill this gap by analyzing how naturalization

The authors estimate racial/ethnic achievement gaps in several hundred metropolitan areas and several thousand school districts in the United States using the results of roughly 200 million standardized math and English language arts (ELA) tests administered to public school students from 2009 to 2013. They show that achievement gaps vary substantially, ranging from nearly zero in some places to larger

Why do societies today distribute political power more equally than before? Most scholars believe that this transition is explained by the rise of capitalism but have long disagreed about why it mattered. The author argues that dominant models fail to capture why capitalist development helps key actors win what they seek. Drawing on comparative and historical work, the author introduces a model of

Despite modernity’s love affair with rationality and the precision that supports it, ambiguity persists not only in humor and politics but in all areas of contemporary life including scholarship and science. Here the authors explore how knowledge cultures differ in their precision of expression and the consequences of ambiguity for those cultures. They develop, estimate, and validate a model of ambiguous

Demographic and ecological theories yield mixed evidence as to whether ethnic enclaves are a benefit or a hindrance to the status attainment of residents and entrepreneurs. This article provides one possible theoretical resolution by separating the positive effects that may emanate among co-ethnic neighbors from the negative effects that may result with the concentration of racial or ethnic groups

Trust creates vulnerability to exploitation. This article approaches this paradox by comparing the exploitability of categorical trust within social groups to the deterrent effect of categorical distrust between rival groups. The empirical setting is a 2008 stockbrokerage fraud perpetrated on an ethnically diverse population of investors in Kenya’s Nairobi Securities Exchange. As expected, investors

The authors propose and test a novel theory of how decisions not to hire reproduce gender segregation through what they term proportional prejudice. They hypothesize that employers are less likely to hire anyone from an applicant pool that contains a large proportion of gender-atypical applicants—that is, those whose gender does not match the occupation stereotype—as this leads employers to form negative

Who identifies as a world citizen? Many scholars argue that transnational connections are the primary conduits for global cultural diffusion and, therefore, that affluent residents of the densely connected global core should be the most likely to identify with global society. However, empirical studies have shown that global identification is common on the global periphery. The authors build on theories

In Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner develops a processual model for how multivocal narrative history and time can emerge from conversation among heterogeneous subjective voices, both living and dead. Four social processes of memory assembly are involved: individual memories, changing perspectives, symmetry, and resonance. Iterated stories about characters in the past construct layered identities

Environmental justice and social movements scholarship demonstrates how not-in-my-backyard activism by more privileged communities leaves the disadvantaged with “locally unwanted land uses.” Yet it overlooks instances of local support for risky industries. Our ethnographic case shows how a rural, white, mixed-income Pennsylvania community adopted a please-in-my-backyard stance toward shale gas extraction

The unequal spatial distribution of crime is an enduring feature of cities. While research suggests that spatial diffusion processes heighten this concentration, the actual mechanisms of diffusion are not well understood as research rarely measures the ways in which people, groups, and behaviors connect neighborhoods. This study considers how a particular behavior, criminal co-offending, creates direct

In 1868, the state of Georgia began punishing convicts by leasing them to private companies. Georgia’s transition from penitentiary confinement to convict leasing coincided with a shift in the composition of its inmates. Fifteen years after the Civil War, African-Americans in Georgia were imprisoned at a rate more than 12 times that of whites. This article finds that black men were most likely to be

This article argues that local minority groups are better able to initiate and sustain underground movements because members form isolated hubs of commitment that are able to overcome the clandestine collective action dilemma, that is, the dual challenge of secrecy and mobilization. The author substantiates this claim with a case study of resistance against the Holocaust. He combines a unique and underutilized

With evidence comprising three years of ethnographic research in child support courts and 125 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers, the author shows how criminal justice and child support provisions work in tandem to create complicated entanglements for fathers. She develops the concept of incarcerated fatherhood—a matrix of laws, policies, and institutional practices that shape formerly

The rapid growth of genetic ancestry testing has brought concerns that these tests will transform consumers’ racial and ethnic identities, producing “geneticized” identities determined by genetic knowledge. Drawing on 100 qualitative interviews with white, black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, and Native Americans, the authors develop the genetic options theory to account for how genetic ancestry tests influence

Seventeenth-century England was the site of a profound transformation of early economic thought on both qualitative and quantitative dimensions. The authors show that the proliferation of the chartered company in a context of low state representation of merchants played an important role in this shift. They outline the mechanisms through which chartered companies affected publication rates and provide

Recent trends in income segregation in metropolitan regions show that, after a decline in the 1990s, there was an increase in 2000–2010 that reinforced concerns about the overall growth in U.S. income inequality since the 1970s. Yet the evidence may be systematically biased to exacerbate the upward trend because the effective sample for the American Community Survey (ACS) is much smaller than it was

Because of racially disproportionate imprisonment rates, the literature on mass incarceration has focused on the labor market consequence of imprisonment and the implications of those effects for racial inequality. Yet, the effects of imprisonment itself, as distinct from conviction, are not well understood. The authors leverage a natural experiment based on the random assignment of judges to felony

This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially

Few books can claim to address a social problem involving billions of dollars withmillions of lives hanging in the balance, but Swidler andWatkins’s AFraught Embrace does just that. Dissecting the role of foreign altruists and local brokers in aid efforts to stem the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa generally, and Malawi more specifically, this book makes a compelling sociological contribution

Drawing on interviews with 194 market participants (including 54 practitioners of high-frequency trading or HFT), this article first identifies the main classes of “signals” (patterns of data) that influence how HFT algorithms buy and sell shares and interact with each other. Second, it investigates historically the processes that have led to three of the most important categories of these signals