Norms are fundamental to social life, but basic questions about how they are affected by social context remain. Specifically, how do normative constraints depend on the presence and status of observers, and how do such relational contingencies vary across cultures? Using data from more than 25,000 individuals across 90 societies, we test several hypotheses linking normative constraints on everyday behaviors (like arguing, laughing, cursing, kissing, and crying), to the presence and status of observers. We find that behaviors widely viewed as appropriate in private become more constrained in the presence of others (an observer effect), and even more so when those others are higher in status (a status effect). Both observer and status effects are culturally universal, but the observer effect shows more variation across cultures. In particular, we find that observer effects are larger in societies that emphasize individualizing moral foundations, that is, avoiding harm and unfairness to others, because these societies are more permissive of actions when others are not around. The relative stability of status effects across cultural contexts suggests a universal tendency to defer in social hierarchies. These findings shed light on the relational contingency of everyday norms and underscore the role of such norms in the maintenance of social order and reproduction of inequality.
Social scientists have long studied the emergence of civic organizations through two dominant perspectives: demand-side theories arguing that these groups fill gaps left by government and market failures, and supply-side theories emphasizing resource mobilization and dependence. However, these theories insufficiently account for how contemporary nonprofits and social enterprises arise in increasingly networked, professionalized, and competitive environments. This article interrogates the relational roots of civic fields, centering the concrete ties and interactions through which new organizations are incubated, resourced, and legitimated. Using the case of a dozen new civic organizations in a developing country, I show how founders leverage interpersonal and interorganizational ties to convert social capital into intellectual, economic, human, and symbolic capital. However, this ability for capital conversion depended on actors’ positions in the field and dispositions embedded in their habitus. These processes contribute to the field’s organizational reproduction —that is, reproduction of professional practices, funding models, and state-aligned approaches mirroring founders’ shared social (dis)positions. As civic organizations play increasingly prominent roles in development and governance, understanding their relational origins helps explain whose visions of social change gain organizational form.
Prior research on managerial attainment highlights inequalities based on gender and ethnicity, but the role of social origins has been neglected. Moreover, past research on intergenerational social mobility does not focus specifically on how parents’ and children’s occupations may be linked. We develop a theoretical model of intergenerational managerial status transmission that we test using event history analysis that tracks managerial attainment (2000 to 2019) for over half a million Danish workers (born 1965 to 1975). Results reveal that children of managers are substantially more likely to become managers than the children of non-managers, and this inheritance is stronger for sons and for those with senior managerial origins. For children of lower-level managers, this is primarily related to advantages in early life (parental economic capital, educational attainment), but descendants of senior managers additionally benefit from advantages that accumulate later (career trajectories, elite social connections). Gender and seniority effects intersect to produce a particularly striking advantage for the sons of senior-managerial fathers. Much of this advantage remains unexplained after testing a large set of potential mediators, implying a considerable role for male-dominated forms of elite cultural and social capital (e.g., membership in exclusive clubs) and underscoring the limits to formal organizational approaches to equalizing outcomes at the very top of the occupational hierarchy.
Many jobs in the twenty-first century have become short-term, precarious, and unstable. To help explain this phenomenon, I consider the fragmentation of economic activity across networks of transacting organizations-a trend known to affect pay, but with unknown implications for the stability of work. I focus on a key part of this trend: the growing role of subcontracting. Combining research on the reasons for subcontracting with organizational theories of dependence and diversification, I argue that many subcontractor establishments face volatile demand and have few margins to cut costs other than labor. These factors compound to destabilize work for employees. Drawing on restricted-access French microdata, I show that employment at subcontractor establishments is substantially more unstable than elsewhere. I then trace this instability to key features of their organizational structure. Subcontractors employ a narrower range of occupations, are less profitable, and spend a greater share of their total expenses on labor than do non-subcontractors. Together, these attributes can account for almost two fifths of subcontractors' excess employment instability. Finally, I show how subcontractor establishments are less able to insulate their employees from swings in demand. Following a drop in revenue, the employees of subcontractor establishments are more likely to exit than are those of non-subcontractor establishments. These findings demand a richer view of employment instability, entailing not only the demise of conventional employment practices-the focus of much recent research-but also the function and structure of organizations.
