The 10 most-cited articles in American Journal of Sociology, 2021

This article advances and tests hypotheses on arrest in the lives of 1,057 individuals from an original longitudinal study of multiple birth cohorts who came of age during a period of considerable social change in the last quarter-century. The authors show that large cohort differences in the course of arrest arise from changing macrohistorical environments rather than dispositional, demographic, socioeconomic, or neighborhood differences in childhood. Further, the impact of two leading explanations of crime—socioeconomic disadvantage and low self-control—depends on the historical timing of when children reach late adolescence and early adulthood. Cohort fortunes diverge mainly as a result of when both crime rates and police enforcement—especially for drug offenses—unexpectedly fell. The results quantify the power of social change and contribute a new understanding of inter- and intracohort inequalities in growing up during the era of mass incarceration and the great American crime decline.

Physical attractiveness is an important axis of social stratification associated with educational attainment, marital patterns, earnings, and more. Still, relative to ethnoracial and gender stratification, physical attractiveness is relatively understudied. In particular, little is known about whether returns to physical attractiveness vary by race or significantly vary by race and gender combined. In this study, we use nationally representative data to examine whether (1) socially perceived physical attractiveness is unequally distributed across race/ethnicity and gender subgroups and (2) returns to physical attractiveness vary significantly across race/ethnicity and gender subgroups. Notably, the magnitude of the earnings disparities along the perceived attractiveness continuum, net of controls, rivals and/or exceeds in magnitude the black-white race gap and, among African-Americans, the black-white race gap and the gender gap in earnings. The implications of these findings for current and future research on the labor market and social inequality are discussed.

Political scientists have acknowledged the importance of nationalism as a constitutive element of radical-right politics but have typically empirically reduced the phenomenon to specific out-group sentiments. Sociologists, in contrast, have devoted more attention to theorizing and operationalizing nationalism but have only sporadically engaged in debates about institutional politics. The present study brings these literatures together by considering how nationalist beliefs shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalism in the U.S. population. The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties, in both the 2016 primaries and the general election. Furthermore, over the past 20 years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have come to define America in more exclusionary and critical terms and Democrats have increasingly endorsed inclusive and positive…

Historically, the U.S. legal system formally institutionalized ancestry and appearance as the foundations of racial membership. Yet evidence suggests informal classification logics based on cultural cues like religion or language may have also long been present. Using a conjoint survey experiment, we disentangle the underlying classification logics of White observers and uncover three key norms: (1) ancestry strongly shapes classification, but there is little evidence of strict hypodescent; (2) skin color is a powerful signal that overrides ancestry when these signals conflict; and (3) sociocultural cues are especially important for “racial middle” categories such as Hispanic, Native American, MENA, and Asian. Our findings show that formal and informal racial classification logics can coexist in time and place. Further, the balance of these competing logics may depend on how state and nonstate actors establish and reinforce membership criteria. Our results hold methodological implications for studies that seek to operationalize race.

Although theorists argue that ideology and material conditions emerge in relation to one another, the connection between racial ideology and place is undertheorized. Analyzing in-depth interviews (N=109) with residents of a racially diverse suburb—Fort Bend County, Texas—the author uncovers a local racial ideology that they term the diversity contract. In contrast to colorblindness, which requires avoidance of race talk, residents exhibit selective engagement: race is recognized for certain purposes—including to celebrate diversity—but recognition of racial inequality in the community is disallowed. Through the diversity contract, residents co-construct the appearance of racial harmony. The author theorizes that this ideology emerges in highly selective, socioeconomically homogeneous diverse suburbs and finds preliminary support for this theory through comparative interviews in Queens County, New York (N=20). Overall, findings suggest that place should be centralized in analyses of racial ideology and illustrate how racial inequality is upheld through different ideologies across…

In the 2000s, newly-analyzed tax data revealed that top incomes in the United States had begun a dramatic upward climb in the early 1980s, summarized as the rise of “the 1%.” This article explains why it took two decades for this increase to become salient. Drawing on insights from the history and sociology of science, I argue that the social sciences rely on knowledge infrastructures to monitor trends and identify stylized facts. These infrastructures collect, process, and distribute data in ways that channel sustained attention to particular problems while rendering other potential observations out of focus. Knowledge infrastructures, like other infrastructures, have significant inertia: initial design choices that followed from particular theoretical, political, and practical priorities become locked in and shape the kinds of data readily available to future researchers. Using this framework, I show how the dominant economic knowledge infrastructures constructed in the mid-20th century were incapable of tracking top incomes, creating the conditions under which experts,…

How do cultural and organizational templates, such as the ideal of gender equality or neoliberal policies, spread around the globe, and what are the cumulative consequences of such processes? This article offers a multilevel theory of diffusion and local incorporation that overcomes some of the conceptual problems of existing answers to this question including those provided by world polity theory, global field theory, policy diffusion scholarship, and research on cultural globalization. The theory conceives the world as polycentric, divided into multiple, overlapping domains of bounded connectivity within which diffusion unfolds. These domains differ in their basic characteristics, such as their degrees of institutionalization, which determine which mechanisms of diffusion (such as coercion or imitation) will be at work and how widely and quickly templates will be initially adopted within them. Depending on the intrinsic properties of templates as well as the local configuration of power, a template may further spread among a population and eventually be incorporated into local…

The women’s liberation movement hotly debated both the cause of women’s oppression and the best approach to changing it. When treated as a moment within 1960s political polarization, these debates can seem esoteric and arbitrary. When examined across the longue durée, the debates prove to reflect complex and stable differences in interpretation that were tied to place more than to the political moment. Using a combination of network analysis, computational text analysis, and qualitative interpretation, the author examines women’s movement discourses across the first and second waves of activism and between two sites, New York City and Chicago. Place, she finds, serves to capture differences in political logics that generate durable differences within movement discourse.

The maintenance of high religiosity levels among Muslim youths in Western Europe constitutes a puzzle in need of an explanation. Focusing on France and using a new empirical strategy for the quantitative study of cultural differences between heterogeneous populations, this study first demonstrates that French Muslims form a diverse group yet one with a consistent and sizable “religiosity differential” resisting intergenerational assimilation to native levels. It then formulates and tests five hypotheses to explain the second generation’s delayed religious assimilation. Material insecurity, the perception and self-report of discrimination, parental religious socialization, transnational ties with the origin country, and neighborhood ethnic segregation are all influential but with an uneven impact across subgroups within native and Muslim populations. Together, results suggest that the religiosity differential stems from a mixture of cultural transmission from the context of origin and blocked acculturation due to stratification and social closure in the context of destination.

Economic sociologists have documented the rise of financialization, including credit and debt. In the case of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system, courts frequently extend payment plans—or “layaway”—as a way for defendants to manage financial court debt and gain their freedom. Using 241 hours of courtroom ethnography and 155 interviews with court actors and people paying their court debt in Illinois, the authors offer a microsociology of financialization that shows how the creditor/debtor relationship commodifies freedom, confuses and suffuses court processes, amplifies control, and expands the financial sector into domains that obligate participation. Layaway freedom represents a case of coercive financialization, or the externally imposed, involuntary, or last-resort entry into financial engagements. The manipulation of money and time achieves disproportionate punishment that is multiplicative, rather than simply additive, all under the guise of routine financial responsibility. The authors discuss implications of these concepts for both economic and criminal-legal…