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Guns are highly visible in the news, in politics, and in American culture more broadly. While most Americans support some gun control, a significant and vocal minority of Americans are firmly opposed. Drawing on work from the recently developing sociology of modern gun culture, we propose an intersectional threat model—wherein perceived threats to multiple privileged identities provoke a distinct response—for understanding the positions Americans take on gun policies. Using data from a 2018 national survey conducted by the American National Election Survey, we find a robust role for perceived threats along gender, race, and citizenship lines in opposition to background checks for private sales and an assault weapons ban as well as support for arming teachers. Interactions reveal multiplicative effects: that gender threats matter more when racial and immigrant threats are also felt. We discuss implications for the prospect of policy and for understanding the pro-gun alt-right movement and other potential applications of intersectional threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on wealth inequality and wealth concentration has made much progress in establishing statistics on the distribution of private wealth, its historical development, and its components in a large set of countries. Yet, this research is less concerned with country-specific contexts that have an impact on the practical relevance of private wealth and its distribution. This article develops a framework for comparative research that is interested in this question. Starting from a typology that distinguishes six "capacities of wealth," it asserts that private assets can be more important, more powerful, or more tolerable, depending on the institutional regulation of the political economy, for example, limitations on private property rights, welfare state redistribution, the electoral system, and cultural patterns of wealth legitimation. Using the USA and Germany as exemplary cases, I show that such differences exist and are politically relevant and that investigating the practical significance of private wealth in different political economies would open up new research trajectories in wealth research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides the first full account of Alice Mustian, a Salisbury woman who in 1614 built a theatre in her backyard and charged an audience admission to watch a group of children perform a play that she had written about some salacious neighbourhood gossip. While the fact that this remarkable incident occurred is not unknown to scholars, the primary historical evidence about the event itself has remained largely unexamined. Drawing on unexplored ecclesiastical court records in the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, we offer a more complete picture of the performance, its complex social context, and the motivations of the parties involved. We locate it within the field of study of lost plays; we consider how it relates to other forms of theatre and performance culture in the period; and we discuss Mustian as a female dramatist whose play offers a tantalizing glimpse of the kinds of voices whose dramatic works may not have survived into the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of all research papers published in the European Sociological Review in 2016 and 2017 (N = 118) shows that only a minority of papers clearly define the parameter of interest and provide sufficient reasoning for the selected control variables of the statistical analysis. Thus, the vast majority of papers does not reach minimal standards for the selection of control variables. Consequently, a majority of papers interpret biased coefficients, or statistics without proper sociological meaning. We postulate that authors and reviewers should be more careful about control variable selection. We propose graphical causal models in the form of directed acyclic graphs as an example for a parsimonious and powerful means to that end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foundations are one of the oldest organizational forms globally; their number and resources, as well as their socio-political and economic importance, have steadily continued to grow. Yet, foundations' attributes, activities, and actual achievements remain underexplored and poorly understood. This is particularly noticeable in the context of global policy and transnational administration, an area where foundations tend to be subliminal players, acting as a widely unrecognized socio-political undercurrent. Addressing the resulting need for better and alternative conceptualizations of foundations, our paper uses French pragmatic sociology of critique (FPSC), a non-structuralist, post-Bourdesian, approach to sociology, to theorize philanthropic foundations within the policy agora. Through FPSC, we present foundations as a composite setup of activity, where critically reflexive actors bring normative ideologies and knowledge to policy, providing a new avenue for how scholarship can interpret and critique foundations and their influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is the first to analyze data from a national survey to investigate the significance for deaf identity of the different forms of social and technological support that deaf people rely upon. Data were derived from a survey among 839 deaf people and were analyzed with regard to social identification as deaf, hearing, bicultural, and marginal. Findings showed connections between technology and identity, including the use of a range of technology to support being culturally deaf. Findings also showed that the deaf and hearing groups had strong homophilous social networks, while the bicultural group tended toward more mixed but equally strong social connectivity. The marginal group had a much thinner social connectivity and relied more upon institutional social support, findings that are in line with previous research revealing a sub-group struggling with social participation and well-being. Theoretically, the paper builds bridges between the fields of social identity and microsociology and shows how a microsociological perspective brings attention to the significance of reiterated social relations and practice for constructing social identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author shares lessons learned from his international social work research. He talks about conducting a collaborative community needs assessment during his visit to a community in the Philippines. He describes collaborative ethnography as an approach to inquiry that is based on transparent inclusion and community partnership. He discusses his realizations about inclusion and equity, respect, cultural differences, flexibility and embrace of ambiguity, comfort zone and learning edge.

