The dynamics of contemporary rural depopulation have been explained and addressed mainly as a result of structural transformations brought about by economic globalization. The influence of cultural/relational aspects has been less present in the scientific literature, where much of the analysis has been concerned with questions such as the effect of bond and attachment to the local. In connection with

Are the positions that protesters take—in favor or against change—consequential for their ability to affect policy? While previous research suggests that protests can inform legislative priorities and facilitate policy introduction, this paper emphasizes policy inaction and stasis as goals of some protest actions. Analysis uses novel and detailed data on energy-related protest and policy actions in

This article examines how prison work functions as a site where neoliberal and carceral capitalist logics are reproduced across individual, organisational and societal levels. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a private UK prison, we argue that confinement exacerbates prisoners’ obsession with money and predatory entrepreneurialism, reflecting and reinforcing the broader dynamics of carceral

One of the most remote regions in the contiguous United States, the Upper Missouri River Breaks in the Northern Great Plains of Montana is both “cattle country” and “pristine prairie”: an identity that brings repeated tension over land use. Over the last twenty years, a conservation organization with a mission to rewild the region has purchased thousands of acres of ranchland from willing sellers despite

Although research has identified how stressors are related to either physical or cognitive function in later life, we bridge these literatures by examining dual functionality (neither physical nor cognitive impairment) among Black, White, and Hispanic adults. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (2006–2016), we investigated whether stressors and resources during childhood and adulthood are

We propose a novel approach to test the fundamental cause theory (FCT) by analyzing the association between socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by the order titles “brothers” and “padres,” and mortality in 2,421 German Catholic monks born between 1840 and 1959. This quasi-experiment allows us to study the effect of SES on mortality in a population with largely standardized living conditions. Mortality

College education features prominently in research on determinants of deaths from substance use disorders and self-harm—outcomes collectively referred to as “deaths of despair” (DoD). Limited attention has been given to whether the protective effects of college education on indicators of despair vary by individuals’ likelihood of college completion. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study

This article investigates the racial and gender dynamics of educational inequality in suburban public schools in the United States during an era of rapid demographic change. As suburban schools transition from predominantly White enclaves to more diverse settings, it is unclear to what extent the popular narrative of “suburban advantage” holds for newcomers. Using a longitudinal data set of majority

The global housing affordability crisis and COVID shutdowns have put living space inequality back on the political agenda. Drawing on Durkheim’s theory of anomie and density, this paper argues that on how many square meters a society lives matters for how stable or anomic it develops. Using data from the Swiss Household Panel, we examine the selection, short-term, and dynamic effects associated with

Research on race homophily in the United States has yet to meaningfully include the growing multiracial population. The present study confronts this challenge by drawing upon recent conceptualizations of race as a multidimensional construct. In aligning this insight with current understandings of homophily, we identify and address several open questions about the origins of race homophily—namely regarding

This article develops a micro-level understanding of informal work (IW) by exploring the legitimising factors which business owners exercise to provide the rationale for engaging in IW. Using the lens of nudge theory, originating from behavioural economics, we show how IW becomes legitimised through nudging. Empirically, we explore the lived experience of service sector business owners who engage in

Graduating from college is widely associated with social and personal advancement, yet many young graduates are not experiencing these benefits. Drawing on 127 interviews with college graduates in the United States and Spain who face employment precarity or economic instability, this study asks: How do these graduates understand their social positions and worth? How does the institution of higher education

Democratic politics in many parts of the world seems increasingly characterised by intense emotions, bitter divisions and growing polarisation. Amidst this charged political atmosphere it is a common refrain that an emotional politics forfeits rational dialogue and threatens our democracy. In contrast to such claims this article argues that emotions are central to citizenship and political participation

Gender segregation across fields of study is a persistent problem in higher education. Although a large body of literature has illustrated both gendered patterns in major choice as well as overall gender segregation across academic majors, comparatively less attention has been paid to an important building block for gender inequality: college courses. In this study, we examine the process of how students

This collection addresses the question: how are masculinities constituted and performed in work and employment settings? Work, Employment and Society has published many studies which show people performing, engaging and resisting constitutions of masculinities in employment settings. This collection brings 11 of these publications together to show how and why masculinities – as culturally constructed

In this case study, we examine a UK-based anti-halal consumer activist campaign called the Boycott Halal Campaign (BHC). Using critical discourse analysis applied to online data, we show how, by framing halal-certified products as an existential threat to the UK, BHC drew from and contributed to the institutionalized ideology of Islamophobia. Given the potential of markets and consumptionscapes in

