ABSTRACT Over the past several decades, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become central yet contested concerns in US higher education, with recent years marked by intensifying political backlash and policy efforts to dismantle DEI infrastructures. Despite this contestation, the widespread adoption of formal diversity structures raises questions about how and why contested organizational practices diffuse. In particular, it remains unclear why some institutions are more responsive than others to different external cues. This study examines the diffusion of chief diversity officer (CDO) positions across US colleges and universities from 1992 to 2023. Drawing on an original longitudinal dataset of more than 1000 institutions and employing event history analysis, I examine how institutional resources, political context, peer influence, media salience, and organizational status were associated with CDO adoption. Findings show that higher‐status institutions were more likely to establish CDO positions yet were less responsive to peer adoption and media salience than lower‐status institutions. Prior to 2020, peer influence, institutional status, and state political context structured diffusion; following the racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd's murder, media salience became a more prominent correlate of adoption. These findings demonstrate that the diffusion of contested organizational practices depends not only on external cues but also on organizations' positions within status hierarchies. The study contributes to theories of institutional diffusion by showing how organizational status conditions responsiveness to changing social and political environments.
ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of structural cynicism to explain transformations in trust, legitimacy, and public communication in late‐modern societies. Existing sociological approaches generally conceptualize cynicism as an individual attitude, a moral disposition, or a reaction to institutional failure. In contrast, this article argues that cynicism has become structurally embedded within the institutional, communicative, and cultural organization of contemporary social life. Rather than representing a breakdown of trust, structural cynicism increasingly takes the form of a normalized condition of participation in mediated societies, in which skepticism becomes coupled with ironic distance and generalized distrust. The article advances this argument through a theoretical‐sociological and interpretive analysis that synthesizes classical and contemporary social theory with recent scholarship on political communication, digital media, and platform society. It identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which structural cynicism is reproduced: the institutional performativity gap, the mediatization of contradiction, and reflexive awareness overload. Together, these mechanisms normalize anticipatory disbelief, ironic self‐positioning, and contingent forms of trust while enabling institutional continuity despite persistent legitimacy deficits. The article argues that late‐modern societies are increasingly stabilized not through normative consensus but through the routine management of contested legitimacy and institutional ambivalence. By conceptualizing cynicism as a structural condition rather than an individual disposition, the paper contributes to contemporary debates on legitimacy, trust, mediated communication, and the changing foundations of social integration, while offering a framework for future empirical research on structural transformations of public belief.
Can sociologists feel? Sociological writing can be beautiful, making us think differently about people, processes, and structures. Yet traditional academic writing that does this is rare. For example, most articles adhere to a jargon-filled format and structure that mimics a detached and disciplined writer. But what if sociology embraced the experimental in form and structure? The affective and emotional? In this article, I draw and build upon Black, transnational, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms as well as anticolonial scholars to argue for a "poetic sociology" that centers imagination, affect, and embodiment, bringing the emotional and interior to the forefront, and how these are socially, politically, and culturally co-constituted. Embracing poetry as a means to theorize (not just describe) social life, as a sociological method, and as data opens up new possibilities of understanding social life because poetry offers new ways of thinking and being in the world, capturing settings, feelings, moments, and their residues in ways that run counter to the discipline of sociology. As such, taking poetry seriously has larger theoretical implications for how we know what we know and emphasizes what's not able to be captured by traditional academic writing.
How do subordinate populations produce collective knowledge when the act of creating and circulating information is criminalized? This paper examines how Chinese migrants navigating the "zouxian" ((sic)(sic)) route, irregular migration from China through Latin America to the United States, collectively produce, verify, and circulate critical information under conditions of evolving digital surveillance and shifting US immigration policy. Drawing on multi-platform observation, digital ethnographic methods, technical documentation, and policy analysis from 2022 to 2024, I document three interconnected dimensions of what I term informational seam-work: semantic neutralization practices that construct interpretive opacity within visible communications; tactical platform circulation that exploits seams between surveillance architectures; and collective governance mechanisms that maintain shared knowledge systems despite active suppression. I also identify a fourth, countervailing dynamic: the structural unreliability of this criminalized knowledge commons, whose conditions of production systematically compromise the quality of the knowledge it sustains. The paper identifies a seam between technical visibility and interpretive legibility, engaging Black studies scholarship without adopting the vocabulary of fugitivity. Rather than framing zouxian as straightforward resistance, the analysis distinguishes the state's tolerance of individual exit from the pressure that falls on the coordination capacity transforming individual aspiration into collectively organized mobility.