Considerable sociological work shows that the human rights regime is rapidly expanding through isomorphic processes. We provide new insight into human rights diffusion through an analysis of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a global forum in which all states receive human rights recommendations from their peers. We convert the roughly 50,000 recommendations from the first two cycles of the UPR into a relational dataset of states making and receiving recommendations, inductively modeling this process of human rights diffusion through latent class regression. Building on research in the new institutionalism, we find that asymmetric relationships between states make it less likely for human rights recommendations to be accepted, with accepted recommendations tending to be more general and easier to implement. We argue that these partnership patterns provide evidence for normative corridors that give world society its shape. By drawing together world society approaches with relational sociology, we develop new insights into the structuration of human rights and normative change more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly believed that improvements in social opportunities can paradoxically lead to a larger share of frustrated individuals. This paradox has been studied in the field of analytical sociology through a competition model proposed by Raymond Boudon. So far, analyses of the model suggest that the paradox indeed occurs, especially when opportunities improve from a low to medium level and acting on these opportunities carries relatively low costs. However, these analyses are based on the premise that actors care about their absolute payoffs and not their relative payoffs. We extend this premise such that actors care both about their absolute and relative payoffs, by incorporating a form of inequity aversion that we call relative deprivation aversion (RDA). Through game-theoretic analyses, we show that the paradoxical relationship is strongly attenuated when incorporating RDA. Using data from several experiments, we show also empirically that there is no significant increase in relative deprivation under improving opportunities. We conclude that the paradox is theoretically and empirically not likely in the situations captured in Boudon's competition model. We discuss the implications this has for the paradox in general and provide suggestions for situations under which the paradox may be more likely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have explored hiring discrimination as an obstacle to former burnout patients. A substantial share of the burned-out working population, however, returns to the same employer, where they face an even more severe aftermath of burnout syndrome: promotion discrimination. To our knowledge, we are the first to directly address this issue. More specifically, we conducted a vignette experiment with 406 managers, testing the potential of the main burnout stigma theoretically described in the literature as potential mediators of promotion discrimination. Estimates reveal that compared to employees without an employment interruption, former burnout patients are assigned a 34 per cent lower promotion propensity score. Moreover, negative perceptions are associated with a history of job burnout. Four of these perceptions, namely lower leadership capacities, stress tolerance, abilities to take on an exemplary role, and chances of finding another job explain almost half the burnout effect on promotion propensities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unemployment has a negative effect on the mental well-being of individuals who experience it. The well-being of the partners and children of these individuals is also negatively affected by this transition. Little is known, however, on the effect of the transition into unemployment on the mental well-being of the parents of unemployed people. This article analyses the association between child's transition into unemployment and parents' minor psychiatric morbidity, using the General Health Questionnaire score as a proxy. The effects of the length of the unemployment spell and the specific pathway into unemployment are investigated. Eventually, the moderating role of the national level of unemployment is also explored. Data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society are used. The results of the analyses indicate that child's transition into unemployment has a small, statistically significant, negative effect on mothers' mental well-being, whereas the effect on fathers' distress is negligible. The association between mother's mental well-being and child's unemployment does not vary by the duration of the unemployment spell, or by the specific path into unemployment (from employment, studentship, or other inactive status). Differently, the negative effect of child's unemployment on mother's well-being is larger at higher levels of unemployment at the country level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we advocate identifying the colonizing logics of race in criminological analysis, in recognition of their enduring postcolonial presence in societies like the United Kingdom. Our argument unfolds through the life stories narrated by three men entangled by colonial remnants of power(lessness), subservience, and criminalization. For Cairo (black) and Rafan (Asian), their subalternity is exposed through their vulnerability to racialized stereotypes which have a foundation in colonial histories. Both young minority ethnic men are also situated in a transnational, glocalized frame in which their racialized and gendered identities prescribed the nature of their belonging to a British nation-state irrevocably connected to the Empire. Our reflections on a third narrative interview of Barry reveal the dividends of