We checked 6 sociology journals on Friday, January 16, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period January 09 to January 15, we retrieved 8 new paper(s) in 3 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

The Social Origins of Effort: How Incentives Reduce Socioeconomic Disparities among Children
Jonas Radl, William Foley, Lea Katharina KrĂśger, Patricia Lorente, Alberto Palacios-Abad, Heike Solga, Jan Stuhler, Madeline Swarr
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Cognitive effort (i.e., the mobilization of mental resources for task performance) is essential to equality of opportunity and meritocracy because it epitomizes individual agency. However, sociological theories of social inequality in effort are scarce and partial, and available empirical measures of effort are unreliable and lack validity. We fill this lacuna by (1) elaborating a theoretical account of how socioeconomic status (SES) affects children’s cognitive effort, (2) developing a novel research design for measuring effort using simple-yet-demanding behavioral tasks and varying incentive conditions, and (3) presenting evidence based on this laboratory design featuring 1,360 5th-grade students. We theorize that greater material abundance and lower environmental threat reduce the subjective costs of exerting effort for higher-SES children, and that parental socialization emphasizing autonomy gives them more intrinsic motivation compared to lower-SES children. Conversely, we posit that the effort of lower-SES children is more susceptible to material and status rewards. Supporting our expectations, we find that social origin effects on effort are largest when incentives are absent, yet decrease notably when material incentives are introduced. Albeit surprisingly modest and malleable, social origin effects on effort challenge voluntaristic notions of individual agency. Crucially though, providing tangible performance rewards can significantly narrow socioeconomic disparities in effort.

European Sociological Review

Labour market insecurity and parental co-residence in the United Kingdom: heterogeneities by parental class and age
Vincent Jerald Ramos, Ann Berrington
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Amidst young adults’ increasing labour market insecurity and rates of parental co-residence, this article examines how unemployment and underexplored forms of non-standard employment (NSE)—underemployment and temporary and agency work (TAW)—are associated with inter-generational co-residence in the United Kingdom. Refining the feathered nest/gilded cage hypothesis to incorporate forms of non-NSE, we analyse how parental social class moderates this relationship across the transition to adulthood phase, driven by both protective and propellant motives. We estimate logistic regression models using the 2021–2024 waves of the UK Labour Force Survey, which allow for a precise identification of time-related underemployment and agency working. Results suggest that states of labour underutilization (underemployment) and impermanence (TAW) as well as unemployment are all associated with higher probabilities of parental co-residence relative to standard employment. This relationship is in part mediated by earnings disparities. Further, socio-economic background matters—the positive insecurity co-residence association is most pronounced amongst young adults from service-class backgrounds. This is consistent with a refined feathered nest/gilded cage hypothesis whereby higher parental resources facilitate co-residence at earlier phases of adulthood transitions, especially for young adults facing labour market insecurities, but this slightly tapers off with age.
Educational hypogamy and gender equality within couples: a review of competing hypotheses and evidence from the Generations and Gender Survey
Nadia Steiber, Christina Siegert
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This study examines the implications for gender equality of the increasing prevalence of heterosexual couples in which the woman is more highly educated than the man (‘educational hypogamy’). It provides a structured overview of competing theoretical predictions regarding the association of hypogamy with gender equality within couples and formulates specific hypotheses that address selection into hypogamous unions. Using data from the Generations and Gender Survey and employing diagonal reference models, the study investigates how hypogamy relates to gender attitudes and the gender division of labour within couples, net of partners’ educational attainment levels. Results indicate that hypogamy is associated with a more egalitarian division of paid work, particularly among parents, and with fathers expressing more supportive attitudes towards maternal employment. However, although hypogamous women are more strongly engaged in the labour market after becoming mothers than their counterparts in homogamous unions, their partners’ contributions to household chores do not increase proportionately, reflecting a pattern consistent with the ‘stalled gender revolution’ theory. Thus, hypogamy is associated with more gender equality in labour market participation but not with a more equitable sharing of household tasks.
An experimental study on institutions and social norms of tax payment
Gian Luca Pasin, Aron Szekely, Flaminio Squazzoni
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The production of public goods, which are fundamental to well-functioning societies, requires the payment of taxes, but taxpayers have clear incentives to free-ride because of the low probability of sanctions. Despite these incentives, many do pay, and research suggests that non-monetary mechanisms are important drivers. Here, we focus on social norms and propose that they drive tax paying and mediate the relationship between institutional quality and tax payments, potentially leading to either virtuous or vicious feedback cycles. Using two studies conducted in Italy, a nationally representative survey and vignette experiment (NStudy I = 1,218) and an online behavioural experiment (NStudy II = 448), we show that: (i) social norms and perceptions of institutional quality predict tax payments; (ii) social norms affect tax payment intentions and behaviour; and (iii) institutional context influences these dynamics either positively or negatively through social norms. Our results highlight the essential role of social norms in shaping tax payments and their link to context-specific institutional factors.

