The 10 most-cited articles in American Journal of Sociology, 2022

Building on literatures on racial regimes and the legacy of slavery, this study conceptualizes and constructs a novel measure of the historical racial regime (HRR) and examines how HRR influences contemporary poverty and racial inequality in the American South. The HRR scale measures different manifestations of the U.S. racial regime across different historical periods—slavery and Jim Crow—and is based on state-level institutions including slavery, sharecropping, disfranchisement, and segregation. The analyses use Luxembourg Income Study data (2010–18) for 527,829 Southerners. Results show that residing in a state with stronger HRR is not significantly associated with greater poverty for all and especially not among White Southerners. Rather, a higher level of HRR worsens Black poverty and especially Black-White inequalities in poverty. Further, HRR explains a significant share of the Black-White poverty gap. This study demonstrates the enduring influence of historical state institutions on contemporary poverty and racial inequality.

Why do some cities adopt practices to resolve social and environmental problems more rapidly and extensively than others? Although diffusion studies emphasize administrative adoption by central authorities, a range of private and public organizations are involved in the distributed adoption of innovations. The author argues that variation in the adoption of urban innovations results from persistent differences in cities’ organizational communities. An econometric analysis of the geographic dispersion of green construction practices and policies demonstrates that cities with greater civic capacity, where values-oriented organizations recognize and tackle social problems, see quicker and more extensive adoption. The effect is largest early in the diffusion process because nonprofits are themselves early adopters of green construction. Municipal policies later legitimate green building, but they follow prior individual organizations. The sequential framework of distributed and administrative adoption contributes to the understanding of the institutional determinants of responses to…

This article presents how global governance went viral as its targets moved from sovereign to corporate entities and its source from multilateral financial institutions to domestic U.S. institutions. It argues that viral governance describes how the United States rewrote global rules through its sanctions program first against Iran, then against Iran-affiliated global banks and businesses, and finally against the daily compliance practices of global money, information, and technology flows in general. Utilizing over 150 interviews with international experts in the field of sanctions and banking, the article describes the recursive process that led the U.S. government to assume global regulatory powers and to initiate deglobalization in its trade war against the European Union and China. The article concludes that viral governance perpetuates crises, whereas multilateral governance seeks to extinguish crises; it operates through sustained legal uncertainty over the jurisdictional limits of the hegemonic power, while multilateral governance seeks to absorb legal uncertainty; it…

A wide range of self-styled experts have emerged in recent years to sell professional self-improvement advice in fields as diverse as employment, health, and finances. Despite lacking traditional markers of expertise, these minor experts are gaining credibility and clientele, often at the expense of official experts in their field. Why do people turn to these experts? How do they build credibility? This article analyzes the paradoxical case of career coaches, many of whom were themselves long-term unemployed, to advance a theory of credibility construction among self-improvement experts. Drawing on qualitative data, the author finds that self-improvement experts build their credibility through strategic interactions and relational work with clients rather than through the institutional affiliations and credentials normally associated with expertise. The author identifies three complementary techniques—(1) constructing a shared moral order, (2) building affective trust relationships, and (3) sharing personal testimonials of transformation—and argues that this bundle of tactics…

Using a probability-based sample from 39 U.S. states from a general health survey, the author evaluates popular claims of a "transgender tipping point" by estimating probabilities of identifying as transgender and gender nonconforming among cohorts of respondents born between 1935 and 2001. Respondents born after 1984 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender or gender nonconforming than respondents in earlier cohorts. However, cohort changes in identification as transgender and gender nonconforming vary along lines of sex assigned at birth, race/ethnicity, and college attendance. Within different cohorts, these factors have different associations with higher or lower odds of identifying as transgender or gender nonconforming, sometimes contrasting with popular narratives and media representation patterns. Analyzed in context, these findings provide empirical evidence that several distinct population-level biographical availability patterns, including convergences, reversals, and persistence of demographic associations, have shaped the prevalence and composition of…