whiteness, simultaneously occluded, disavowed, and yet wilfully upheld, but in a competitive and exclusive form of belonging. In the articulation and analysis of these stories of crime and order, we mine styles of reasoning from postcolonial theory, sociology, history, and philosophy to embolden a postcolonial criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A successful school-to-work transition is crucial to an individual's initial entry into the labor market and overall sustainable career development. Scholarly interest in how emerging adults (i.e. late teens to late 20s) can achieve a successful transition to work has grown considerably, stemming from various disciplines, such as educational sciences, psychology, sociology, and economics. These disciplines have all produced valuable knowledge, yet, they mostly exist as separate silos, without clear integration. To create an overview of the literature, we systematically reviewed school-to-work transition literature and used a sustainable career lens to organize it. Based on 365 articles from the past 28 years, our review findings show that there are different conceptual and theoretical approaches to studying school-to-work transitions. We subsequently organize these perspectives into antecedents categorized into the sustainable career perspective's person, context, and time dimensions. Moreover, we categorize school-to-work transition outcomes as proximal and more distal outcomes related to happiness, health, and productivity indicators. Finally, we reflect on the implications of our review article and suggest ways forward for conceptualizing and theorizing modern school-to-work transitions, along with an agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender equality indexes (GEIs) have become a popular tool for the quantification of unequal resource distribution between males and females. Creating such an index implies an understanding of what gender inequality is, though this question has remained the province of theoretical feminism with little explicit treatment in the methodologically focussed literature. This paper presents an empirically minded, theoretical account of gender inequality, which can be used broadly to inform the development of GEIs. The account proceeds in three steps. First, we argue for a broad understanding of the types of resources that structure gender inequality. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, we highlight the importance of including symbolic capitals (and indeed viewing gender itself as a symbolic capital). By considering gender as a symbolic capital, we are drawn to the ways that normative maleness hides some types of gender inequality. Thus, caregiving norms and leisure time inequality are brought to the foreground. Finally, in recognizing that there is no single unifying female experience, we describe the ways that gender inequality intersect with other forms of disadvantage, motivating the incorporation of (particularly) race into the index. The result is a comprehensive—and theoretically defensible—set of indicators for the measurement of gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the 85th Annual Meeting of the ASA Sociology of Religion Section, to be held August 9–11, 2024, at the Monville Hotel in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Family immigration-related separation is incredibly stressful; however, Latina/o/x separated families might engage in communal coping to help mitigate those stressors. Utilizing the extended theoretical model of communal coping, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 family triads (i.e. separated parent, separated child, primary caregiver) who were experiencing or had recently experienced immigration-related family separation. We explored cultural and structural elements associated with communally or individually coping, and we considered why family members, all of whom experienced separation stress, might cope differently. Among the different types of family members, gender norms were related to communally coping, relying on extended family for support, and protective buffering. Physical distance, as well as limited technology access and literacy also hindered communal coping. When exploring within-family-triad experiences, three themes were apparent: (a) one-sided communal coping, (b) protective buffering at the cost of one's own needs, and (c) communal coping impeded by relational strain. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering the multidimensional nature of a stressor (i.e. family separation) when determining whether people are communally coping; how cultural and structural elements relate to coping; and including multiple family members' perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do relationships shape requests for financial assistance? I conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1666 US-based GoFundMe campaigns for patients with colorectal cancer. I identify three types of campaign organizers—self-funders, financially bonded campaigners and financially independent campaigners—who draw on different narratives of deservingness depending on their relationship to medical costs. I find that organizers use stories to create good matches, which vary depending on the organizer's financial relationship with the patient. Financially independent campaigners, who do not experience the burden of medical bills, tell stories that counter dominant cultural beliefs about dependency. Self-funders and financially bonded campaigners both told stories that managed the stigma of dependency, where the former connects self-sufficiency to employment and the latter argues that medical prices make it impossible to prepare. These findings provide novel insights into theories of relational work and how financial relationships shape narratives of debt, dependency and deservingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on women's drinking occurs in largely disparate disciplines—including public health, health promotion, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies—and draws on differing philosophical understandings and theoretical frameworks. Tensions between the aims and paradigmatic underpinnings of this research (across and within disciplines) have meant that knowledge and insight can be frequently disciplinary-specific and somewhat siloed. However, in