This article analyses the representation of the gig economy in three Australian newspapers from 2014 to 2019. ‘Gig work’ is defined as short term, contract or freelance employment and is seen by many social institutions as the future of work. Drawing on a corpus of 426 articles, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is used to examine the construction of the ‘gig economy’ in the cultural imaginary.

At the center of the COVID-19 pandemic lies a ubiquitous feature of medicine. Medicine is permeated with ignorance. Seizing this moment to assess the current state of medical sociology, this article articulates a sociology of medical ignorance. We join insights from earlier medical sociological scholarship on uncertainty with emerging research in the sociology of ignorance to help make sense of the

Research on biological embedding of the social environment has been expedited by increased availability of biomarkers. Recently, this arsenal of measures has been expanded to include epigenetic clocks that indicate in years the extent to which an individual is older or younger than their chronological age. These measures of biological aging, especially GrimAge, are robust predictors of both illness

In his account of the medical profession’s ascent, Paul Starr drew a distinction between the social authority of physicians and the cultural authority of medicine—between doctors’ capacity to direct others’ behavior and the ability of medical institutions and discourses to shape meanings of illness, health, wellness, and treatment. Subsequently, scholars have reflected on the social-structural transformations

Recent trends in U.S. health have been mixed, with improvements among some groups and geographic areas alongside declines among others. Medical sociologists have contributed to the understanding of those disparate trends, although important questions remain. In this article, we review trends since the 1980s in key indicators of U.S. health and weigh evidence from the last decade on their causes. To

Research on the social dimensions of health and health care among sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) has grown rapidly in the last two decades. However, a comprehensive review of the extant interdisciplinary scholarship on SGM health has yet to be written. In response, we offer a synthesis of recent scholarship. We discuss major empirical findings and theoretical implications of health care utilization

From 1940 to 1980, studies of medical education were foundational to sociology, but attention shifted away from medical training in the late 1980s. Recently, there has been a marked return to this once pivotal topic, reflecting new questions and stakes. This article traces this resurgence by reviewing recent substantive research trends and setting the agenda for future research. We summarize four current

The concept of health lifestyles is moving scholarship beyond individual health behaviors to integrated bundles of behaviors undergirded by group-based identities and norms. Health lifestyles research merges structure with agency, individual-level processes with group-level processes, and multifaceted behaviors with norms and identities, shedding light on why health behaviors persist or change and

This article discusses the growing political divide in the United States and how ideological polarization has increasingly assumed spatial dimensions, as rural areas have become strongly associated with Republican support, and urban areas have become associated with strong Democratic support. In the context of the recent Trump administration, marked not only by authoritarian tendencies, ethno-nationalism

Despite evidence of sub-standard working conditions and low rates of pay, drivers working on the Uber platform report varying levels of job-satisfaction. In order to better understand driver experience most research conducted to date differentiates driver experience by driver investment (time) on the platform. While this approach offers insight into driver motivations, it obfuscates key socio-political

This article examines the idea that basic income has transformative power. It does so by scrutinising Erik O. Wright’s theory of transformation from a feminist-Bourdieusian perspective. Rather than assuming a direct link between basic income and actors’ turning away from the capitalist labour market, this is a perspective that emphasises conditions of possibilities for practices beyond paid work and

This article uses ethnographic data to explore the relationship between a job club facilitator and a job seeker with an intellectual disability, to illuminate the gulf between employment activation and the multifaceted everyday reality experienced through employment preparation activities, at a job club established for people with intellectual disabilities who are in receipt of social care. The focus

Sociologists increasingly face choices among competing algorithms that represent reasonable approaches to the same task, with little guidance in choosing among them. We develop a strategy that uses simulated data to identify the conditions under which different methods perform well and applies what is learned from the simulations to predict which method will perform best on never-before-seen empirical