Social Forces

Dualization of corporate control: lifetimers, external appointees, and CEO succession in Japan
Jiwook Jung, Eunmi Mun, Hiroshi Ono
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We investigate mechanisms of institutional stability under profound environmental change, using corporate control in Japan as a critical case. Building on the concept of dualization in the comparative institutions literature, we theorize how dualized power relations at the top of the firm sustain insider control. Using data on executive board members of all non-financial firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange from 1993 to 2016, we show that “lifetimers”—employees who spend their entire careers with a single company—continue to enjoy substantial advantages in CEO succession. They maintain their dominance by promoting fellow lifetimers and constraining the prospects of other candidates. At the same time, “external appointees”—organizational outsiders who join the firm directly as executive board members—also benefit from their institutional ties and boundary-spanning roles. Yet, unlike lifetimers, their relative advantages are fragile, as they lack durable intra-firm power bases and are more exposed to shifting external conditions and internal politics. Our findings suggest that resistance by organizational insiders, combined with the selective co-optation of outsiders, can help preserve institutional arrangements in a changing environment.
Volunteering trajectories across crises: resilience, persistence and spill-over between ordinary and crisis volunteering
LÌrke Høgenhaven, Louis Møgelmose, Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, Jonas Toubøl
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This study contributes to the sociology of volunteering and crisis research by analyzing the little studied relationship between crisis volunteering (addressing societal crises) and ordinary volunteering (unrelated to crises). This is achieved by examining sector level resilience of ordinary volunteering during crises, possible spill-over between ordinary and crisis volunteering, and the persistence of individual crisis volunteers across the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022 and the reception of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion in 2022. Using cross-sectional data from random samples of Danish adults before (n2020 = 3,519), during (n2021 = 1,700) and after (n2024 = 1,548) the pandemic, the results show that ordinary volunteering was highly resilient to the pandemic despite a significant reduction during the crisis. A five-round panel (n = 694) further shows that, while ordinary volunteering prior to the crisis correlated with crisis volunteering, crisis volunteering did not spill over into ordinary volunteering after the pandemic. Rather, crisis volunteers persisted engaging in crisis volunteering when Ukrainian refugees arrived. These findings have important implications for civil society studies because the absence of spill-over between ordinary and crisis volunteering suggests that the two types of volunteering operate according to distinct logics and the persistence of crisis volunteers across crisis challenges notions of crisis volunteering being spontaneous and emergent.
Does stringent climate policy decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions?
Ryan P Thombs, Andrew K Jorgenson
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A foundational question in environmental sociology is whether economic growth can be sufficiently decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions. Scholars working in different analytical perspectives assert that such a decoupling is largely contingent on more stringent climate policy that mandates or incentivizes the reduction of carbon-intensive production. However, there is limited research on whether policy has such a moderating influence. Here, we extend the literature by testing whether more stringent climate policy moderates the effect of economic growth on greenhouse gas emissions using panel data from 1990 to 2022 for forty-nine countries. Building on the extended two-way fixed effects estimator, we advance an approach for estimating country-specific and average short-run and long-run effects with dynamic models that we show outperform other macro panel estimators using Monte Carlo experiments. Using this approach, we find that, on average, strong climate policy stringency decouples economic growth from emissions in the short run and the long run and that the decoupling effect is largest in higher-income nations. However, we also find that greater policy stringency is associated with increases in emissions in lower-income and middle-income nations. We then build a hypothetical three-nation World that consists of a lower-income, middle-income, and higher-income nation and develop a suite of scenarios that differ based on their rate of economic growth and climate policy stringency. The results suggest that steady-state and degrowth scenarios offer the most sustainable futures in terms of lower emissions and that degrowth is the most equitable in terms of reducing emissions. We conclude by arguing that these findings have significant implications for policymaking and for key theoretical debates in sociology regarding economic growth and the environment.
Navigating white space: how Black and Latine youth deepen their understanding of race and space through community-based education and youth workers as spatial guides
Bianca J Baldridge, Marlo A Reeves
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Guided by theories of racial capitalism, “white space,” and “bodies out of place” as frameworks, and through combined analyses of two studies in the same city with shared participants, the authors argue that Black and Latine youth possess a spatial awareness of white space. Community-based educational spaces (CBES) and youth workers, who are central to the process of sociopolitical development, act as spatial guides, fostering opportunities for youth to: (1) make sense of the spaces they encounter, and (2) deepen their understanding of race and space as a core component of sociopolitical development toward social action. The authors suggest that relationships between youth workers and youth within CBES are essential catalysts for deepening youths’ understanding and navigating white space.