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This paper provides an overview of current debates and themes in literature relating to place-based stigma, including a reflection on terminology use. Generally, we rely on Loïc Wacquant's framing of territorial stigma as a feature of advanced marginality. In this paper, drawing on my own research in Toxteth, Liverpool, I offer a critique of the Wacquantian approach, highlighting the limits of the advanced marginality framing of place-based stigma. The paper considers the global reach of placed-based stigma and the temporal aspect of stigma that must be taken into consideration when we consider how stigma is currently applied to communities. A key feature of this paper is the foregrounding of the concepts of 'core' and 'event' stigma, which have generally been a feature of literature in business and management. I argue that our understanding of how communities become stigmatized can be enhanced by framing place-based stigma in this temporal sense. Understanding how stigma becomes adhered to particular spaces, places and landscapes is necessary if we want to comprehend how this stigma transfers to the communities inhabiting these geographies. This paper suggests that we must look to the past, and to the voices who shape the past, in order to understand the present and to plan for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nothing puzzles sociologists of religion more than the reasons and the patterns behind religious change. In the literature on secularization processes, it is broadly accepted that ongoing modernization has undermined many of the pillars of institutional religions, leading to widespread religious decline. While a considerable body of research investigates the "why(s)" of this decline, the main focus of this paper is on the "how." Drawing on CARPE, a harmonized dataset concerning church attendance with almost 2 million observations spanning over 40 years in 39 European countries, this article disentangles the contributions of period change and cohort replacement to the general religious decline. It shows that this decline reflects a real population dynamic based on generational replacement. It is not historical events or developments affecting everyone that undermine religion: new and less religious cohorts are replacing old and more religious ones. Like many other population dynamics, this process is described by an S-shaped curve and applies—with different speeds and levels—to almost all the European countries considered herein. These findings suggest that the effects of the processes of modernization on the mechanisms of religious socialization should be scrutinized more carefully when studying the reasons behind religious decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is not one historiography of post-war social science but two: one focused on the sociologists, the other on the people the sociologists studied. This second historiography peels back the abstractions of social scientists to reconstruct the everyday lives and the 'vernacular' speech of those studied. John Goldthorpe's paper in this roundtable provides an opportunity to reflect on the historical concerns, methods, and future of the new literature on post-war sociology and social transcripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophical arguments regarding academic freedom can sometimes appear removed from the real conflicts playing out in contemporary universities. This paper focusses on a set of issues at the front line of these conflicts, namely, questions regarding sex, gender and gender identity. We document the ways in which the work of academics has been affected by political activism around these questions and, drawing on our respective disciplinary expertise as a sociologist and a philosopher, elucidate the costs of curtailing discussion on fundamental demographic and conceptual categories. We discuss some philosophical work that addresses the conceptual distinction between academic freedom and free speech and explore how these notions are intertwined in significant ways in universities. Our discussion elucidates and emphasises the educational costs of curtailing academic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the roots of the characterization of John Stuart Mill as a 'Neo‐Malthusian'. Making extensive use of the Norman E. Himes Papers, held at the Countway Library of Medicine, it shows that Himes, a U.S. sociologist and committed birth control campaigner in the inter‐war period, framed a characterization of Mill that endures to this day. The article demonstrates how and why Himes repeatedly took his arguments 'beyond the facts', partly in response to a dispute with the British birth control campaigner Marie Stopes, and established the practice of referring to Mill as a 'Neo‐Malthusian'. The article concludes by arguing that the term impedes more than it aids our understanding and Mill scholars would benefit from stripping away decades of accreted interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the characteristics of faculty members' publishing records at the start of a first assistant professor position in order to predict their continued publication productivity. Using data from nearly 500 US-based sociologists, we examine how indicators, such as number of published articles, the extent of sole authorship, journal placement, and doctoral pedigree, predict success in publishing. After accounting for year of PhD, primary research methodology, and demographic characteristics, the analysis finds that the total number of articles published at the time of hire is not a significant predictor of future productivity. But the number of sole-authored articles published at the time of hire is positively associated with subsequent publication. The analysis also finds that doctoral pedigree is negatively associated with the total number of articles published post-hire but positively associated with publishing in top sociology journals. The authors suggest that faculty with different doctoral origins pursue varied publishing 'scripts' in their careers. Sole authorship operates as a potent trigger at career onset for cumulative advantage. In the context of the reward system of science, a moral community identifies early solo work as a sign of work prowess, which begets further publishing success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on the population of US sociology doctorates over a five-year period, we examine different predictors of placement in research-oriented, tenure-track academic sociology jobs. More completely than in prior studies, we document the enormous relationship between PhD institution and job placement that has, in part, prompted a popular metaphor likening academic job allocation processes to a caste system. Yet, we alsofind comparable relationships between PhD program and both graduate student publishing and awards. Overall, we find results more consistent with PhD prestige operating indirectly through mediating achievements or as a quality signal than as a "pure prestige" effect. We suggest sociologists think of stratification in their profession as not requiring exceptionalist historical metaphors, but rather as involving the same ordinary but powerful processes of cumulative advantage that pervade contemporary life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have long been interested in the theoretical possibility of a universal ritual. Despite a growing number of indicators of world society and globalization, there have not been attempts to observe and analyze the international reach of particular rituals. We propose an extension of the "interaction ritual chain" by theorizing how an interaction ritual might be created and diffused internationally. We look at the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, which created shared conditions of social distancing and emotional distress. We analyze a discontinuous chain of urban and national interaction rituals that focused attention on the efforts of healthcare workers fighting the virus. We count clapping and noise-making in 101 countries and 26 global cities. While we find similar ritual forms and international symbols of solidarity, there was also substantial evidence of conflict and particularism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the impact of the second