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The success of megachurches in America is often traced back to their strategic ability of mobilizing new members in a competitive, religious marketplace. This paper shifts the attention to the push factors of megachurch success. It develops a causes of effects approach, in which local place‐based conditions in 22 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) are compared and related to megachurches. First, correspondence analysis (CA) is used to take into account a large set of explanatory conditions such as religious and ethnic group affiliations, social structural conditions as well as value orientations. CA reveals that megachurches are typically successful in MSAs characterized by an evangelical hegemony. Second, qualitative comparative analysis shows that population growth and suburbanization are necessary conditions for a high share of megachurches. An analysis of sufficient conditions leads to three propositions: Megachurches grow in cities (1) where a large closed evangelical community exists; (2) where a large upward oriented Christian immigrant community exists; (3) and in tolerant (and educated) areas—in conjuncture with the presence of a larger community of Protestants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of megachurches in America is often traced back to their strategic ability of mobilizing new members in a competitive, religious marketplace. This paper shifts the attention to the push factors of megachurch success. It develops a causes of effects approach, in which local place‐based conditions in 22 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) are compared and related to megachurches. First, correspondence analysis (CA) is used to take into account a large set of explanatory conditions such as religious and ethnic group affiliations, social structural conditions as well as value orientations. CA reveals that megachurches are typically successful in MSAs characterized by an evangelical hegemony. Second, qualitative comparative analysis shows that population growth and suburbanization are necessary conditions for a high share of megachurches. An analysis of sufficient conditions leads to three propositions: Megachurches grow in cities (1) where a large closed evangelical community exists; (2) where a large upward oriented Christian immigrant community exists; (3) and in tolerant (and educated) areas—in conjuncture with the presence of a larger community of Protestants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This integrative literature review examines the sources of the persistent debate over the influence of disasters on individual mental health that characterizes the disaster research literature. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper highlights how the connections between individuals and the systems in which they are embedded influence people `s varied responses to disaster Consistent with the emerging emphasis in the social sciences on contextualizing individual behavior this paper examines how family, community, social structural cultural, and environmental factors affect the development of stress in disaster populations. It concludes with recommendations for policy, practice, and research related to disaster recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study of an emerging environmental decision-making model that attempts to move beyond traditionally adversarial approaches toward "consensus building." Consensus-based decision making ostensibly allows activists equal power with industrialists and state actors in environmental policy-making. This research builds upon the growing literature on frame-analysis by demonstrating that there are instances when challengers actually engage in collaborative framing with their adversaries. This does not presume that activists reject oppositional framing altogether. In these cases, environ- mentalists actually draw on a mixture of confrontation and negotiation in this innovative form of collective action that positions them in contexts most environmentalists never experience-a place at the decision-making table with elites. This study reveals that environmentalists are becoming more sophisticated in their efforts to protect local communities and natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

-This paper conceptualizes and estimates a model of welfare participation that tests for community effects. Theoretically, the model is consistent with Fischer's (1984) notion of urban life, and a welfare participation model developed by Rank and Hirschl (1993). The empirical analysis includes aggregate and multivariate tests, and an identification of these effects in terms of household knowledge and behavior. We find strong evidence that community structure influences the decision to get food stamps, and one notable difference with the Rank and Hirschl findings: community poverty level is a more powerful and global predictor of participation than is population density. The findings suggest emendations to Wilson's notion of the "truly disadvantaged" insofar as residence in high poverty areas afford opportunities for information exchange and the development of specialized networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do we mean by progress and cumulation in the social and human sciences? Recent thinking in the philosophy and history of science has led to an abandonment of some versions of logical positivism and of verificationism that had a strong deductive and theory testing orientation. What is to replace them is less clear. This paper argues that progress and cumulation can be seen as a process of evaluation and retention within an epistemic community. Scholarly disciplines differ in their social structure and in their epistemic and normative commitments. Since sociology is a fragmented discipline, progress and cumulation differ within its multiple subdisciplines, which to varying extents represent epistemic communities. Brief sketches of progress (advance) and cumulation in several subdisciplines are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over the "community question" has generated several perspectives on the sources of ties to the territorial community in modern society. This paper attempts to empirically assess the utility of each model for predicting the number of ties to the local community and extra-local area, using data on voluntary association memberships in Seattle. Results indicate that the "community of limited liability" perspective is most accurate in predicting the importance of social, economic, and temporal investments for local memberships, and social position for extra-local memberships.