The gender gap in self-employment is one of the most resilient in labour participation. While for some, this gap is the result of women’s lack of opportunities to become self-employed, for others, it reflects women’s preference to stay in paid employment. This article investigates the motivations behind women’s decision (either from opportunity or necessity) to start a business in 17 European countries

Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We resolve this puzzle by showing the affordances of different levels of culture (i.e., genres and objects) in the expression of tastes. We rely on original

The social stratification literature is inconclusive about whether there is a direct effect of grandparent resources on grandchildren's educational outcomes net of parental characteristics. Some of this heterogeneity may be due to differences in omitted variable bias at the parental level. Our article accounts for a more extensive set of parent characteristics and explores the mediating role of parental

Predictions of node categories are commonly used to estimate homophily and other relational properties in networks. However, little is known about the validity of using predictions for this task. We show that estimating homophily in a network is a problem of predicting categories of dyads (edges) in the graph. Homophily estimates are unbiased when predictions of dyad categories are unbiased. Node-level

How does schooling affect inequality in students’ academic skills? Studies comparing children’s trajectories during summers and school years provide a provocative way of addressing this question, but the most persuasive seasonal studies (1) focus primarily on skill gaps between social categories (e.g., social class, race/ethnicity), which constitute only a small fraction of overall skill inequality

AbstractComplexity theory and systems thinking are increasingly popular in both academic and practitioner discourses to “improve” peacebuilding. Recently, they have also been considered to make peacebuilding interventions more bottom-up and less exclusive. Contributing to the debate in international political sociology on the role of (professional) knowledge in shaping interventions, I examine this

This article explores the lived experiences of disabled men and women who work in sheltered employment. Specifically, it analyses how the entanglement of sociomaterial practices affects disabled workers’ co-constructions of work and disability. Theoretically grounded in posthumanist performativity theory, the article shows how embodied employment experiences within organisational spaces contribute

Intimate partner violence in the United States is significantly associated with employment instability. Using a latent growth curve model, the current study investigates the impact of intimate partner violence on mothers’ (N=4897) employment outcomes trajectories in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study which include four waves of data collection starting when a child was born and ending about

Etherington’s Austerity, Welfare and Work provides a significant contribution to critical understandings of contemporary economic restructuring and the changing role of the state in Britain. This is achieved in a number of steps. First, Etherington designs a unique conceptual framework to demonstrate how Britain’s respective industrial relations and welfare systems are inter-related and have been re-designed

Review of Why Surgeons Struggle with Work-Hour Reforms By James E. Coverdill and John D. Mellinger Vanderbilt University Press, 2021, 224 pages https://www.vanderbilt.edu/university-press/book/9780826501059.

To ensure effectiveness in reaching organizational goals, authorities must gain legitimacy (i.e., the support and approval of their subordinates). This study uniquely brings together an identity-based approach, stressing an authority’s use of fair decision-making procedures, a resource-based approach, highlighting an authority’s use of power in a benevolent fashion, and the status of the authority

Evidence is mixed as to whether less- or more-advantaged fathers suffer penalties for taking paid family leave and the reasons for this. Perhaps selection into taking leave differs among fathers, or taking leave increases some fathers’ commitment to family over paid work, or taking it sends a negative signal to employers about future work-family priorities. We contribute to the literature by distinguishing

Social capital is widely cited as benefiting children’s school performance, but close inspection of existing research yields inconsistent findings. Focusing on intergenerational closure among parents of children in the same school, this article draws from a field experiment to test the effects of social capital on children’s achievement in reading and mathematics. When children were in first grade

HeadworthSpencerUniversity of Chicago Press, 2021, 272 pages.