national research assessment (VQR 2004–10), which was performed in 2011 by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes, on publication strategies by sociologists in Italy. We reconstructed all publications from Italian sociologists in Scopus between 2006 and 2015, that is five years before and after the assessment. We also checked academic tenure and promotions during the assessment. Our results showed the potentially distortive effect of institutional signals on publications given that Italian sociologists published more in journals that were considered influential for assessment, some, however, being of doubtful quality. Our findings would suggest that the use of informed peer review and ad hoc journal ranking could stimulate adaptive responses based on strategic journal targeting to ensure publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race is central to economic life, but race is not central to economic sociology. We argue that economic sociologists should treat racism as a constitutive, structuring force, analytically co-equal with capitalism, patriarchy and nationalism. Our article has three aims. First, we document how canonical and award-winning works of economic sociology do not discuss race and racism, and do not engage with the contemporary sociology of race. Second, we identify six key insights from the sociology of race and suggest how they could influence economic sociology: the emergence of race out of racism, an understanding of racism as structural, the role of whiteness, the intersections between racism and other systems of oppression, the ideology of colorblind racism and the fundamental connections between racism and capitalism. Third, we conclude by discussing recent research that bridges the two subfields and lays the groundwork for an understanding of 'racialized markets' and 'racialized economies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of education as well as philosophers, sociologists and other theoreticians are searching for new models and interpretations of teaching, using new concepts, transversality being one of them. Some treat the new ways based on transversal competence as an augmentation of neoliberal power and its influence at school, some, on the contrary, struggle with the influence and creation of absolutely new modes. Following the latter approach developed by Wallin (2014), Cole (2013, 2018) and Bradley (2018), applying the Deleuzean and Guattarian philosophy to education as regards the concept of transversality, as well as abstract machine, line of flight, people‐yet‐to‐come and other concepts, I examine the educational capacity to apply new updated ways for educating the young generation. I present a multi‐modal experiment in a class using transversality. It is a practical teaching/learning method using multi‐modality in a philosophy class and integrating art. In practice, transversality is interpreted in two ways: radical, which means working with and within transversality in the creational machine, and soft, which refers to working for transversality, that is, the creation of circumstances for new possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion deeply intersects with race, ethnicity, and class in the United States. In many cases, these “variables” cannot be separated. In other words, religion’s relationship to other social structures is “complex”—a term which I borrow from a body of literature known as “complex inequality.” If we accept this complexity, then a central question arises: what are we doing looking for independent effects of religion? Asking this question does not imply that religion is not worth studying sociologically. It also does not mean that we cannot figure out when and how religion matters on its own. But it does mean that we have some work to do—especially on our research designs and methods—if we want to understand religion in all of its complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the reception of the book "The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion" by Peter Berger in Latin America. It offers information on the book which explores the sociological underpinnings of religion and the growth of a modern secular society. Topics include the history of the study of religion in Latin America, Berger's occupational background and achievements, and presence in the Latin American sociology of religion.

In this article, we analyse the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing among the European sociologists. The focus is on the distinction between statistical significance and substantive, sociological significance. We review all articles published in the European Sociological Review between 2000-2004 and 2010-2014 that use regression models (N = 356). Our main aim is to determine whether the authors discuss the effect size of their findings and distinguish substantive from statistical significance. We apply a five-item questionnaire to each article and find that about half of the articles erroneously interpret a statistically insignificant coefficient as a zero effect, while only one in three engage in a discussion of the substantive meaning of the effect sizes. Moreover, our findings show a negative trend in the practice of significance testing over the past 15 years. These results are similar to those of the comparable review in the field of economics. We conclude by providing a set of recommendations on how to reduce the misuse of significance testing in sociological research, through an informed benchmarking of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a biographical and historical account of religious change in China, this article first offers a personal observation of life in a society without religion. In the last three decades or so, however, unbeknown to most sociologists in China and the West, a quiet spiritual revolution has swept the vast land. Contemporary China is indeed a fertile field for sociologists to examine the social importance of religion in the modern world. His scholarly research on religion has been driven both by personal curiosity and a sense of social responsibility. The author explains what questions have propelled his empirical research and theoretical development. Constructively engaged with both classic and contemporary sociologists, the author calls for going beyond national boundaries and transcend various forms of parochialism in their social scientific endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The sociology of religion is not well known for exporting theory to other subdisciplines, for which the author suggests three causes: a lack of interest in religion from other sociologists, a focus on “normal science” rather than exportable theory, and an insistence that religion is a sui generis analytic category. The author then suggests how this third cause can be remedied by no longer thinking of religion as an analytic category but rather as a site though which religious actors can be studied. Doing so would shift religion to a pragmatic, native category, thereby allowing an easier export of concepts discovered while studying religious groups, in the tradition of sociological classics like taboo and charismatic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the historical usages of the term capital and the explosion of different types of supposed ‘capital’ in the twentieth century, including ‘human capital’ and ‘social capital’. In medieval and early modern times, capital meant money investable or invested in business. This meaning persists in business circles today. In contrast, Adam Smith treated physical assets, machines and people as ‘capital’ and this different usage has dominated economics since. The pre-Smithian meaning referred to money or other saleable assets that could be used as collateral. This article questions the change in meaning by economists and sociologists and highlights the importance of collateralisable property for capitalism. ‘Human capital’ can only be collateral if the humans involved are slaves. ‘Social capital’ can never be used as collateral and it is not even owned. These important issues are masked by the broadened notion of ‘capital’. Given the conceptual problems involved, economists and sociologists should consider returning to the pre-Smithian and surviving business usage of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]