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.