line with the social and economic determinants of the health model, alcohol research needs approaches that can explore how multiple gender-related factors—biological, psycho-social, material, and socio-cultural—combine to produce certain drinking behaviours, pleasures and potential harms. We argue that critical realism as a philosophical underpinning to research can accommodate this broader conceptualization, enabling researchers to draw on multiple perspectives to better understand women's drinking. We illustrate the benefit of this approach by presenting a critical realist theoretical framework for understanding women's drinking that outlines interrelationships between the psychoactive properties of alcohol, the role of embodied individual characteristics and the material, institutional and socio-cultural contexts in which women live. This approach can underpin and foster inter-disciplinary research collaboration to inform more nuanced health promotion practices and policies to reduce alcohol-related harm in a wide range of women across societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare provision is often conceived through the lens of decommodification and analysed in (re)distributive terms. This article argues that a distributive approach does not sufficiently capture the complexity of 21st century welfare state dynamics. It proposes re-conceptualizing provision as a mix of three policy functions: raising and maintaining human capital stock; easing the flow of gendered life-course and labour-market transitions; guaranteeing social safety-net buffers. This analytical perspective allows theorizing life-course multiplier effects and policy (non-)complementarities, both at the level of individual objective and subjective well-being and in terms of aggregate employment, poverty and fiscal sustainability. This perspective also enables us to extend the temporal horizon of welfare politics beyond short-term electoral logics for explaining welfare reform. The article underscores how methodological pluralism remains key for understanding contemporary welfare states, and for grasping welfare outcomes and institutional change in a research endeavour that involves both generalization and contextualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives I work from a gendered life-course perspective to examine the association between older parents' fertility history (i.e. timing and parity) and their risk of cognitive impairment in the United States. Methods I analyze nationally representative data from 9 waves over 16 years of the Health and Retirement Study (2000–2016). The sample includes 14,543 respondents (6,108 men and 8,435 women) aged 50 and older at the baseline survey. I examine the relationship between parity, age at first birth, and age at last birth with risk of cognitive impairment using nonlinear discrete-time hazard models. Results Adjusting for the effects of full covariates, there are U-shaped relationships between women's age at last birth and risk of cognitive impairment and between women's parity and risk of cognitive impairment. In the sensitivity tests, the relationships remain robust when sampling weights are applied, or mortality selection is corrected. Discussion Fertility timing and parity are likely factors associated with the risk of cognitive impairment for older women. Understanding fertility history and its impact on cognition can help identify the most vulnerable subpopulations, so that more effective interventions can be made to improve cognitive functioning among older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives Age-friendly community initiatives (AFCIs) strive to make localities better for long and healthy lives by fostering improvements across social, physical, and service environments. Despite the heightened need for community supports during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, very little research has addressed the work of AFCIs in the context of this crisis. We aimed to develop theory on how AFCI core teams have contributed to community responses during the pandemic, as well as what contexts have influenced the initiatives' ability to contribute. Research Design and Methods As part of a multiyear, community-partnered study on the development of philanthropically supported initiatives in northern New Jersey, we conducted qualitative interviews with 8 AFCI core teams during the winter of 2020–2021. The interviews focused on the leaders' efforts at that time, with probing questions concerning enabling factors for their community responses. We analyzed the data using an inductive coding process encompassing open, axial, and subcoding. Results The analysis indicated four distinct roles of AFC core groups: good community partner , creator , advocate , and communications broker. We further found that AFC leaders primarily drew on three types of capital—human, social, and tangible—to enact these roles, oftentimes in cumulative ways. Discussion and Implications We interpret our study's findings and their implications by integrating insights from theories of social impact. We further highlight the importance of continued research on community-centered approaches to promote aging in community during times of societal crisis, and otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, in order to improve outcomes for children from ethnic minority backgrounds and to speed up the adoption process, the UK government changed the Children and Families Act. The legal requirement on adoption agencies to consider ethnicity in the decision around 'matching' was removed, thus clearing the way for transracial placements. This article interrogates the impact of the change in law on social work practice around adoption, using the experiences of diverse Muslim-heritage children as a case study. Grounded in the sociology of religion, the findings presented here are based on semi-structured qualitative interviews (n  = 28) with those involved in the care of Muslim-heritage children. In discussing qualitative findings, all adopters and prospective adopters interviewed in this research insisted on adopting children who 'look like them', and social workers continued to look for the 'best' possible matches. Children from minoritised backgrounds continue to wait for long periods before finding permanent homes. Our evidence raises questions about the efficacy of policy guidance. Based on this evidence we conclude that greater strategizing is needed around the recruitment of adopters from diverse backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 106 Táíwò Olúfhemi O. Reconsidering Reparations. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 25 Du Bois W. E. Burghardt. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 27 Du Bois William Edward Burghardt, Jones Mack H. 2017. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 21 Dean Lorraine T. 2018. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 26 Du Bois William Edward Burghardt, Diggs Irene. [Extracted from the article]