How do citizens in authoritarian contexts interpret nationalist messages embedded in everyday life? While research shows that nationalism is reproduced through routine practices, less is known about how audiences interpret, adapt to, or contest official messages—and why. I argue that outward nationalist alignment persists not through uniform conviction, but because divergent interpretive pathways converge on surface-level conformity. This study examines China’s entertainment industry, where the state mobilizes celebrities to amplify nationalist messages. Using a two-stage mixed-methods design, I first survey internet users ( N = 2,211) to show that audiences judge celebrities’ nationalist transgressions as significantly more severe than non-political misconduct, with systematic variation across social groups. To uncover the interpretive logics behind this heterogeneity, I draw on 55 in-depth interviews, identifying four orientations shaped by individuals’ primary information repertoire and lived experiences of positioning within the national community. These orientations range from emotional affirmation to pragmatic compliance to tactical reinterpretation that enables indirect critique. By revealing how everyday encounters with celebrity culture—such as scrolling past a star’s nationalist post—normalize nationalist expectations, I demonstrate that the ideology endures even where internalization is limited. Grounded in the Chinese case, the study advances debates on cultural governance, audience reception of official messaging, and symbolic boundary-making in authoritarian settings.
Many of the social outcomes and patterns located at the very center of sociological inquiry are grounded in interaction ritual dynamics. Yet, while broadly used across subdisciplinary divides, such rituals are depicted in radically different ways. Drawing from a Durkheimian tradition, and following Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, we distinguish between what we term “rituals of face” and “rituals of effervescence”—rituals aimed at defending the self, and rituals that produce emotional entrainment. Leveraging two very different empirical research projects—patterns of ethnoracial stigmatization in Norway and an ethnography of creative songwriting sessions in Canada—we show that these two kinds of rituals are simultaneously at play. Using the first empirical case, we show how actors ritually segregate their social worlds, saving face with white audiences while often producing effervescence with minority audiences. Using the second, we show how rituals of face and of effervescence are recursively intertwined. We then argue that distinguishing these interaction ritual forms, and attending to their situational dynamics, allows us to ask new empirical questions and to develop a better understanding of the interactional structure of diverse processes: from social movement dynamics to discrimination.
What are the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In this article, I shed new light on the beginnings of Zionist colonization and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by focusing on the effect of malaria on labor competition in late-Ottoman Palestine. In doing so, I develop a bioterritorial theory of colonization; I propose that disease can profoundly shape territorialization, labor regimes, political-economic development, and intergroup conflict over labor and land. In dialogue with Du Bois's work on collectivist colonization in closed labor markets, I use this bioterritorial theory to understand early economic competition between Jews and Arabs. I show how disease shaped this competition by undermining malaria-na & iuml;ve Jewish workers, who consequently struggled to survive in the country. I propose that malaria was a highly important factor driving the Jewish workers to ally with the World Zionist Organization in pursuit of exclusivist collective settlements, thereby shifting their focus from labor to land. To develop this argument, I draw from historical data, including memoirs, newspaper articles, reports, letters, and scientific publications. The bioterritorial theory contributes to scholarship on settler colonialism, theories of disease and colonization, and explanations of colonization and conflict that focus on ideology and ethnonationalism.
