We checked 6 sociology journals on Friday, December 05, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period November 28 to December 04, we retrieved 8 new paper(s) in 4 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

(Trans)National Gender Expertise and the Politics of Recognition
Tara Gonsalves
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International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) require a global rights category around which they can make claims. But, social category systems vary across context. How do INGOs articulate a global transgender rights category amid rapidly shifting political landscapes? Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and expert reports published between 1990 and 2019, I show how the gender experts who staff INGOs used a variety of recognition strategies to navigate competing demands from gender-diverse communities, opponents of LGBT rights, and broader political and cultural shifts. Initially, gender experts subsumed divergent gender category systems. As a widening array of gender-diverse people and opponents of LGBT rights contested the universality of the category system, INGOs shifted their approach. Rather than flattening divergences or decoupling them from institutional categories, gender experts substantively responded to misalignments, qualifying and transforming the original category in the process. In showing how INGOs address contradictions inherent to human rights frameworks and reflexively respond to critiques of coloniality, this article advances science, knowledge, and technology studies, global and transnational studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

European Sociological Review

Are gender norm violations always perceived negatively? The effects of marital name choice on perceived work and relationship commitments
Kristin Kelley, Lena Hipp
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Women who keep their surnames after marriage violate the prescriptive stereotype that they should be communal and deferent, while men who change their names violate the stereotype that they should be agentic and individualistic. Drawing on data from a pre-registered survey experiment conducted with a national probability sample in Germany (N = 1,899), we test hypotheses derived from the prescriptive stereotype framework and examine whether gender norm violations are evaluated symmetrically for women and men. Our analyses show that men who break marital name norms by changing their surname are perceived to be less committed to their jobs but more committed to their relationships than men who keep their names. Women who break marital name norms by keeping their surnames are perceived as less committed to their relationships, but—unlike men—they are not ‘rewarded’ with higher perceived professional commitment. In fact, name-keeping women are seen as no more committed to their jobs than name-changing women or men. These findings illustrate the persistence of prevailing gender role expectations and suggest that women have less flexibility than men to break gender norms in the family context, while men have less flexibility than women to break gender norms in the workplace context.