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a version of Professor Smith's Presidential Address as delivered at the annual meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society in Boston, March 2022. Most sociologists go into the field hoping our work will help address the inequalities or injustices we study, but academic institutions and careers strongly guide most of our work away from the engagement needed to have such impacts. With others, I argue for changes in academic careers and institutions to better recognize, promote, and reward publicly engaged sociology, which would help academia honor its social contract. I briefly engage Burawoy's concept of public sociology, then propose types of publicly engaged sociology that align with how many sociologists do such work: Reframing/Debunking Sociology, Institutionally Engaged Sociology, and Community Engaged Sociology. Next, I analyze several obstacles to publicly engaged—and especially community engaged—sociology, including epistemic assumptions and evaluative practices stemming from instrumental positivism, belief in a canonical Hawthorne effect as a clean experimental finding, and a bias against research that helps research participants or partners. Finally, I offer advice and strategies to younger sociologists wishing to do such work and recommend ways academic institutions and practices could better support publicly engaged sociology, including by training students and faculty in how to do it, creating a Journal of Publicly Engaged Sociology, and amending ASA's Code of Ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the experiences of people affected by symptoms associated with depersonalization/derealization disorder. This condition entails sensorial alterations resulting in a defamiliarization with the world and their bodies. The American Psychiatric Association, however, admits that depersonalization/derealization may be a part of meditative practices and should not, in certain cultural contexts, be diagnosed as a psychological disorder. Through a comparison of two distinct sensory cultures—communities of Vipassana meditation practitioners and patient‐led communities—I explore the sense‐making work that people perform to render destabilizing somatic sensations congruent with either medical or spiritual cultural worldviews. Drawing from personal narratives, online data, and psychiatric case studies, I argue that a sociocultural cosmic order, in which people ongoingly appraise sensory experiences in terms of their potential to foster "self‐actualization," largely determines whether social actors interpret these dissociative destabilizations as either pathological or aspirational—a process I term "sensory instrumentalization." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community currency is an understudied, alternative social movement. These local networks are grassroots, collective efforts to form an alternative market with the hopes of empowering the economically marginalized and building social capital. Original data collected from members of a local currency system are employed to investigate their motivations to join and the congruence between motivating factors and various forms of participation. Four categories of motivations are identified and multivariate models are estimated to assess which are the most salient predictors of differential participation. The results provide some support for the congruence hypothesis. As predicted, member motivations play a role in shaping forms of participation. This evidence is used to draw larger implications for social movement research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on research about women's autonomy, gender, and development, and Latin America, I analyze individual, household, and community-level factors associated with husbands' sole authority with regard to four household issues: (1) money management; decision-making about (2) food purchases, (3) medicine purchases, and (4) health providers. The results point to how husbands' authority varies across household issues and how the dynamics of authority differ with regard to money management and the other decision-making issues studied. This study found that husbands' authority varied not only by individual characteristics but also by community features and thus adds to efforts to represent more fully how context matters to household gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We adapt the frame-alignment perspective in order to demonstrate how institutional framing shapes media coverage of a toxic crisis. This framing activity is described as a new approach to managing public responses to contamination that differs from the approach characterizing contamination episodes at Love Canal and Woburn, MA. Our analysis focuses on the process by which actors responsible for managing toxic crises carefully construct and manage a coordinated risk frame. We refer to this as institutional framing and illustrate how it shapes media framing of a toxic event. We conclude by proposing further research to identify the causal relationship between institutional framing and the absence of mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses two books "For Bread With Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940," by Ewa Morawska and "Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940," by Judith E. Smith. "For Bread With Butter" and "Family Connections" take different approaches about immigrants from diverse backgrounds who settled in communities with widely different economic and social opportunities, but they make similar theoretical contributions that go beyond their immediate subject matter. In different ways both studies reject the polar concepts of tradition and modernity as frameworks for understanding immigrant experience and the transformation of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. Neither the authors nor others who question oppositional categories mean to abandon concepts altogether or to replace polar concepts with other constructs that constrain and limit new conceptualizations. Although Smith's book also contributes to analyses of social change, ethnic identity and the formation of the American working class, the study engages less with theoretical traditions and focuses more closely on the intricate details of family, work and community life. This is not simply another analysis of immigrants family, kin and community ties.