The United States is currently in the midst of a long, historic cultural transformation-redefining our collective representation to be inclusive of diverse sexual and gender identities. A core logic advancing this inclusion is to discursively recognize an expanded set of discrete, deconstructed identities-gay and lesbian expands to LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA1, and so on. But a newer logic stipulates that inclusion arises through using constructive identities that encompass many fluid experiences under a single term (e.g., "queer"). To understand inclusive change, the authors leverage a unique mesolevel site of cultural (re)production: service and advocacy nonprofit organizations. Using event history models, the authors investigate inclusive language change by 735 organizations from 1998 to 2016. They supplement analyses of administrative data with semistructured interviews with 13 nonprofit leaders, providing converging evidence. Findings showcase how bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down pressures explain both the inclusion of discrete identity labels and the shift to constructive logics.

How do we understand ambiguous state activities? How do state actors interpret, use, and produce ambiguous classifications? By asking what explains the simultaneous classification of Filipinos as citizens, nationals, and aliens during U.S. imperial rule, this article draws attention to modern states’ ideological commitments and the foundational role of concerns over race in shaping state institutions and ambiguous practices. In debating how to rule over Filipinos, U.S. state actors wrestled with tensions between territorial expansion and limiting the rights of nonwhite people. They institutionalized ambiguity into the legal architecture of the state. The coexistence of seemingly contradictory statuses was enabled by the decisions of the highest court in the land and reflected national and imperial conflicts over belonging. Debates over national boundaries—over who can belong—are key to understanding the structural sources of ambiguity in statecraft. In the United States, these questions are fundamentally about race.

Occupational structure is commonly viewed as either hierarchical or organized around stable classes. Yet, recent studies have proposed to describe occupational structure as a network, where the mobility of workers demarcates boundaries. Moving beyond boundary detection, this article develops occupational network as a dynamic system in which between-occupation exchange is shaped by occupational similarities, and occupational attributes are in turn responsive to mobility patterns. We illustrate this perspective with the exchange networks of detailed occupations. Our analysis shows that the U.S. occupational structure has become more fragmented. The division was in part associated with the emerging importance of age composition, as well as those of quantitative, creative, and social tasks. The fragmentation reduced wage contagion and therefore contributed to a greater between-occupation wage dispersion. These results indicate that occupational attributes and mobility are co-constitutive, and that a network perspective provides a unifying framework for the study of stratification and…

Abstract: Sociological studies stress how state legibility serves as a form of populational control. Often overlooked are how states differ in their will to control, and how this variation shapes legibility projects. This article proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework to study legibility from a comparative perspective that seeks to account for this variation. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework through an in-depth analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor individuals visible in order to implement conditional cash transfer programs (or CCTs). In the mid-1990s, these two states implemented the same policy, facing very similar challenges; yet, they adopted different solutions for governing their respective CCT programs and making poor families visible. Drawing on the analysis of approximately 10,000 pages of official documents, 100 in-depth interviews with bureaucratic and political elites, and 18 months of fieldwork in Brazil and Mexico, this article reveals the political and governance effects of distinct methods of seeing like a state. Specifically, I show…

Foundational urban social theories view heterogeneity of exposure to spatial contexts as essential aspects of the urban experience. In contrast, contemporary neighborhood research emphasizes the isolation of city dwellers—particularly racially segregated youth. Using geospatial data on a sample of youth from the 2014–16 Adolescent Health and Development in Context study, this article explores variation in the residential racial composition of everyday activity locations. The geographic isolation approach expects home neighborhood racial composition to closely align with the racial composition of activity location neighborhoods. Consistent with the alternative compelled mobility approach, the authors find that segregated Black youth exhibit among the highest levels of heterogeneity in the racial composition of neighborhoods encountered. These youth spend a substantial amount of their outside-home time in low-proportion Black neighborhoods, mostly driven by organizationally based resource seeking. These findings challenge the assumption that residence in Black-segregated neighborhoods…