The 2013 Charter of Values in Québec proposed to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols in the public sphere; while ostensibly neutral, such bans harm women who identify as Muslim, hurting their sense of belonging. This article examines the emotional experiences of Canadian Muslim women and the emotion work they do to manage non-Muslims’ impressions of them in a context of rampant Islamophobia. To understand

Political and popular tropes portray Muslims as monolithically, uniquely, and inherently patriarchal and misogynistic—a phenomenon of which Muslims are acutely aware. This study asks whether and how Islamophobic tropes influence Muslims’ gender ideologies. Using life history interviews with Muslim Americans, we find a diversity of gender beliefs, challenging the discourses that frame Muslims’ gender

Prior scholarship demonstrates that motherhood wage penalties and fatherhood wage premiums contribute to the gender pay gap. These analyses typically take a cross-sectional perspective, asking to what extent gender inequalities in the association between parenthood and wages can explain gender pay inequality for a given cohort or at a given moment in time. By contrast, explorations of gender pay convergence

Drawing upon ethnographic research with families as they navigate a year in ‘Brexit Britain’, this article explores how people live with Brexit, examining the effect of Brexit politics on everyday personal life, particularly relationships with family. In order to examine how macro-political events and timescapes interact with the quotidian, the article explores interactions between ‘Brexit time’ (including

The morality of artificial intelligence (AI) has become a contentious topic in academic and public debates. We argue that AIs moral acceptance depends not only on its ability to accomplish a task in line with moral norms but also on the social status attributed to AI. Agent type (AI vs. computer program vs. human), gender, and organizational membership impact moral permissibility. In a factorial survey

We examine the gendered distribution of peer-ascribed status in schools. Using network data from more than 14,000 students in 676 classrooms, we explore gender differences in the ascription of status and the types of behavior rewarded with status. On average, girls receive slightly fewer status ascriptions than boys, and students tend to grant status more frequently within the same gender. Contextual

This article explores how unions can influence employer decisions to downsize – a longstanding question that has been addressed through three waves of research. Although the literature has successively identified three types of factors that influence managerial decisions to downsize, it has not fully addressed the interactions of these factors, leading to inconsistencies. This article builds on and

In North Central Montana, a land‐based conflict centered on the environmental organization American Prairie sparked the formation of the “Save the Cowboy, Stop the American Prairie Reserve” Facebook page, attracting posts and comments from ranchers and members of the area's agriculture‐dependent communities. Despite Montana's rapid amenity migration and rural gentrification, this region has largely

This paper explores how connectivity to place has brought life to contemporary environmental struggles in what is now known as New York State. Layers of memory, colonization, and stewardship are embedded within a community's relationship with their environment. By focusing on two case studies, the authors will illustrate how this relationship shaped successful place‐based resistance. Throughout our

Most research on the strong relationship between education and cognitive aging has focused on years of schooling. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study—a sample of White persons born in 1939—we explored whether greater curricular rigor in high school was also associated with better cognitive function in later life. We estimated multilevel structural equation models in data from 2,749 participants

This research adopts an analytical spatial perspective to explain ethno-national health inequality between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. The work identifies the forces that instigated and maintained the spatial segregation of Palestinians and elaborates the role of segregation in generating health gaps between Palestinians and Jews. The analysis suggests a novel conceptualization of two types of

Changing socioeconomic conditions are enticing more and more Nigerian mothers to work and pursue careers. This article explores how middle-class professional women navigate working mother subjectivities in the context of Nigeria’s strong patriarchal culture, where traditional notions of maternal femininity prevail. We argue that the working mother’s subjectivity is a key site where the struggle over

The field of critical heterosexualities studies invites sociologists to untether heterosexuality from biology. In this article, I leverage the findings of 113 interviews with a racially diverse sample of cis and trans women to examine how women maintain everyday dignity in the street despite widespread gender harassment and systemic, racialized sexual inequalities. Drawing on social constructionist

Stephan Dochow-Sondershaus Sociological Science October 18, 2024 10.15195/v11.a35 Abstract This study reexamines the relationship between the coexistence of distinct ethno-cultural groups and social connectedness. Although previous research suggests a negative association between neighborhood-level ethnic diversity or ethnic minority shares and individual integration, alternative theoretical perspectives

While prior research has widely acknowledged the consequences of specific family transitions (e.g., parental death, parenthood, grandparenthood) for individual wealth holdings, the interplay of multiple family transitions and positions occurring at different life stages and in various orderings has received little attention. This is despite the fact that these transitions and positions most likely

