Classical theories of the division of labor emphasize the overwhelming productivity benefits that arise from specialization. But recent evidence reveals that the division of labor in late industrial societies is under increasing strain. Here, we discuss two types of strain: increasing task burdens and coordination problems. First, worker task burdens are expanding due to the rationalization, bureaucratization, and financialization of late industrial societies. Second, population growth, system complexity, and political attacks on bureaucracy mean that organizational capacity is being overwhelmed. Rising exposure to crises—including pandemics, climate disasters, and geopolitical conflict—further undermines the robustness of the division of labor: Workers are forced to take on unfamiliar tasks and the resilience of existing systems is challenged. We conclude our review by considering the potential of artificial intelligence to relieve or exacerbate these vulnerabilities by reshaping task structures, enhancing coordination, and supporting crisis response. The review integrates fragmented literatures to highlight systemic challenges and possible future trajectories of work and society.
Research on legacies of racialized control recognizes and examines how historical violence continues to exert effects on contemporary inequalities. Focused predominantly on histories of enslavement and lynching in the US South, studies have demonstrated the continuing hold of these institutions on a wide range of racialized outcomes, including income inequality and poverty, violent crime, incarceration and other criminal legal consequences, political polarization, residential segregation, and educational and health disparities. Over the past two decades, the literature has matured significantly, evolving from studies demonstrating these durable temporal connections to more recent robust attention to a unified theoretical framework and the mechanisms that enable legacy effects to persist over long time periods. This review emphasizes recent refinements associated with parsing sources of persistent inequalities, accounting for interrelationships among modes of control, and identifying factors that interrupt as well as produce durable legacy effects. It concludes with recommendations to more directly engage the systemic nature of racialized control, take fuller advantage of leverage provided by expanding methodological foci, and thicken connections to parallel work in cognate fields.
Human behavior can vary markedly across situations, yet it at times exhibits striking persistence. To account for these characteristics, cognitive sociologists have focused on two aspects: how situational cues—including the presence and behavior of others—activate mental structures and predispositions, such as schemas, frames, or repertoires, and how behavior is governed by dual processes, whether through autonomous, associative activation or controlled, effortful deliberation. Building on research in cognitive and social psychology, these insights became central to the literature on culture and cognition in North American sociology. Even earlier, ideas about framing and dual processes had been adopted in European sociology. We introduce this largely separate body of scholarship, discuss its relationship to its North American counterpart, and highlight related developments in axiomatic decision theory and mathematical psychology. We also demonstrate how sociologists can employ dual-process and framing models to generate new hypotheses across diverse areas of research.
Abortion is a polarizing political issue across the American continent, yet US-focused scholars seldom interrogate the consequences of abortion politics for democratic institutions. Latin America scholarship has done better. Moving beyond the typical academic focus of explaining abortion liberalization or abortion politicization, this regional scholarship investigates how conservative actors strategically isolate and amplify the antiabortion position as a means of consolidating alliances and deepening elite control over legislative and judicial institutions. More provocatively, this scholarship also suggests that elites use the unique liminal legality of the fetus to blur, and ultimately weaken, national commitments to legal and judicial equality, thus facilitating democratic backsliding. Legal access to safe abortion is critical for the life, health, and human rights of women and girls around the world, but the Latin America scholarship suggests that gaining and maintaining abortion rights is also critical for healthy democracies.
Who counts as white in the United States? This has been a demographic puzzle since US citizenship was first limited to “free white persons” in 1790. Over time, immigrants from various world regions began to comprise the white population, creating a numerical majority and what is now the widely used reference category for measuring racial inequality. This review traces the evolving composition of the white racial category from the 1960s to the present, highlighting increased immigration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East as key sources of diversity within the federally defined white population. I organize the review into three sections. The first section reviews the historical construction of the white racial category in relation to the federal classification system used by the US Census. The second section examines compositional changes in the global origins of white immigrants since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. It highlights how geopolitical events have shaped divergent migration and resettlement experiences for immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East—groups who are legally classified as white but often racialized as “not quite white.” The third section reviews research on immigration and health to illustrate how compositional changes in the white population affect our understanding of US health disparities. The conclusion considers the implications of treating whites as a single, monolithic group and calls for greater analytic attention to within-group diversity among whites in studies of inequality.