This article examines how time both exacerbates and destabilizes existing inequality by stratifying agency. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in nine cancer clinics and 196 in-depth interviews with 96 patients navigating a terminal cancer diagnosis toward the end of life, we show the centrality of "temporal misalignment"-a mismatch between the temporalities enacted by individual actions and those imposed by institutional contexts structuring when and how action is possible. A combination of ethnographic data and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) reveals how effective use of resources requires cancer patients to (1) triage conflicting demands of treatment, work, family, and bureaucratic schedules; (2) reconcile mismatched trajectories of disease progression and healthcare institutions; and (3) anchor uncertain decisions at present in an anticipatable future. These efforts to manage temporal misalignment not only reproduce resource disparities, but also create new, imminent, and often embodied constraints on agency that even the most advantaged patients find resource-draining and goal-displacing as the disease progresses. Reconceptualizing time as a ruptured relationship between agency and contexts offers important sociological insights into how resources, institutions, and culture operate and intertwine to shape inequality in healthcare and beyond.
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.
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.
Do state Right to Work (RTW) laws unleash economic dynamism, or the ability for local economies to respond, thrive, and grow in changing conditions? Although the specific goals of RTW laws to limit union security agreements appear to narrowly target unionized firms, proponents and opponents alike argue that RTW laws have broad labor market consequences. Union monopoly theories suggest that unions increase labor costs and exert greater worker control over the labor process in ways that distort and dampen firm investment and growth, and hence that RTW promotes economic dynamism. Institutionalist theories counter that unions increase labor productivity and build a stronger local consumer base, and hence that RTW inhibits economic dynamism. We provide a novel test of these divergent hypotheses using 75 years of County Business Patterns data and county-border-pair fixed-effects regression models to address unobserved heterogeneity. We fail to find consistent evidence that RTW passage is associated with meaningful changes in employment or workplace establishment concentration relative to geographically proximate counties in non-RTW states that share a common border. We develop an alternative competitive labor policy mitigation perspective that highlights how policymakers respond to policies in neighboring states to help explain this null result. Consistent with our arguments, we find that non-RTW states made tax and incentive policy more attractive for employers during this period, and that tax and incentive policies have a meaningful association with local economic dynamism. This highlights tax incentives as an alternative policy lever that non-RTW states used to mitigate the competitive advantages of RTW states.
Research shows that penal state involvement facilitates a wide range of detrimental consequences, yet existing theoretical accounts tend to focus on stigma or exclusion, leaving the role of individual decision-making underspecified. To address this gap, I advance the concept of collateral decision-making: the process by which individuals, embedded in a criminal legal institution, make decisions that carry adverse consequences in another institution, whether within or beyond the criminal legal sphere. Through this process, individuals reframe how they navigate a particular institution to mitigate negative experiences generated by a criminal legal institution. I analyze in-depth interviews with 65 pretrial detainees simultaneously embedded in jails and criminal courts-two state institutions that constitute distinct structural constraints, functions, and decision-making points. The findings expose why and how the disadvantage of pretrial detention recalibrates decision-making and translates into unfavorable court outcomes, as detainees accept plea agreements to escape violence, the misery of court holding tanks, poor jail conditions, and address primary-caregiver role strain-even while maintaining their innocence. The analysis also reveals that detainees sometimes forgo the potential benefit of legal counsel, offering a compelling account of how this decision appears reasonable within the structural constraints of jail detention, yet ultimately reproduces institutional disadvantage. The findings illustrate how penal state involvement cascades across institutional boundaries, shaping individual behavior and reinforcing social disparities.
How do some families manage to entrench themselves in the upper class for many generations while others do not? Bringing together economic sociology, political sociology, and stratification, I introduce a concept for the study of multigenerational persistence at the top of a stratified society: kinship interlocks. Kinship interlocks are portions of a kinship network that closely combine great wealth, status, and power. Just as board interlocks connect corporate elites through overlapping board memberships, kinship interlocks connect economic, social, and political elites through family ties. Using a mixed-methods analysis, I find that the intimate exchange of resources in kinship interlocks generates upper-class persistence via two primary mechanisms: it protects kin from economic, legal, and social risk, and it propels kin into higher strata. Processes of kin formation and intimate exchange are co-constitutive with systems of gender, sexuality, and race, such that the most durable portions of an upper class are especially heteronormative and racially dominant. The analysis is based on a unique dataset consisting of the full upper class and all economic, political, and social elites in the first 122 years of Dallas, Texas, along with all mutual family ties.