While the existing literature on service work allows us to understand how customer sovereignty policies constrain service work by transforming servicescapes, we need a more agential approach to how service workers use space as a resource to deal with the tensions resulting from the promotion of customer sovereignty. This article draws on de Certeau’s thinking to fill this gap by looking at how workers

The “countervailing powers” framework conceptualizes health care as an arena for power contests among key stakeholders, drawing attention to the moves, countermoves, and alliances that have challenged physicians’ dominance since the 1970s. Here, we focus on one of the lesser known micro-level consequences of such forces for physicians: emotional distress. We draw on 145 interviews with frontline physicians

Although clinicians have been the focus of research on trust in health care, much of the health guidance Americans receive occurs outside clinical settings. School-based health education is one such setting. Given the importance of interpersonal dynamics to clinicians’ work, trust likely features heavily in achieving health educators’ outcomes. This study asks: How do health educators approach building

Although there is robust evidence that socioeconomic position influences later-life cognitive function, two issues limit knowledge regarding the nature and magnitude of these relationships and potential policy interventions. First, most social science research tends to treat cognition as a unitary concept despite evidence that cognitive outcomes are not interchangeable. Second, most biomedical research

The category of the nomad has gained a newfound salience in recent decades, ranging from public interest in “digital nomadism” to academic debates about “nomadic theory.” Faced with this upsurge of interest in nomadism, this collective discussion brings together five scholars of diverse theoretical and academic backgrounds to investigate the pasts, presents, and possible futures of the nomad category

This paper draws on fieldwork interviews with migrants who fled their home countries (Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan) and irregularly traveled through Sudan, Sahara, Libya, and the Mediterranean Sea, eventually reaching Europe. It demonstrates how, throughout their journeys, migrants were targeted by various armed groups (particularly non-state) for purposes including recruitment, extortion, ransom, immobilization

This article explores the importance of what we call “decolonial deconstruction” for contemporary global politics and policy discourses and develops a critique of this approach. “Decolonial deconstruction” seeks to keep open policy processes, deconstructing liberal policy goals of peace, democracy, or justice as always “to come”. It emerged through a nexus of postmodern and decolonial framings, well

This article theorizes smartphone detoxing as a practice of sovereignty. The article begins by arguing that the smartphone enables the exercise of psychopolitical control, a new mode of neoliberal governmentality under which individuals are governed through the algorithmic modification of behavior. Against this background, smartphone detoxing can be seen as a practice of sovereignty in the sense that

Rural Sociology has failed to incorporate Settler‐colonialism and Indigenous theory in studying rural social relations. This presents a serious gap in the discipline's conceptualization of land as the foundation of social reproduction. Indigenous theory provides rich insights about humans' relations among themselves and with the more‐than‐human that inform our understanding of Settler colonialism as

This article addresses a prominent gap in sociological studies of consumption and disposal. Whilst waste and disposal studies have traditionally focused on the production of waste or its subsequent treatment at municipal disposal facilities, little has focused sociologically on waste outside of these confines, such as littering and fly-tipping. Focusing on the latter, this article makes an original

What happens after rescue from modern slavery, the third largest organized crime in the world? The mainstream perspective suggests that people can be rescued and set free from slavery. This article challenges this assumption by arguing that rescue inflicts more violence and sends workers back to exploitative labour. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study of 31 workers in the informal sector (and

Discussions about epistemic inequalities have for several years highlighted the need to engage critically and reflexively with the politics of citation. Many authors have called for colleagues to correct longstanding epistemic and material injustices by proactively citing scholars and scholarship from marginalised groups, thereby producing radical knowledge that disrupts power. Analysing the epistemic-political

Michael J. Rosenfeld Sociological Science October 7, 2024 10.15195/v11.a34 Abstract U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB) surveys document a decline of more than 50 percent between 1987 and 2016 in the percentage of women working for the federal government who have been sexually harassed (narrowly or broadly defined) in the prior two years. This decline has been underappreciated due to the infrequency

This article sheds new light on the history of French feminism during the crucial period between the 1960s and 1980s, and it does by so opening up the range of actors as well as the geography and chronology considered. More specifically, it reconsiders the battles for reproductive rights: the liberalisation of contraception in 1967 and of abortion in 1975. Focusing on the perspective of those sitting

A central theme of this article is the developing tension between art specialists and non-specialists as a function of complex, differentiated figurations. Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic revolutions is allied to Elias’s model of the relative autonomy of the artistic figurations within lengthening relations of interdependencies and shifting cognitive-emotional tension balances of feeling and reasoning