Much recent sociological work on religion in the United States is written outside the field’s two established paradigms: secularization theory and the 1990s “religious economy” approach. Drawing together strands of recent theoretical innovation and contemporary religious developments that challenge the existing paradigms, we introduce elements of a twenty-first-century paradigm for the sociology of American religion. We argue that the shape-shifting nature of American religion (and secularity) can be productively conceptualized as an effect of unbundling—that is, a process by which religious goods once offered as a package by institutionalized religious authorities are now offered individually or repackaged into various hybrid and contested forms by a wide array of suppliers. We demonstrate the value of our approach by showing how two major religious traditions, Christianity and Buddhism, have become unbundled. In both cases, our approach positions us to apprehend a range of phenomena beyond traditional organized religion, as well as how organized religion adapts to fit this new de facto unbundled landscape. We offer criteria for delimiting the scope of this broader unbundled religious landscape, and discuss the implications of our approach for scholarship on religion, meaning making, and social change.

How do social network interactions at the micro level generate novel network structures at the macro level? While recent methodological advancements have enabled the statistical analysis of micro–macro network effects, the current literature says little about the conditions sufficient to draw causal inference, how to evaluate indirect pathways that generate macro-level structures, or how to assess the sensitivity of empirical estimates to model choice. We address each of these problems in the micro effects on macro structure (MEMS) framework for micro–macro network analysis. We first report new formal results showing that the MEMS is nonparametrically identified under the conditional ignorability assumption and that, when identified, the MEMS can be interpreted under the “causes of effects” framework. We then show that the MEMS can be decomposed into direct and indirect effects to conduct mediation analysis when the interest is in multimechanistic pathways, where micro mechanisms shape macro outcomes by acting indirectly via intervening micro mechanisms. Finally, we build on these results to introduce a simple sensitivity test for the robustness of empirical estimates to model selection. We illustrate the utility of the methods in an empirical analysis of direct and indirect pathways linking in-group preference, out-group avoidance, and triadic closure to network segregation.

We expand upon the structural human ecology tradition by recasting its classic drivers as historically racialized mechanisms operating within a system of racial capitalism. We draw on critical approaches to environmental justice to link multiscalar processes to material infrastructures, theorizing redlining and interstate-highway planning as coupled racial projects that organize the production of transportation emissions across urban space. To test this empirically, we combine Home Owners’ Loan Corporation grades with on-road carbon dioxide (CO₂) and estimate multilevel models for 9661 census tracts nested in 194 US cities (2010, 2015). Redlined areas exhibit higher on-road CO₂ net of contemporary tract characteristics. Associations between affluence, whiteness, and emissions are strong in greenlined areas but largely flat in redlined areas, and public-transit commuting shares show little relationship to emissions across grades. Together, the results indicate that spatially fixed, historically racialized transport infrastructure continues to concentrate emissions in disinvested neighborhoods regardless of who lives there now.

Over the past decades, higher education has expanded dramatically worldwide, yet how this transformation shapes public beliefs in meritocracy remains underexplored. This study examines how the expansion of higher education has shaped public beliefs in meritocracy across thirty Western countries. Drawing on four waves of repeated cross-national data from the International Social Survey Programme (1987, 1992, 2009, 2019, and ISSP), three-level mixed-effects models show that the gross tertiary enrollment ratio is positively associated with overall endorsement of meritocratic beliefs. Individuals with a college degree express stronger meritocratic beliefs than non-degree holders. Furthermore, the magnitude of the attainment gap increases with gross tertiary enrollment ratios, indicating that higher education expansion (HEE) reinforces belief divides. The findings suggest that HEE diffuses meritocratic norms while simultaneously stratifying their credibility across social groups. It further reveals that mass higher education generates a dual consciousness of meritocracy, combining endorsement and skepticism among individuals. The study highlights how expanding education systems shape the ideological foundations of inequality and underscores the paradoxical role of higher education as both a universalistic script and a positional resource.

Daily social interactions provide access to key social resources, yet little research has examined how these interactions vary across geographic space—particularly in later life. Using ecological momentary assessment data from a state-representative study of older adults in Indiana, we examine how interactions with different partners vary across a continuum of municipality population density. Further, we assess whether this variation is shaped by social opportunity structures—such as number of community parks, theaters, and volunteer organizations—and whether patterns persist during leisure time, when individuals are free to choose their interaction partners. Results show that higher population density is associated with more time spent alone, more interactions with “shared-foci partners” (i.e., partners known through foci of activity, such as neighbors, professionals, congregation members—though associations are driven primarily by professionals, strangers, and “others”), and fewer interactions with kin. Adjusting for social opportunity structures does not affect the observed association between population density and aloneness, interactions with shared-foci partners, or interactions with kin, indicating that differential access to social opportunity spaces does not explain these relationships. Restricting analyses to leisure activities reveals that differences in shared-foci partner interactions by population density disappear—implying they are driven by variation in obligatory tasks—while differences in kin interactions and, to a lesser extent, time spent alone persist. By identifying population density as a structural factor that shapes everyday sociality, this study underscores the role of geographic context in structuring older adults’ access to social connection and the resources embedded in daily interaction.

Job precarity is a core mechanism of workplace inequality that underlies economic segmentation between organizational insiders and outsiders. Yet less is known about how institutional contexts affect dual employment arrangements that create differential rewards between long-term and short-term workers. Drawing on institutional distinctions between China’s state and private sectors under marketization, this study shows how compensation for employment relations differ across sectors, how sector-specific returns vary with marketization levels, and how these differential returns contribute to overall earnings inequality within sectors. In the private sector, labor flexibility helps offset the costs of maintaining long-term employment through lower pay for short-term workers. In the state sector, the socialist personnel system preserves advantages for permanent employees, whereas the economic egalitarianism norms constrain the sustainability of these advantages under dual employment relations. Analyzing data from the nationally representative China Family Panel Studies 2018 and leveraging provincial marketization variations, I find that the state sector has less employment precarity than the private sector overall but imposes a larger earnings penalty on short-term employment. This penalty is smaller in more marketized provinces, mitigating overall earnings inequality associated with employment type within the state sector. In the private sector, however, both forms of inequality are larger in more marketized provinces. These within-sector earnings penalties and their association with marketization are most pronounced among low-paid workers, and cross-sector disparities are concentrated between government and public institutions and private enterprises. The findings challenge the view that marketization uniformly worsens precarious workers’ earnings and demonstrate the institutional foundations of labor market inequality in contemporary China.