Islamist terrorist attacks evoke negative stereotypes and symbolic threat perceptions toward men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin, yet evidence on the labor market consequences of these attacks remains inconsistent. We address this ambiguity by developing a framework that links external shocks to employment outcomes through salience shifts and managerial discretion within workplaces. Salience shifts arise when clusters of terrorist attacks-rather than isolated events-are amplified by media coverage, reinforcing or generating stereotypes and increasing the likelihood that ethnoracial categories become consequential in hiring decisions. Whether such shifts translate into exclusion depends on organizational contexts that mute or permit greater managerial discretion. We test this framework using monthly linked employer-employee data from Germany (1999 to 2019), data on terrorist attacks linked to Islamist motives, name-based measures of perceived origin, and topic-modeled newspaper coverage. Our analyses show that periods marked by multiple Islamist terrorist attacks and heightened media coverage significantly reduce the employment of men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin. These effects are strongest in workplaces with a high share of non-complex jobs and in settings lacking formal hiring procedures or worker representation, but they are muted where Middle Eastern managers are present. Together, these findings indicate when and where politicized events translate into employment disparities, highlighting the need to account for temporal and organizational contexts.
Cultural trauma refers to how past experiences of harm can fundamentally transform a community's shared identity, potentially generating feelings of solidarity and providing communities with a sense of common purpose. This article examines the role of cultural trauma in motivating and guiding ongoing efforts to preserve historic Chinatowns in Canada and the United States in the face of contemporary challenges such as gentrification. We demonstrate how activists understand themselves to be continuing a struggle against anti-Chinese racism that extends back to the nineteenth century. Explaining the contemporary salience of trauma, we conceptualize Chinatowns as "cultural reservoirs" that have accumulated physical traces of past harms. These traces serve as iconic representations of trauma: haunting reminders of the tenuous place of Chinatowns in North American cities. We identify three types of icons produced by distinct material processes: stubborn, entropic, and remedial. By identifying the importance of the physical environment in the trauma process, we reconcile a realist focus on historical events themselves with a constructivist account of their subsequent incorporation into collective memory. Cultural reservoirs do not determine how contemporary communities will remember their past, but the physical traces they preserve create experiences and situations in which trauma narratives seem intuitive and salient to contemporary communities.
Low-income households in the United States draw on public and private resources to manage economic risk. Cross-national scholars describe a "credit-welfare state tradeoff" where credit markets become particularly important when state benefits are less supportive. The United States is frequently highlighted in this regard, with its often-inadequate market-first safety net. Both credit markets and the safety net are, however, highly unequal and segmented across U.S. states. We provide new empirical insights on the credit-welfare state nexus by leveraging a large national sample of credit record data that allows us to distinguish between credit instruments. We link these data to a comprehensive dataset on state safety nets with comparable measures of program supportiveness. We estimate two-way fixed-effects models that exploit temporal variation within states in safety net supportiveness. We find that living in states with more supportive safety nets is associated with a lower probability of high-cost alternative payday, installment, and personal finance loan use, and a higher probability of mainstream credit card access, particularly among low-income households. In the context of the relative inadequacy of the U.S. safety net, state safety net supportiveness matters less for whether people borrow than for what credit instruments they use. Our findings suggest that efforts to restrict the U.S. safety net are likely to increase reliance on high-cost loans among low-income households, furthering the unequal burden of interest and fees levied on these households.