Apparently growing punitiveness in many countries toward the end of the twentieth century prompted considerable criminological activity which focused on attempting to understand trends and contrasts in systems and patterns of punishment. Although to date this literature has tended to treat policing and punishment as being largely separate spheres of activity this paper advances two reasons for paying greater attention to policing in this context. First, and briefly, to reflect the fact that the police are the 'gatekeepers' to the penal system, and therefore in some senses inseparable from other penal practices. Second, and more centrally, that in various forms policing both involves, and is often experienced as, punishment. Attempts to understand the nature of and differences between penal states will be enhanced by the inclusion of policing within its ambit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the significance of re-analysing material from social-science archives in the context of John Goldthorpe's critique of the use of data from the Affluent Worker project. Drawing on my own role in elaborating this approach, most comprehensively in my book Identities and Social Change , I defend the value of re-analysis both as a means of bringing out previously unknown popular testimonies, and also in reflecting on the way that social scientific research has itself been a significant force for social change in recent decades. I consider how the practice of re-analysis can be defended even when social-science protocols regarding replication cannot be used, and reflect more broadly the significance of the Affluent Worker study in shaping understandings of social change in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-visits contemporary surveys of the cinema in the 1930s and 1940s to explore the implications that the cinema's role as an "emotional frontier" between everyday life and the imagination had on the emotional lives of boys and young men. It makes a novel contribution to the history of youth and emotions, arguing that for boys and young men who were disconnected from social life, the cinema was an "emotional refuge," a space of heightened emotional encounter, in which conventional assumptions about masculinity could be fractured and "feminine" sensibilities otherwise difficult to express publicly could receive cathartic release. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that W. E. B. Du Bois generates the beginnings of what I call a "sociology of feeling" in his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Bill Hardwig and Sarah Wilson contend that Du Bois developed Quest and other fictional works as alternatives to his prior experiments in quantitative sociology, which he found to be reductive. Although it may be tempting to think that Du Bois's literary experimentation is proof of his disillusionment with the discipline, I claim that he actually works to augment the explanatory power of an affective sociology in Quest. He moves away from overly statistical methods but not sociology as a framework. As a Black sociologist, Du Bois was deeply invested in network thinking, which, among other insights, identifies separate incidents of racial oppression as components of a greater system. In Quest , Du Bois enriches his network thinking through a formal innovation hitherto unremarked by scholars: a persistent motif of trembling. Quivers and shivers mark moments of heightened affective connection between characters and environments in Quest. Through trembling bodies and objects, Du Bois interweaves social and economic relations with affective ones in a multivalent network contextualizing living persons. Harnessing the formal flexibility and duration of the novel to convey the affective complexity of embodied networks, Quest is a multidisciplinary enterprise that furthers sociological knowledge and anticipates affect theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review article I consider Kenneth Einar Himma's argument that law is necessarily coercive. While casting doubt on Himma's framing of the issues as well as on his specific claims in support of that conclusion, I suggest some alternate avenues for arguing that law is a coercive institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, where around 19,500 dialects are spoken, there is a great abundance of fiction quite rich in varied descriptions of old age and aging. While scholars like Pramod K. Nayar and Ira Raja have recently begun studying Indian literary texts written in English from the perspective of literary gerontology, those literary experiences of aging (which are originally in languages like Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Oriya, etc.) are yet to be analyzed from a gerontological point of view. The present paper aims at studying the experiences of old age in 2 Indian short stories (one from Bengali Literature and another from Tamil Literature)—Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay's "Drabomoyee Goes to Kashi" ("Drabomoyeer Kashibash" in Bengali) and T. Janakiraman's "The Puppet" ("Vilayattu Bommai" in Tamil). Regarding "Drabomoyee Goes to Kashi," the paper interrogates the problems in the emplacement of Hindu older widows to Kashi and explores the possibilities in Drabomoyee from ecofeminist and creatural perspectives. The discussions on "The Puppet" chiefly reflect on the social exclusion of the aging bodies of people living with dementia. Through the story of Venu, the paper shows that what the society or family generally expects from the older persons suffering from dementia may not do any good to them, and may instead lead to their institutionalization