Our concern in this contribution is to ask what the special features of populism in Hungary are, where government and the largest opposition party can be considered populist. The study aims at analyzing motivations, interests, benefits, and profits of populism in fragile Hungarian regions. The main part examines three peculiar features of state populism: the rural support for stabile political and

This study examines how workplace technological innovation is associated with individual-level employment turnover. We advance the literature by studying how the impact of technology differs for Dutch native workers and workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. Furthermore, we examine the disparate impacts of organizational context, as indexed by the proportion of workers with non-Western immigrant

We ask whether patterns of racial ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in educational attainment are amplified or attenuated when we take a longer view of educational careers. We propose a model of staged advantage to understand how educational inequalities evolve over the life course. Distinct from cumulative advantage, staged advantage asserts that inequalities in education ebb and flow over the

Review of “The Sociology of Children’s Rights” By Brian Gran Polity Press, 2021, 259 pages. https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509527847&subject_id=2

KinderKimberlyUniversity of Minnesota Press2021, 360 pages. https://www.upress.umn.edu/Plone/book-division/books/the-radical-bookstore

This article explores the underexamined role of personal enablers in migrant entrepreneurship. Drawing on timeline interviews, the study relays the importance of entrepreneur enablers in migrants’ business endeavours over time, ranging from coincidental and ephemeral encounters to the development of supportive communities. In the absence of accessible business support structures, the role of chance

Despite the extensive literature on the labour market outcomes of migration, little attention has been given to labour market inequalities within ethnic economies containing internal ethnicity. This article, using a field-study, multi-segmented labour market approach and the enclave hypothesis, contributes to the literature by demonstrating the key roles of different migration patterns and ethnic disparities

The robustness of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) results features high on the agenda of methodologists and practitioners. This article aims at advancing this debate on several fronts. First, in line with the extant literature, we take a comprehensive view on robustness arguing that decisions on calibration, consistency, and frequency thresholds should all be tested. Second, we introduce the

Review of “Calculating Race: Racial Discrimination in Risk Assessment” By Benjamin Wiggins Oxford University Press, 2020, 160, pages. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/calculating-race-9780197504000?cc=us&lang=en&

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, people living in cities were much more likely than rural residents to become infected with and die from the virus. Beginning in the summer of 2020, however, the proportional increase in virus spread became much greater in rural areas. By March 2021, per capita cases and deaths were greater in nonmetro than in metro areas. Multi-variate regression analysis found that

This article presents Khongelani Hlungwani’s experiences of working as a labour broker worker and his struggle to become a permanent worker in Gauteng, South Africa. His account provides a lens through which to understand the shopfloor divisions between permanent and labour broker workers. These divisions are, as Hlungwani’s account demonstrates, compounded by a trade union movement that largely sidelines

American youth from rural backgrounds have made great strides to overcome challenges in college enrollment and completion since the 2000s. Yet little is known about how rural youth are financing these attainment increases—a pressing question in light of high college costs, rising student debt, and spatial inequality in the resources that students have to pay for college. This paper examines disparities

The present study conceptualizes earnings inequality between black and white men as a three-stage dynamic process: the pre-market human capital acquisition, the labor-market entry, and the longitudinal career progression. Based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this framework is put to an empirical test that leads to two major conclusions. First, overall patterns of black-white earnings

A new body of sociological research is finding that northern and rural youth, and in particular, low-SES youth, face difficulties accessing higher levels of postsecondary education and lucrative fields of study such as the STEMs. However, existing research has yet to systematically measure the skills proficiencies of youth in these regions nor have we understood the factors which might account for

When this paper was first published, figure 1 was missing the note ``Note: A similar background pattern indicates that actors are, based on the most common coresidence arrangements and kinkeeping mechanisms, likely to share a household. A similar shape indicates that actors belong to the same nuclear family (two partners and their biological child(ren)).'' This has now been corrected online.