In the half-century following its mid-century emergence, the sociology of medicine in the United States has been constituted by a theoretical vocabulary anchored in concepts of roles and professions, and a methodological commitment to ideal types. More recently, research has called attention to these foci in ways that prompt close attention to categories once considered relatively homogeneous. After briefly discussing the key emphases of early work, I review contemporary literature's most active areas and intersections, especially organizations, professions and labor, and science and knowledge. In particular, the review demonstrates the behavior of the literature's key stakeholders—such as doctors and hospitals—as displaying a certain orderly heterogeneity. That is, although variation and diversity are characteristic of medical work, this heterogeneity is not random. Rather, I show that practices are organized systematically to reflect and constitute local and global communities of health care users and providers. I identify how the corpus suggests that more work could be done across key topics of the sociology of medicine to enable theoretical synthesis of these empirical results.
In this article, we take stock of major developments in sociological approaches to the study of sexual life in the twenty-first century. First, we highlight the breadth of theoretical and methodological approaches within the sociology of sexualities subfield. We explore the growth of research that centers race, ethnicity, age, and geographic location within the study of sexualities. We also showcase the growing body of transnational research that critically examines the shifting forms of state power that constrain and enable the possibilities of sexual autonomy and collective action. Second, we examine the emerging subfield of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender)-inclusive demography, detailing the limitations and possibilities of this methodological approach and recent patterns in findings. Finally, we highlight how feminist and queer critiques have expanded the conceptual frameworks for studying sex beyond the procreative/nonprocreative binary that long pervaded the discipline. We end with ideas for how to safeguard the epistemological and methodological diversity of sexualities research in sociology.
This article surveys a growing body of work examining the concrete consequences of implementing meritocracy in social life. To date, this work remains compartmentalized into the separate subfields of cultural sociology, economic sociology, organizational science, and the sociology of education and stratification. We bring this work together by arguing that it explores meritocracy as the making of merit-based status orders, or merit orders. Merit orders are status hierarchies—sets of relations of value superiority, equality, or inferiority people perceive among others—based on assessments of others’ merit, achievement, or performance. They exist as cultural objects and cultural schemas, and they can be studied for their shape and for their sharedness. Most importantly, focusing on merit orders enriches our understanding of how meritocracy enters social stratification processes. This is because meritocracy shapes stratification not only by sorting individuals into unequal social positions, but also by creating merit orders that have stratifying effects of their own. In particular, the making of merit orders has a tendency to moralize inequality by framing disparities in social advantage as differences in individual merit, it teaches observers to perceive quality differences among social actors in hierarchical terms that undermine egalitarian beliefs, and it can directly exacerbate inequality in merit-based rewards when the architecture of merit orders is more hierarchy-like.
Over the past half-century, sociologists working across subfields and analytic levels have documented the downstream implementations of diversity as a dominant social value. We synthesize this research, paying special attention to scholarship examining five key analytic contexts: class, taste, interactions, organizations, and cultural objects. The literature suggests that, despite persistent hierarchies of valuation and worth, a “conspicuous openness to diversity” has become particularly institutionalized among organizations and elites, operating as a foundational schema. We conclude with three directions for future research: exploring both historical and contemporary backlashes to diversity on the local and global scale, the impacts of diversity as a dominant social value for both non-elites and those who are cast as visible evidence of diversity, and the underlying mechanisms behind conspicuous openness to diversity, given well-documented gaps between discourse and action.
Computational developments—particularly artificial intelligence—are reshaping social scientific research and raising new questions for in-depth methods such as ethnography and qualitative interviewing. Building on classic debates about computers in qualitative data analysis, we revisit possibilities and dangers in an era of automation, large language model chatbots, and big data. We introduce a typology of contemporary approaches to using computers in qualitative research: streamlining workflows, scaling up projects, hybrid analytical methods, the sociology of computation, and technological rejection. Drawing from scaled team ethnographies and solo research integrating computational social science alongside in-depth observation, we describe methodological choices across study life cycles, from literature reviews through data collection, coding, text retrieval, and representation. We argue that new technologies hold potential to address long-standing methodological challenges when deployed with knowledge, purpose, and ethical commitment. Yet, a pragmatic approach—moving beyond technological optimism and dismissal—is essential given rapidly changing tools that are both generative and dangerous. Computation now saturates research infrastructure, from algorithmic literature searches to scholarly metrics, making computational literacy a core methodological competence in and beyond sociology. We conclude that when used carefully and transparently, contemporary computational tools can meaningfully expand, rather than displace, the irreducible insights of qualitative research.