and other forms of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives Personal networks play a fundamental role in the daily lives of older adults. Although many studies examine how life course factors and personal preferences shape network formation, fewer consider how the places in which older adults live present opportunities and obstacles to cultivate social relationships. In the present study, we explore how geographic context is associated with the ability to bridge social ties within one's personal network. Methods We use data from the Person-to-Person Health Interview Survey (N = 709), a representative sample of Indiana residents. Personal network data were collected using 4 name-generating prompts. Logistic regression models and linear regression models were used to assess 2 measures of network bridging. Results A minority of respondents reported the ability to bridge ties within their networks. Respondents residing in rural and mixed counties were less likely than urban respondents to have at least one member of their network who was completely disconnected from all other members. Discussion These findings suggest that the communities in which older adults live condition opportunities for accessing unique network resources. Additional research adopting a network perspective is needed to provide insight into geographic disparities occurring among the older population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries, there are calls for children to be allowed to participate in social work decision-making. This article analyses child participation vis-à-vis social assistance (SA), which is a municipal cash benefit representing the last safety net. In Sweden, SA is part of the professional field of social work and national policy recommends that children are consulted. The aim is to analyse local policies and practices regarding child participation, and the data are based on case studies in six social service offices. Unlike most participation studies, children's participation is conceived as an institutional pressure and the concept of decoupling is used to examine how local authorities relate to participation. The findings show that in local policies there is a general openness towards participation, but in practice no efforts are being made to promote participation. The absence of participation is analysed as deriving from organisational barriers (practices are adult-centred and child welfare units are seen as responsible for participation) and the scepticism of social workers (participation is an infringement on parental obligations and children should be protected from involvement in financial issues). The article ends with a discussion on the decoupling and adequacy of children's participation in settings comparable with Swedish SA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the capacity for social control to act as a complement and alternative to the law in controlling corporate harm. Social control can manifest as demands that businesses obtain a social, not just a legal, licence to operate which can provide an avenue for communities to reject or shape company operations. Drawing on parallels with the ambiguities that hinder the criminalization of business conduct, this paper shows how the social licence can also be used to silence critical voices or justify harmful practices. This ambiguity hinges on struggles around what is or is not socially desirable, which can engender significant conflict. Whilst this conflict might be inevitable, even productive in reducing corporate harm, it can leave a debilitating social legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The David Miller case raises the question, does liberal free speech doctrine require academics to defend the antisemitic conspiracy-talk of a sociology professor? The article opens with a discussion of Louise Glück's poem 'A Myth of Innocence', and then proceeds towards an answer to this question, pausing to address details of the Miller case itself when the general argument requires it to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The finding that men are disproportionately represented in positions of workplace authority to an extent that cannot be explained by human capital attributes and location within the structure of the economy is well documented. Arguing that different authority positions are differentially gendered, this article tests a more refined hypothesis: that the gender gap in authority is larger in positions that are relatively seen as more suitable for men. We distinguish authority positions by the amount of authority and the gender-typed control over resources they involve, hypothesizing a larger gender gap in positions with larger proportions of supervisory, as opposed to nonsupervisory tasks, and in positions with control over organizational, as opposed to human, resources. Our findings, based on Dutch linked survey and administrative data from about 32,000 employees who have started their careers between 1999 and 2016, largely support these ideas. We find an overall larger gender gap in positions with largely supervisory tasks as opposed to positions with only some supervisory tasks. Additionally, the authority gender gap is the largest in largely supervisory positions with control over organizational resources and smallest in positions with control over human resources. We discuss both theoretical and practical implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of precarious work in recent decades has motivated a large body of research on its implications for health. While considerable work has focused on whether precarious work undermines health, much less is known about why it matters. To fill this gap, this paper offers and tests a conceptual model whereby the effects of precarious work on health are mediated by social marginality, specifically reduced self-efficacy, weaker social integration, and lower social capital. All three mechanisms are understood as both social consequences of precarious work and important determinants of health. Empirically, we use data from the European Social Survey and investigate (1) conditional direct effects of precarious work on self-rated health and (2) extent of mediation via the three mechanisms. Furthermore, we assess the generalizability of the model across five welfare state regimes that prior