Political leaders play a potentially important role shaping behaviors and beliefs during crises. In the pandemic, a number of high-status politicians, notably leaders of populist parties, were seen to diminish compliance with institutional recommendations by casting doubt on COVID guidelines. But what happens when such leaders change position and endorse previously discouraged behaviors? Using longitudinal data from the Understanding Coronavirus in America panel with fixed-effects modeling, this article examines how Trump's unexpected endorsement of facemasks in July 2020 affected individuals' likelihood of wearing a facemask and belief in masks' efficacy. I find that Trump's pivot lifted Republicans' use of facemasks, closing 40 percent of the preexisting gap with Democrats and with stronger effects among individuals who were more exposed to the early-summer spike in COVID cases. Additionally, I provide evidence for the unique significance of this moment in the history of the pandemic, showing that at almost no other time did partisan behaviors converge as sharply. However, in contrast to expectations from most dominant theoretical models of behavioral change, especially the health belief model, no corresponding shift in beliefs about facemasks can be detected. These results have important theoretical implications for understanding how pivots can shape behaviors during crises, the validity of existing models in public health, pandemic populism's causes, and directions of future research.
This article argues that folklore (orally transmitted group knowledge) shapes far-right voting by inculcating feeling rules that resonate with nativist and autocratic ideas. Drawing on recently rediscovered archives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists, we pair a dataset of local support for the far-right in all Reichstag elections in Germany's Weimar period, with unique information on the prevalence of ethnic bogeymen in local folktales. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find a robust and considerable effect of the presence of fearful folktales on radical right voting. These effects are particularly strong for localities where citizens face political and economic threats. We use an instrumental variable analysis drawing on folklore data from the 1860s to establish the long-term roots of this pattern, disentangle the effect of folktales from contemporary political influences, and establish causal order. Our findings suggest that folklore plays a key role in aligning the supply and demand for far-right movements by shaping how citizens see and feel the world around them. In addition, we illustrate that folklore archives provide a unique opportunity to unpack affective-discursive canons across space and time.
Questions of temporality are at the heart of climate change discourse: Does one think of climate change primarily as an event happening in the present, or as something that will take place in the future? By when must we take action to prevent its worst consequences? This article presents the first large-scale assessment of the structure and evolution of temporalities expressed in U.S. media discussions on climate change (2000 to 2021). To do so, we developed a novel computational framework for detecting and interpreting temporal expressions in textual data. Our analyses yield three main findings: First, temporal horizons for climate change have continuously shrunk since 2000, stably targeting, on average, the year 2060. However, second, while anticipated effects are getting closer, horizons for the coordination of climate action have remained highly stable, averaging around 16 years into the future at any given time. Third, contrasting the stability of explicitly stated horizons, we find a sharply expanding discourse of urgency patterned by outbursts of urgency: sudden surges in calls for immediate action or warnings against climate change's devastating consequences during events like the 2020 California wildfires. By uncovering this disjuncture of different forms of temporality, we illuminate a crucial aspect of the climate change debate, contribute to the sociological theory of events, and identify some of the conditions underlying climate inaction.
Sociologists have long shown that moral beliefs are key to sustaining market arrangements. Yet surprisingly little research has examined how groups may assess the fairness of taken-for-granted market practices differently. In this article, we draw on three survey studies to examine Americans' moral beliefs about risk-based pricing, a pricing institution in which consumers who are predicted to be costly are charged more. In markets for both insurance and consumer loans, we uncover a pattern in which higher-income individuals are consistently more likely than lower-income individuals to accept the moral legitimacy of tethering prices to a person's behavior, irrespective of economic self-interest or ideology. To explain this pattern, we introduce a novel theoretical lens we term "selective empathy"-that is, in evaluating pricing arrangements, individuals disproportionately direct their empathy to one exchange partner or the other, taking the perspective of either the company or the customer. We find that wealthier individuals are more likely than lower-income individuals to empathize with companies-and less likely to empathize with high-risk consumers. These findings cast risk-based pricing as a classed form of economic rationality. Moreover, they bring attention to the role of affect in pro-capital attitudes.