This article synthesizes major strands of scholarship on migrant remittances, addressing the central question of what motivates migrants to remit and how these motivations vary across social, temporal, and structural contexts. We review classical and neoclassical theories, the migration–development nexus, and the New Economics of Labor Migration, highlighting analytical limits in their economistic assumptions. We then examine sociological and transnational approaches that reconceptualize remittances as socially embedded practices shaped by gendered obligations, kinship norms, moral economies, sending-state regimes, and digital mediation. Building on this literature, we outline a multilevel sociological framework that situates remittance behavior at the intersections of microlevel familial subjectivities, mesolevel community expectations and transnational networks, and macrolevel political–economic structures. This framework underscores the recursive relationship between the causes and consequences of remitting, illustrating how remittances simultaneously sustain households, reshape social relations, and reproduce state and global dependencies, thereby challenging linear models prevalent in development discourse.
This article reviews the sociological and interdisciplinary literature on the global architecture of elite wealth, emphasizing structural transformations in the global political economy following the 2008 financial crisis. First, we review the literature on wealth stratification and its limits for studying the current structure of elite wealth. Second, we highlight the dimensions central to this new landscape and examine the reorganization of global production and capital flows, including the outsourcing of manufacturing and the rise of new economic centers in East and Southeast Asia, which challenge nation-bounded analyses of wealth. Third, we show how both democratic and authoritarian states strategically partner with private capital, blurring political distinctions and enabling elite consolidation. Fourth, we trace the expansion of offshore finance that fosters the rise of a transnational elite supported by professional intermediaries. We conclude by calling for new theoretical and methodological tools to study elite power, hidden capital flows, and their implications for inequality and governance.
Although theory suggests that discrimination generates health inequalities in a variety of ways, research today concentrates almost exclusively on one particular mechanism: the conscious experience of unfair treatment, often termed “perceived discrimination.” To rethink perceived discrimination as one among other mechanisms, this review draws on the social stress model, reinterpreted as a macro-micro-macro sociological explanation. This reframing additionally reveals that the social stress model rests on an implicit theory of the emotional actor that provides no guidance to distinguish psychiatric illness (an individual problem) from nondisordered but painful emotional responses to external adversity (a social problem). To prevent this confusion, the review puts forward an account of the emotions that emphasizes their rootedness in the social world. On the empirical front, the review covers ethnic differences in depression and psychosis, as well as recent studies indicating that only a small portion of discriminatory treatment surfaces in the target's consciousness as perceived discrimination.
There is an emerging recognition among sociological theorists that luck may play a substantial role in life course achievement. There is also a nascent empirical literature that finds life outcomes to be unpredictable and unexpected life events to be a likely cause. A third literature of causal event studies provides thousands of point estimates of the life course consequences of random events. This review brings these literatures together under a unified framework.
The role of gender in far-right parties and movements received little attention until the late twentieth century, when feminist and masculinity studies began to draw attention to women's participation in these politics and the gendered nature of men's far-right activism. In the past decade, research in this area has flourished, creating a distinct subspecialty. This review focuses on recent scholarship on the discourse and practices of femininity/women and masculinity/men in the far-right and the transnational antigender movement opposed to feminist and LGBTQ+ political gains. It also suggests topical and methodological directions for the next stage of research and reflects on the ethical, political, and safety challenges that scholars of the far-right and gender encounter today.