work has deemed to be important moderators of the health–precarious work relationship. Results indicate precarious work has significant conditional direct effects and indirect effects through all three mediators that significantly reduce effect of precarious work on health. This is robust in the general sample and for four of five welfare state regimes. These findings highlight a previously unexplored vector connecting precarious work to health and indicate that the effects of precarious work on perceptions of self and social relations is a key link to poorer health. The study also expands conceptualization of the broad role of socioeconomic status for health inequalities and furthers understanding of the mechanisms at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how social capital is divided across classes in Chile, one of the most unequal countries in the world. We analyse the extent to which upper-, middle-, and lower class individuals congregate in social networks with similar others, while following Bourdieu and expecting that in particular the networks of the higher social strata are segregated in terms of social capital. We test our argument with large-scale, representative survey data for the Chilean urban population aged 18–75 years (n  = 2,517) and build an integrated indicator of people's social class that combines measures of education, occupational class, and household income. Our regression analyses show that upper-class individuals have larger networks and access to more varied and prestigious social resources than their middle- and lower class counterparts. Interestingly, however, we found a U-shaped relationship between social class and class homogeneity, indicating that network segregation is high at the top as well as at the bottom of the class-based social strata. In contrast, the classes in the middle have more heterogeneous class networks, possibly forming an important bridge between the "edges" of the class structure. These findings demonstrate that whereas social and economic capital cumulates in higher classes, the lower classes are socially deprived next to their economic disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives This study examines the longitudinal relationships between retrospective reports of early-life social relationships (i.e. having good friends, parent–child relationship quality, and childhood neighborhood social cohesion) and episodic memory in China. Methods We analyzed 2 waves of data (2011 and 2015) from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. The analytical sample included 9,285 respondents aged 45 and older at baseline. A lagged dependent variable approach was used to estimate the associations between measures of early-life social relationships and episodic memory change at the study's 4-year follow-up. Results Retrospective reports of better early-life social relationships are significantly associated with higher levels of episodic memory performance in 2015 among middle-aged and older Chinese, controlling for episodic memory in 2011, childhood socioeconomic status, adulthood sociodemographic variables, and the history of stroke. Educational attainment accounts for a significant portion of the associations between early-life social relationships and episodic memory. In contrast, mental health and social engagement in adulthood account for a small part of these associations. Discussion The findings suggest that positive early-life social relationships are beneficial for episodic memory in mid- and late life, and more research is needed to examine the underlying mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relational sociology, or the idea that relationships are the starting point for empirical research, offers comparative law distinctive analytical frameworks, heuristics, and methods. This Article proposes that these could advance traditional goals of comparative law by reconceiving fundamental categories of law, state, and society in relational terms while broadening the scope of useful comparison, and adopting a processual view of legal communities, legal knowledge, and culture rooted in practical action. It also highlights how comparative law offers sociology opportunities for deeper engagement with law, culture, transnationalism, and the dynamics of different normative orders. A relational analysis of disciplinary knowledge production suggests that deeper crossdisciplinary engagement has been limited less by shared interests than by the structures of academic knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a re-emergence of international interest in relationship-based social work. This article uses children's accounts of their relationships with social workers to build on previous research to promote children's safety and well-being. Interviews were undertaken with 111 children aged six- to eighteen-years old across ten different local authorities in England, as part of the evaluation of Munro, Turnell and Murphy's Signs of Safety pilots within the Department for Education's Children's Social Care Innovation Programme. The interviews reveal four key findings: that children look for care and reciprocity in their relationships with social workers and this can be achieved through listening and small acts of kindness; that they are adept at recognising aspects of social workers' verbal and non-verbal communications which indicate to the child whether they are listening and interested in them; that there are times in which children are particularly vulnerable especially if parents are resistant to engagement or children's trust is broken; and that children actively use their agency to control their communication and engagement. The article concludes by highlighting children's relational resilience and the importance of ensuring opportunities for children to develop new relationships with social workers when previous relationships have broken down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses events that marked the twentieth anniversary of the Rome Statute. Building on sociological methods and original data, the article shows how these events were dominated by particular elites and by an orthodox perspective on international criminal justice that excluded other points of view and professional groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication scholars have