Work-family policies are theorized to shape the division of paid labor after parenthood, but recent studies have cast doubt on their importance. Leveraging harmonized longitudinal data spanning 27 countries and an analytic focus on couples and couple dynamics, our study shows that work-family policies do shape how divisions of paid labor change with parenthood, and that they also moderate the importance of couples’ relative resources as a determinant of the division of labor. We find that moderate-length paid maternal leave and greater childcare availability reduce parenthood penalties in couples’ division of paid work time, while prolonged leave exacerbates penalties. Furthermore, by focusing on couples, we provide novel evidence that partners’ relative resources do not operate uniformly across work-family policy contexts, showing that policies can incentivize couples to divide paid work in ways their relative resource profiles would not otherwise predict. We find that moderate-length paid leave and greater childcare availability encourage egalitarianism among male-breadwinner couples, although extended leave encourages greater gender traditionalism among female-breadwinner couples. These findings reveal that classic theories of household specialization and bargaining are not universal, and highlight the need for greater theoretical attention to how country- and couple-level forces interact to shape gender inequality.
How do local governments symbolically manage the diversity of their residents? Drawing from an original representative sample of local government officials, we use a novel survey experiment with open-ended survey responses to examine preferences for cultural objects that symbolically manage religious diversity, an axis of difference that is increasingly salient to social conflict. Our experiment randomly varies the content of holiday displays on government property to measure diversity management strategies. Results show that government officials prefer the assimilationist strategy of a Christmas tree—by itself—over multiculturalist and exclusivist strategies, which both include sectarian religious content. Officials also evaluate Christmas trees as the content least likely to signal government endorsement of religion, compared to other holiday displays. We argue that these patterns can be explained by conceiving of a Christmas tree as a cultural cipher, a well-known cultural object that affords a range of meanings and resonates across social identities as innocuous. We argue that cultural ciphers are useful for an assimilationist approach to managing diversity because their ambiguity allows them to act as a vehicle of symbolic inclusion while also sustaining the meanings of majority groups. We also consider how cultural ciphers may lose their power for civic solidarity.
When people form beliefs in social life, they often calibrate their own thinking against what they anticipate “most people” think. Although prior research demonstrates the importance of these inferences, scholars have yet to examine who is best proxied by “most people.” Given persistent inequalities in U.S. society that advantage White men, as well as theories of cultural hegemony, we hypothesize that “most people’s” imagined beliefs are closely proxied by those of White men. We test these ideas using an original survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults ( N = 2,089) in which we adapt 64 core items from the General Social Survey. Respondents were randomly assigned to answer these questions either from the perspective of most people, or from the perspective of designated race-gender groups. Contrary to our hypothesis, we find strong and consistent evidence that White men are not seen as standard-bearers for most social issues. Instead, perceptions of what most people believe are highly aligned with the imagined beliefs of White women. Importantly, this pattern emerges not because White women are seen as influential, but because White women are perceived as less extreme than other groups. We also observe variation across respondents, such that respondents tend to center their own race-gender group in conceptualizing most people’s beliefs (with White women typically close behind).
Social movement studies have long centered social movement organizations (SMOs) as the primary vehicles of mobilization. Yet contemporary movements are increasingly decentralized and digitally mediated, challenging SMO-centric frameworks such as resource mobilization theory (RMT). As contention becomes more individualized and non-conventional, organization- and event-centered approaches struggle to explain how movements persist, evolve, or dissolve under shifting conditions. Drawing on RMT and economic sociology, this article advances a relational resource mobilization framework through four propositions: resource mobilization (1) is historically contingent; (2) translates into tactics differently across organizational configurations; (3) is relational; and (4) provides an analytic for examining movement continuity across time and space. Within this framework, I introduce the model of connective resource mobilization to theorize how digitally mediated movements generate strategic capacity through personalized earmarking practices across borders and phases of contention. Based on 179 interviews and observation at 187 events in Hong Kong and Canada, I trace how the Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Movement evolved from its 2019 protest peak through its subsequent downturn across domestic and diasporic contexts. The analysis demonstrates how a relational approach to resource mobilization can illuminate divergent trajectories of movement continuity across historical, geographic, political, and socio-technological contexts.
To understand how organizations distribute resources, we need to understand how they come to evaluate their members as worthy. This article introduces “organizational consolidation”: the degree to which ascriptive statuses—race, gender, class—align with the context-specific criteria that actors use when evaluating one another. Building on relational inequality theory and inhabited institutionalism, we argue that organizational consolidation shapes which attributes stand out, how actors categorize one another, and how combinations of attributes yield recognition or marginalization. When consolidation is high, local meaning-making is more likely to reproduce patterns of recognition that track ascriptive statuses; when it is low, alternative patterns become possible. We develop a concept-methods package that turns this framework into a roadmap for observing local patterns of recognition: association rule mining, latent class analysis, and partial order set modeling. We illustrate the value of these tools in a small, racially diverse U.S. high school where consolidation is low: teachers evaluate students through combinations of race, gender, and organizationally relevant characteristics, rather than any single attribute. By formalizing organizational consolidation as a measurable structural condition, we provide a diagnostic for comparing how organizations reflect or refract broader social hierarchies—shifting focus to how and under what organizational conditions inequality takes the specific forms it does.