The conditions for intra-European labour mobility have changed significantly during recent decades, mainly due to the European Single Market. Despite this, internationally mobile and highly skilled intra-EU migrants from West to West have not received enough attention in the sociology of work. The present article focuses on highly skilled labour migrants with a university degree from Sweden, currently

It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the social sciences in informing us of deepening inequalities at work and how they are likely to play out as the economic crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds. Understanding the long-term impact of the pandemic requires us to think across the intersection of work and society. This is challenging work as part of taking an intersectional position

This feminist analysis focuses on sexual harassment within a specific category of jobs known as display work, where primarily women’s bodies are commodified and sold to consumers, and often through the conduits of powerful male industry leaders. Using qualitative content analysis methods to analyze 88 subjective, first-person narratives of harassment from 70 models working within the fashion business

As sexting has become more common, so has the sharing of nude and semi-nude images of others. While women and men may both engage in this practice, when they do so they often participate in distinct gendered rituals. Drawing on 55 in-depth interviews with college students, I examine how the symbolic meanings attached to men and women’s nude images in the context of intimate heterosexual interactions

The ways in which partners manage their money provide important clues to gender inequality in and the nature of couple relationships. Analyzing data from nationally representative surveys (N = 11,730 couples), I examine changes across British cohorts born between the 1920s and 1990s in their household financial management, and how the changes vary across individuals and couples occupying differential

Despite the growing population of youth identifying with a transgender or nonbinary gender identity, research on gender-diverse individuals’ educational outcomes is limited. This study takes advantage of the first nationally representative, population-based data set that includes measures of gender identity and educational outcomes: the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Using minority stress

This study is the first to explicitly assess the connections between welfare state spending and the gendered and classed dimensions of unpaid care work across 29 European nations. Our research uses multi-level model analysis of European Quality of Life Survey data, examining childcare and housework burdens for people living with at least one child under the age of 18. Two key findings emerge: First

Students with aligned educational and occupational expectations have improved college and labor market outcomes. Despite extensive knowledge about the ways social background and school context contribute to educational expectations, less is known about the role of social intuitions in shaping expectational alignment. Drawing on data from the 2009 High School Longitudinal Study, I estimate the magnitude

When the welfare state is under attack from neoliberal reformers, how can trade unionists and other campaigners build solidarity to defend it? Based on 45 qualitative interviews, this article compares campaigns to defend British health services and social security benefits between 2007 and 2016. Building on the macro-insights of comparative welfare-state literature and the more micro-level insights

This study compares the labour market trajectories of the temporary employed in Norway with those in Sweden. Sweden’s employment protection legislation gap between the strict protection of permanent employment and the loose regulation of temporary employment has widened in recent decades, while Norway has maintained balanced and strict regulation of both employment types. The study asserts that the

In this article, I present a new multivariate regression model for analyzing outcomes with network dependence. The model is capable to account for two types of outcome dependence including the mean dependence that allows the outcome to depend on selected features of a known dependence network and the error dependence that allows the outcome to be additionally correlated based on patterned connections

Review of “Are We the 99%? The Occupy Movement, Feminism, and Intersectionality” By Heather Hurwitz, Temple University Press. 2020, 208 pages. http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000010062

Review of “Amateurs Without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion” By Allison Schnable University of California Press, 2021, 262 pages. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300958/amateurs-without-borders

Review of “Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town” By Colin Jerolmack Princeton University Press: 2021, 336 pages. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179032/up-to-heaven-and-down-to-hell

Review of “The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary” Gábor Scheiring Palgrave Macmillan. 2020, 394 pages. ISBN-13: 9783030487515. https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030487515

The social autopsy takes the death of a set of individuals as its starting point and then critically and systematically examines social and political conditions to explain these deaths and generate awareness and policy change. After distinguishing the social autopsy from other means to explain excess and premature deaths, we delineate three core methodological principles of the social autopsy: social

Riegle-Crumb, Catherine, and Menglu Peng. “Examining High School Students’ Gendered Beliefs about Math: Predictors and Implications for Choice of STEM College Majors.”Sociology of Education 94(3):227–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407211014777

Review of “Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels” Pamela J. Prickett University of Chicago Press. 2021, 192 Pages. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo68656607.html