This review offers a framework for studying the measurement, consequences, and sources of poverty in times of crisis. Recent crises—such as COVID-19, the Great Recession, and environmental disasters—expose limitations of the standard social science toolkit for studying poverty and offer lessons for improving poverty and policy research. Regarding measurement, evidence suggests that the intrayear volatility of incomes and blurred boundaries between resource-sharing units deserve greater focus in poverty measurement debates. Regarding consequences, research emphasizes the need to quantify poverty's distinct roles as a risk factor versus stratifying feature during crises. Regarding sources, evidence from recent crises offers direct tests of competing theories of poverty and offers clear lessons for policy strategies to reduce poverty. I conclude that sociologists’ conceptual toolkit is uniquely well-suited to capture the multifaceted nature of poverty; the discipline should more forcefully incorporate its principles into a renewed study of poverty and public policy.
Three decades ago, influential marriage migration perspectives emerged that importantly transformed the agenda for studies on how women from the Global South experience intimate relations with men from the wealthier North. Applying feminist gender perspectives, this field centered on a woman's subjective lived experiences of her asymmetrical, unequal union with a foreign man, focusing on reproductive labor and questions of hypergamy. It remains the dominant analytic lens, but we advocate a rethink. First, we argue for extending the marriage migration frame to cross-border intimate mobilities, so that it includes a fuller range of this type of gendered, sexualized, and unequal intimate social relationship. Second, it is necessary to account for the important contextual backstory—opportunity structures—that facilitates the evolution of significant pathways for intimate mobilities between specific Southern and Northern places over time. We demonstrate by reference to Thailand, one of the largest sources and locations for cross-border intimate mobilities.
The sociology of housing has clear implications for and overlaps with sociological studies of inequality. However, gender is still overlooked and undertheorized in housing research. Drawing on gender scholars, we caution against the tendency to treat gender as a synonym for women, as a variable that compares outcomes to those of men, and/or as synonymous with binary roles (e.g., poor mothers of color versus affluent, White gentrifiers). We demonstrate how a subset of scholars departs from these tendencies and model avenues for further research, for example by viewing housing and gender as coconstitutive. Overall, we argue that the measurement of inequality at the city and neighborhood level stymies focus on gender. However, by taking housing units—and, crucially, the households that they contain—as their unit of analysis, sociologists of housing are well-positioned to merge attention to the importance of gender identities, expectations, and roles with analyses of multiple overlapping levels and sites of inequality.
This review provides 10 actionable recommendations for advancing the scientific study of structural racism through theoretically grounded and empirically robust measures and methods. By offering conceptual and analytical clarity, these recommendations aim to enhance research rigor on the structure and function of racism. For each recommendation, we ( a ) delineate key theoretical principles tied to specific features of structural racism, ( b ) evaluate the strengths and limitations of existing measures and methods, and ( c ) propose best practices for measurement and modeling that align with theory and rigorous methodologies. Given the complex, multifaceted, and dynamic nature of structural racism, we emphasize the necessity of embracing epistemological and methodological pluralism. Scholars are encouraged to integrate insights through triangulation by leveraging diverse theoretical frameworks, varied data sources, and a wide array of methods. The review concludes by addressing pressing challenges and identifying opportunities for innovative research to deepen our understanding of structural racism and its enduring impacts in racialized societies.
This review articulates sociology's emerging approach to public administration, building on long-standing interest in bureaucracy. The sociology of public administration aims to understand how public administration perpetuates or mitigates inequalities through how well it performs (or does not) and for whom—balancing interest in performance and inclusivity. Sociological work on public administration has exploded in the past decade, illuminating the internal workings of the state apparatus and interrogating microlevel practices of governance, administration, and the chains by which policy comes to be enacted and experienced in the lives of citizens. This scholarship has concentrated around three themes: ( a ) public administration as a fragmented patchwork with high variation in performance, including administrative burdens that disproportionately affect marginalized groups; ( b ) public administration as a social arena with blurred boundaries, with unclear and negotiated jurisdictions for action, and where interpersonal and interorganizational connections have equivocal effects on the work of the state; and ( c ) understanding public administration as socially constituted, not only by rules on paper but by the people who do the work of the state, bringing identities, experiences, cognition, and cultural understandings to bear. The article also includes a supplemental appendix discussing public administration's role in institutionalizing categories that permeate everyday life, producing both legibility and illegibility.