begun to investigate various links between empirical research and normative theory. In that vein, this article explores how Boltanski and Thévenot's sociology of critique can enhance our empirical and normative understanding of controversies in media ethics. The sociology of critique and its justification model provide a comprehensive descriptive framework for studying practices of moral evaluation and the social goods at stake in them. First, I discuss some prevailing approaches in media ethics. Second, I explicate how the sociology of critique defines situations of normative justification and supplies a model of their basic requirements. Third, I show how this model can be used to analyze the social background of a media ethics controversy. Last, I suggest how the descriptive approach of the sociology of critique can identify conditions in morally pluralistic social settings that pose challenges to normative theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives Although siblings represent central members of the networks of caregivers and their parents, there has been limited attention to how siblings affect one another's well-being during caregiving. In this article, we draw from theories of identity and stress to examine the impact that siblings have on caregivers' psychological well-being. Specifically, we employ a mixed-methods approach to explore whether caregivers' perceptions that their siblings are critical of the care they provide their mother are associated with higher depressive symptoms and the mechanisms underlying this association. Methods Using quantitative data collected from 404 caregivers nested within 231 families as part of the Within-Family Differences Study, we conduct mediation analyses to examine whether perceived sibling criticisms are associated with caregivers' depressive symptoms (a) directly and/or (b) indirectly through sibling tension. We then analyze qualitative data collected from the same caregivers to gain insight into the processes underlying statistical associations. Results Quantitative analyses revealed that there was no direct relationship between perceived sibling criticisms and depressive symptoms; there was, however, an indirect relationship such that perceived sibling criticisms were associated with greater sibling tension, which in turn was associated with higher depressive symptoms. These quantitative findings were corroborated by qualitative analyses, which demonstrated that, in an effort to mitigate the negative impact of sibling criticisms, caregivers often employed strategies that may have fueled sibling tension. Discussion These findings demonstrate how identity processes, as well as the family networks in which caregiving takes place, shape the experiences and consequences of parent care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The walking interview is used to explore the lived experiences and meanings individuals attach to place(s). Despite scholarly interest in place and volunteering, attention to the walking interview is lacking. This article presents an exploratory study, which invited five volunteers to participate in a walking interview. Our aim is to discuss the walking interview to expand the range of methodologies employed in research on volunteering, particularly volunteering and place. The walking interview has novel implications for the conceptualization of volunteers and for the meanings individuals identify in their volunteer experience(s). Volunteers can be conceptualized as mobile subjects to explore the implications of physiological movement in place for the volunteer experience. Walking can unearth the significance of emotions and memories to volunteers' negotiation of the 'everyday politics' of volunteering. The mobility of people and objects in sites of volunteering are salient as they reveal embodied aspects of the volunteer experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intervention efforts include social support as a mechanism to promote well-being in diverse communities. Cultivating support can be complex, particularly in disadvantaged urban communities. This complexity is compounded by a lack of studies that attempt to map associations between urban neighborhood environments and social support exchanges. Authors address this gap by analyzing data from the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Life Span study (Wave 1, 2004–2009), a 20-year epidemiological investigation of African American and White adults living in Baltimore City. Results of ordinary least squares linear regression models (N  =   2,002) indicate that individuals who report that their neighborhoods have more social resources (p =.03), social order (p <.001), social cohesion (p =.002), and social control (p =.001) tend to exchange more social support. Respondents in neighborhoods with more social disorder report providing more support (p =.02), but receive less (p =.004). Neighborhood social environment is more consistently associated with support received from friends or other kin compared with spouses and children. These findings suggest that neighborhood social environments may be a key contextual consideration for social work intervention efforts and indicate need for macro-level interventions to complement existing micro-level interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earl Wright II 1 and Aldon D. Morris 2 1 Rhodes College, 2 Northwestern University In the late 1990s an upstart and insurgent push arose in the discipline of sociology to expand the literature on the contributions of William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois beyond cursory acknowledgments of his 1899 book Philadelphia Negro and his theories including "double consciousness" and the talented tenth. Stated simply, Morris demonstrated that Du Bois' scholarly activities constituted the methodological and analytical blueprint that dominates the current discipline and that should have made Du Bois' name synonymous with the discipline for many decades prior to this moment. Extending beyond previous scholarship, Morris argued that Du Bois should be credited as the founder of American scientific sociology because the methodological sophistication of his works was much more scientific than those of his contemporaries at well-resourced and more highly rated institutions. [Extracted from the article]