Few sociologists have influenced as many areas of inquiry as Paul DiMaggio. Across organizational sociology, culture and cognition, economic sociology, networks, inequality, political sociology, and methodology, his work has repeatedly reshaped research agendas. Just as importantly, generations of scholars have carried those ideas forward, extending them into new domains and developing them in unexpected directions.This issue brings together papers by Paul’s former students to celebrate both his scholarly contributions and his lasting legacy as a mentor. When we began organizing the volume, we contacted former students without regard to specialty area, method, or seniority. The response was immediate and overwhelmingly enthusiastic. People were eager to participate and quickly committed to the project. Had time permitted, the volume could easily have been twice as large. The collection includes work in the domains of organizational sociology; economic sociology; networks, diffusion, and inequality; culture and cognition; and political sociology. While, remarkably, Paul has contributed to even more areas than this, such a list is already incredibly impressive in its breadth. Using his own concepts, we could say that Paul is an institutional entrepreneur who reshaped many academic organizational fields. A common thread running through much of Paul’s work is the conviction that theoretical and methodological innovation are inseparable. He coined the term “theorodology” to express the idea that behind every difficult theoretical problem lies a methodological challenge, and behind many methodological innovations lies an effort to answer an important theoretical question. This perspective appears repeatedly throughout the volume. The contributors employ a striking range of methods, but they share a commitment to using those methods in the service of substantive sociological questions rather than treating methodology as an end in itself.
DiMaggio and Powell’s “The Iron Cage Revisited” is one of the most influential articles in the history of sociology. This article examines its place amongst other citation classics in the field over almost a century. Taking a cohort-based approach, I identify the 10 most influential articles published in each decade from the 1930s to the 2010s. I show that “The Iron Cage Revisited” marks an inflection point in the discipline’s expansion and consolidation. It is the high-water mark of a particular sort of article: a theory article published in one of the discipline’s two leading generalist journals. And it marks the beginning of a long and still-continuing decoupling of the most influential work from the highest-prestige journals. I suggest the reasons for this shift are to be found in how the structural and demographic expansion of American higher education in the post-World War II period was processed within the discipline, in ways consistent with the arguments laid out in DiMaggio and Powell.
Symbolic boundaries are central to much of Paul DiMaggio’s work on culture and inequality. Who is seen as part of one’s community and who is seen as outside of it has important implications for how individuals develop opinions about who belongs in the nation. Understanding these patterns is perhaps more critical than ever, as communities endure a second Trump administration bent on demonizing immigrants, pursuing mass deportation, and severely curtailing immigrant rights. This article examines these issues by exploring Latino and Asian American attitudes toward current immigration enforcement strategies. Drawing on a survey of registered voters in California, we ask: who supports strategies that target and deport immigrants, and what factors predict variation in these attitudes? We find that both groups show similarly low levels of enforcement support overall, and that across both groups, the belief that enforcement unfairly targets Latinos is associated with lower support, while conservative ideology is associated with higher support. Within groups, however, the sources of opinion variation differ systematically. Among Latino respondents, we find a strong and consistent gender gap across multiple political dimensions, whereas among Asian Americans, attitudes are structured by education level and ethnic origin. Overall, these patterns reveal that the boundaries of exclusion run not only between communities but also through them, and any real reckoning with exclusion must begin by centering the divisions within.
Most social scientists agree that the relationship among theory, method, and data is profoundly iterative, marked by multiple rounds of back-and-forth among existing theories, research methods, and empirical puzzles. Paul DiMaggio once framed research problems as fundamentally “theorodological” (a mash-up between “theoretical” and “methodological”). In DiMaggio’s reading, theory and method aren’t separable—and the most interesting problems engage with both as entwined concepts. As interdisciplinary researchers who work and advise students primarily in qualitative research, we ask: how can a social scientist “do” theorodology? Over the years, we have developed a set of tools and metaphors to aid in this endeavor: (a) theorodology by walking around; (b) theorodology through interdisciplinarity; (c) theorodology as brick work; (d) theorodology through costume fitting; and (e) the “square peg” moment of theorodology. We conclude by discussing the broader importance of bringing together theory and methods when thinking about innovation and creativity in social science research.
The study of consciousness has traditionally focused on perception, awareness, information processing, memory, and subjective experience. While these approaches have generated significant advances in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology, they have devoted comparatively limited attention to the temporal structures through which consciousness is organized. Existing theories successfully explain how conscious states emerge, how information becomes globally available, and how perception unfolds through predictive and embodied processes. However, they provide fewer conceptual tools for understanding why human experience is characterized by rhythms, accelerations, stagnations, crises, moments of resonance, and sudden transformations.This article introduces the concept of temporal topology of consciousness. The framework rests on the proposition that consciousness is not organized primarily through chronological succession but through recurring temporal structures that shape the experience of continuity, interruption, significance, and change. Drawing upon phenomenology, embodied cognition, consciousness studies, and theories of lived temporality, the study proposes five fundamental structures of temporal organization: rhythm, density, resonance, drift, and phase transition. The central argument advanced throughout the article is that consciousness inhabits a topological rather than a purely chronological form of time. Clock time provides a measure of duration, but it does not explain the qualitative organization of experience. Temporal topology, by contrast, describes the structures through which human beings encounter continuity, disruption, transformation, and meaning across time. On this basis, the article proposes temporal topology as a new object of inquiry within consciousness research and suggests its relevance for psychology, phenomenology, cognitive science, human performance, and the study of human experience.