Social Forces

When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers: organized crime violence and risks for migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border
Oscar Contreras-Velasco
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How does the contestation of territorial control by organized crime shape risks for migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border? Drawing on survey data from nearly 5,000 undocumented migrants (Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte [EMIF Norte]), official homicide data from Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehension statistics, this paper combines panel data analysis, negative binomial models, and hierarchical clustering to examine how different forms of criminal territorial control influence migrant risk. I find, first, that contested criminal control, where multiple groups compete for dominance, is associated with significantly higher homicide rates. Second, migrants crossing through these contested territories face higher cumulative exposure to hazards, even after accounting for demographic vulnerabilities and border enforcement. Third, risk is unevenly distributed across the border: migrants crossing through eastern sectors, marked by fragmented and volatile criminal governance, experience higher dangers than those crossing western corridors where criminal authority, while not monolithic, tends to be more consolidated or negotiated. These findings extend sociological theories of non-state governance by showing that criminal organizations can sometimes reduce acute violence when they achieve relative coordination or stability, but that competition and fragmentation undermine this order and amplify migrant vulnerability.
Proximity to riots: spatial exposure and attitude toward the police in Africa
Souleymane Yameogo
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Riot poses a serious challenge to the legitimacy of state institutions, eroding the trust that underpins effective policing. While research links riot violence to declining trust in the police, it has paid little attention to how distance (spatial proximity) to riots shapes this relationship. This study argues that, compared to residents at greater distance, those closer to riot hot spots are less likely to trust the police. Drawing on procedural justice theory, psychological coping frameworks, and criminological research on distance decay, the analysis matches geocoded Afrobarometer survey data with Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project riot events across twenty-three African countries. Findings confirm that riot exposure generally reduces trust in the police, but the effect is non-linear: trust is not eroded in riot epicenters and declines more steeply at moderate distances, all relative to greater distance. Lethal riots, compared to non-lethal ones, exacerbate this erosion and heighten fear of violence. By contrast, mob violence, compared to violent demonstrations, strengthens trust as police are seen as protectors against chaos. The study advances a spatially sensitive account of trust and highlights the need for community-based policing strategies tailored to riot-affected contexts, especially in mid-range communities where reassurance is weakest and rumors thrive.
Unshared spaces: a field experiment on the politico-cultural contexts of housing discrimination against transgender and nonbinary persons in Germany
Heiko Beyer, Elea Pfleger
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The paper examines the prevalence and mechanisms of discrimination in the informal shared housing market against transgender and nonbinary persons. Employing a correspondence test, the study investigates the responses to fictitious applications from transgender and nonbinary individuals to shared apartment offers in Germany. The findings reveal significant discrimination against these groups, with varying degrees of discrimination across different cities. The lowest levels of discrimination were observed in cities with high proportions of religiously unaffiliated, where preventive policies had been implemented by the states and where political polarization was high. The study contributes to understanding the challenges faced by transgender and nonbinary individuals in accessing affordable housing and highlights the relevance of structural conditions for everyday discrimination.
Two-layer panopticon: how the Chinese government uses digital surveillance to prevent collective action
Han Zhang
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Authoritarian regimes increasingly use digital surveillance to suppress collective action. Existing accounts emphasize how dictators use mass surveillance of citizens to gather information and deter mobilization, but overlook their continued reliance on human agents, whose shirking often undermines repression. We propose a two-layer Panopticon framework for digital surveillance. Dictators can directly surveil citizens. They can also surveil the frontline agents responsible for implementing repression, reducing shirking and improving prevention. We test this framework in China using an original dataset of 51,611 government procurement contracts that captures digital workplace surveillance of agents alongside mass surveillance of citizens. We find that each layer independently reduces protest and that their interaction produces modestly reinforcing effects. Causal mediation analysis reveals an asymmetric mechanism: about one-third of the protest-reducing effect of citizen surveillance operates through increased oversight of agents, while agent-facing surveillance reduces protest directly. These results remain robust across dynamic panel models, instrumental variables, and alternative protest data. This article bridges and extends research on state repression, principal–agent problems in bureaucracy, and digital authoritarianism, offering new theoretical and empirical insights into how digital technologies strengthen the practice of authoritarian rule.
The geography of discontent: how relative local deprivation shapes political apathy and involvement
Sebastian Jungkunz
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Deprivation has long been associated with lower levels of political involvement, with much of the existing research focusing on individual factors such as socio-economic status. However, the impact of relative local deprivation—how individuals perceive their neighborhood’s socio-economic conditions in comparison to nearby, more affluent areas—has remained underexplored. This article addresses that gap by examining the role of relative local deprivation in shaping political involvement. By conceptualizing relative deprivation in two distinct ways—comparison with neighboring districts and comparison with higher-level areas—I offer a unique perspective on how local inequalities influence political involvement. Using data from a large-scale study in England and Wales (n = 25,001) and the Index of Multiple Deprivation at the postcode district level (ndistricts = 2,290), the results show that residents in areas with higher relative local deprivation are significantly less likely to vote or engage in other forms of political participation. Specifically, respondents from such districts are 1.4–2.1 percentage points less likely to vote, even when controlling for socio-structural factors and (perceived) actual deprivation. These findings highlight the independent effect of relative local deprivation on political involvement, suggesting that individuals in disadvantaged areas become disillusioned when they perceive their district as falling behind neighboring communities. I argue that reducing local inequalities, particularly in deprived areas, could help alleviate political disengagement and foster greater political involvement across all communities.

Sociological Methods & Research

Using Focus Groups for Process Tracing: Leveraging Group Discussions for Causal Inference
Laura López-Pérez, Mayra Ortiz Ocaña
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In the social sciences, most process tracing evidence is gathered through individual or atomized sources. However, there are some cases in which individualized data collection methods are not enough to capture collective social processes. We propose using focus groups for process tracing (FGFPT) to gather and analyze qualitative evidence about causal processes and mechanisms by leveraging interaction and discussions. We present three key benefits of using FGFPT: instant fact-checking, obtaining mechanistic evidence through the interactive process, and enhancing participants’ collective agency. Additionally, we propose general guidelines for designing and implementing focus groups with the aim of process tracing: specifying observable implications, forming the focus group, question design, and training the moderator. Focus groups can be the most adequate data collection method to support and enhance process tracing exercises for collective phenomena.