The 10 most-cited articles in American Journal of Sociology, 2024

This article examines entrepreneurship as a response to labor market discrimination. Specifically, we examine entrepreneurship as a career choice for formerly incarcerated individuals, a group of individuals who face substantial discrimination in the labor market. Using the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data, we find that formerly incarcerated people are more likely to become entrepreneurs compared to individuals who have never been incarcerated. We take advantage of a quasi-experimental setting by using the staggered implementation of “ban-the-box” policies in the US to disentangle the underlying mechanism of how labor market discrimination affects formerly incarcerated individuals in their decisions to enter entrepreneurship. The findings suggest that formerly incarcerated Black individuals pursue entrepreneurship due to the discrimination they face from employers. We also find that entrepreneurship is a viable alternative career choice for formerly incarcerated individuals, yielding both higher income and lower recidivism rates. In addition to reporting robustness…

The Chinese word guanxi distinguishes a kind of relationship that is familiar, consequential for network predictions of performance, and consistent with—but not yet distinguished in—network theory. Phrased in terms of network theory, the Chinese term guanxi can be viewed as a tie that has become strong through its history such that trust within the relationship is high and independent of the surrounding network. As such, a guanxi tie can function on its own as a strong bridge between groups, bypassing the need for structural embedding in third parties. The authors use interviews with a stratified probability sample of Chinese business leaders to look for patterns in the ways they use the term guanxi and the performance relevance of relations they designate guanxi. The discussion positions guanxi within network theory to improve predictions and facilitate unambiguous use of guanxi-like relations as a concept in the theory.

This article presents results from a series of online surveys—conducted among American voters during and after the Trump administration—that show how voters from both parties provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency to mistake misinformation for fact is what drives their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard-bearers. The studies presented here provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations…

Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the authors estimate the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in 12 countries: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden. They find in almost all countries a growing workplace isolation of top earners and dramatically declining exposure of top earners to bottom earners. The authors perform a first exploration of the main factors accounting for this trend: deindustrialization, workplace downsizing, restructuring (including layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, and subcontracting), and digitalization contribute substantially to the increase in top earner…

Sociologists understand that seemingly innate characteristics like race and gender are social constructs, yet a similar appreciation of age has failed to take hold. Using ethnographic, interview, and population-based survey experiment data, we interrogate the child/adult binary in the context of healthcare to illuminate processes through which age categories are essentialized and legitimated and thereby how age is socially constructed. People use hyperbolic language to position children as wholly innocent and limitlessly deserving and adults as agentic, responsible, and less deserving of healthcare resources. Individuals "do" age strategically to obtain resources, and institutions formalize the child/adult binary through arbitrary and sometimes contradictory criteria. Our quantitative data further find age to have outsized effects on perceptions of deservedness and responsibility compared with other categories of social differentiation.

As coverage for gender-affirming surgery and hormone therapy has expanded over the past two decades, insurers are increasingly tasked with deciding which body modifications are necessary for accomplishing masculinity and femininity. Drawing from extensive records on coverage decisions and national health insurance plans, the author investigates how insurers marshal gender categories to make decisions about medically necessary care. While insurers might be expected to draw on medical expertise to make decisions about gender-affirming care, the author finds that they use standards and stereotypes of normative, “ideal” gender. In doing so, expansions in coverage lead to an elaboration of ideal embodied gender based on a white, thin-bodied aesthetic. Ironically, as transgender people succeed in expanding insurance coverage, normative embodied gender becomes more defined and less ambiguous. In showing how insurers and the medical experts they consult mobilize and reconstitute embodied gender, the author advances theories of classification, embodiment, and expertise.

This sequential mixed-methods study examines how Americans ascribe meanings to the concepts racism, sexism, and classism. We first conduct interviews (N=40) using a symbolic boundaries elicitation approach, gathering examples of scenarios that do and do not “count” as racism, sexism, and classism. We then use these examples as vignettes in a nationally representative survey-experiment (N=2,000). Results reveal striking evidence for cultural heterogeneity in how Americans understand and define racism, sexism, and classism. We find that a person’s definition of these concepts depends on their emphasis on intentionality, unequal treatment/outcomes, and power (a)symmetry. We also find that political partisanship, gender, age, and income shape the importance of these three components in their definitions. Finally, we show that Americans’ definitions of racism, sexism, and classism strongly predict their discrimination-related public opinion and policy preferences, such as support for affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws, even after accounting for demographic controls, including…

Imprisonment is recognized as routine in the lives of disadvantaged young men. Scholars center the impact of relatively brief prison experiences on postprison early adulthood, but this approach overlooks the many who are imprisoned for long periods. This study addresses this concern by analyzing interviews with African American and Afro-Latino men who were sentenced as youth and early adults to long prison terms. Prison-like conditions pervaded men’s life histories in ways that shaped how they made sense of incarceration and early adulthood. While those who cycled in and out of penal institutions or who entered prison later in life saw imprisonment as an unsalvageable condition, those incarcerated throughout their early adult years drew on alternate frames of reference to make strategic use of their time and to construct a sense of incarcerated adulthood. The study conceptualizes these coming-of-age processes as carceral passages—repeated encounters with confinement, criminalization, and violence starting at very young ages.

Despite the rise of women’s labor force participation over the last 60 years, the technology industry remains highly segregated by gender. Engineers often think of their work as purely technical. Yet this study highlights the importance of social relationships for career advancement. Drawing on interviews with tech workers, the author traces the unequal career trajectories of men and women. She finds that men without computer science or engineering degrees are informally coached to learn technical skills from their coworkers and transition from nontechnical to technical roles. Women, however, are excluded from these coaching opportunities and steered out of technical roles, effectively barring them from some of the most lucrative positions in the tech industry. These findings highlight new social closure mechanisms that reproduce gender inequality and question whether the educational pipeline can adequately explain women’s underrepresentation in technical roles.

In 2015–16, Germany experienced a rapid and controversial increase in refugees that varied substantially across German districts. This increase provides unique leverage for analyzing how fractionalization, threat, and contact shape the consequences of immigration and ethnolinguistic heterogeneity. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and local district-level administrative data on refugee shares, we innovatively focus on within-person/within-district change in six exclusionary beliefs and behaviors. We demonstrate a two-level cross-cutting process that integrates threat and contact theory but contradicts fractionalization theory. As the refugee share increased nationally, concerns about immigration and Far Right party support increased. However, district-level refugee shares significantly reduced concerns about immigration and Far Right party support. Also, rising district-level refugee shares are not associated with concerns about social cohesion, trust, residential moves, and subjective fair tax rates. While districts with fewer refugees drove the national-level threat, rising…