The 10 most-cited articles in American Journal of Sociology, 2018

Sociological studies often emphasize the role of metrics in broader processes of convergence and homogenization. Yet numbers can take on different meanings depending on their contexts. This article focuses on the case of journalism, a field transformed by quantification in the form of “clicks.” Drawing on ethnographic material gathered at two news websites—one in New York, the other in Paris—it documents important differences in the uses and meanings assigned to audience metrics in the United States and France. At the U.S. website, editors make significant decisions based on metrics, but staff journalists are relatively unconcerned by them. At the French website, however, editors are conflicted about metrics, but staff writers fixate on them. To understand these differences, this article analyzes how the trajectories of the U.S. and French journalistic fields affect newsroom dynamics. It shows how cultural differences can be reproduced at a time of technological convergence.

The rapid growth of genetic ancestry testing has brought concerns that these tests will transform consumers’ racial and ethnic identities, producing “geneticized” identities determined by genetic knowledge. Drawing on 100 qualitative interviews with white, black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, and Native Americans, the authors develop the genetic options theory to account for how genetic ancestry tests influence consumers’ ethnic and racial identities. The theory maintains that consumers do not accept the tests’ results as given but choose selectively from the estimates according to two mechanisms: their identity aspirations and social appraisals. Yet consumers’ prior racialization also influences their identity aspirations; white respondents aspired to new identities more readily and in substantively different ways. The authors’ findings suggest that genetic ancestry testing can reinforce race privilege among those who already experience it.

Drawing on interviews with 194 market participants (including 54 practitioners of high-frequency trading or HFT), this article first identifies the main classes of “signals” (patterns of data) that influence how HFT algorithms buy and sell shares and interact with each other. Second, it investigates historically the processes that have led to three of the most important categories of these signals, finding that they arise from three features of U.S. share trading that are the result of episodes of meso-level conflict. Third, the article demonstrates the contingency of these features by briefly comparing HFT in share trading to HFT in futures, Treasurys, and foreign exchange. The article thus argues that how HFT algorithms act and interact is a specific, contingent product not just of the current but also of the past interaction of people, organizations, algorithms, and machines.

The past several decades have seen a decline in employment rates and labor force participation, particularly among low-skilled, minority men living in poor areas. As low-skill jobs disappear from poor places, how do marginalized job seekers navigate this landscape? Using over 8,000 daily measures of search and work collected from smartphones distributed to 133 men recently released from prison, this article presents the concept of work as foraging, where people work a variety of extremely precarious opportunities that span across job types. Sequence analysis methods describe distinct patterns of search and work that unfold over time, where most people cease their search efforts after the first month and maintain a state of very irregular and varied work. Although there is substantial heterogeneity in patterns, foraging is a common strategy of survival work.

With evidence comprising three years of ethnographic research in child support courts and 125 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers, the author shows how criminal justice and child support provisions work in tandem to create complicated entanglements for fathers. She develops the concept of incarcerated fatherhood—a matrix of laws, policies, and institutional practices that shape formerly incarcerated men’s relationship to parenting. On the one hand, she analyzes the debt of imprisonment, or the material costs of paternal incarceration; on the other, she examines the imprisonment of debt, or the punitive costs of child support debt. She then brings these two entanglements together to analyze their effects on men’s lives as fathers. Instead of “piling up” in men’s lives, these entanglements work in circular ways to form feedback loops of disadvantage that create serious obstacles for men as parents and complicate precisely those relationships proven essential for reintegration after prison: familial relations of care, reciprocity, and interdependence.

Environmental justice and social movements scholarship demonstrates how not-in-my-backyard activism by more privileged communities leaves the disadvantaged with “locally unwanted land uses.” Yet it overlooks instances of local support for risky industries. Our ethnographic case shows how a rural, white, mixed-income Pennsylvania community adopted a please-in-my-backyard stance toward shale gas extraction (fracking). Residents invited development on their land and supported it through quiet mobilization. While landowners prioritized benefits over risks, economics cannot fully explain their enthusiasm. Consistent with public opinion research, partisan identities and community obligations undergirded industry support even when personal benefits were limited. Devotion to self-reliance and property rights led residents to defend landowners’ freedom to lease their land. Cynicism toward government precluded endorsing environmental regulation, and the perception of antifracking activists as “liberal” outsiders linked support for fracking with community solidarity. This case illustrates why…

This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency.

The unequal spatial distribution of crime is an enduring feature of cities. While research suggests that spatial diffusion processes heighten this concentration, the actual mechanisms of diffusion are not well understood as research rarely measures the ways in which people, groups, and behaviors connect neighborhoods. This study considers how a particular behavior, criminal co-offending, creates direct and indirect pathways between neighborhoods. Analyzing administrative records and survey data, the authors find that individual acts of co-offending link together to create a “network of neighborhoods,” facilitating the diffusion of crime over time and across space and, in so doing, create pathways between all Chicago neighborhoods. Statistical analyses demonstrate that these neighborhood networks are (1) stable over time; (2) generated by important structural characteristics, social processes, and endogenous network properties; and (3) a better predictor of the geographic distribution of crime than traditional spatial models.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began punishing convicts by leasing them to private companies. Georgia’s transition from penitentiary confinement to convict leasing coincided with a shift in the composition of its inmates. Fifteen years after the Civil War, African-Americans in Georgia were imprisoned at a rate more than 12 times that of whites. This article finds that black men were most likely to be imprisoned in the convict lease system where they overcame whites’ efforts to preserve their position as dependent agricultural laborers. Where elite white landowners were able to reconstitute a dependent agricultural labor force, they had little reason to use the convict lease system to punish their workers. But in urban counties and in counties where African-Americans had acquired considerable landholdings, black men faced comparatively high rates of imprisonment for property crimes.

Because of racially disproportionate imprisonment rates, the literature on mass incarceration has focused on the labor market consequence of imprisonment and the implications of those effects for racial inequality. Yet, the effects of imprisonment itself, as distinct from conviction, are not well understood. The authors leverage a natural experiment based on the random assignment of judges to felony cases in Michigan to examine the causal effect of being sentenced to prison as compared to probation, stratifying by race and work history. The most widespread effect of imprisonment on employment occurs through incapacitation in prison, both for the initial prison sentence and through the heightened risk of subsequent imprisonment. Negative postrelease effects of imprisonment on employment, employment stability, and employment outside the secondary labor market are concentrated among whites with a presentence work history. Postrelease effects of imprisonment on employment among those with no work history are positive but fade over time.