Do state Right to Work (RTW) laws unleash economic dynamism, or the ability for local economies to respond, thrive, and grow in changing conditions? Although the specific goals of RTW laws to limit union security agreements appear to narrowly target unionized firms, proponents and opponents alike argue that RTW laws have broad labor market consequences. Union monopoly theories suggest that unions increase labor costs and exert greater worker control over the labor process in ways that distort and dampen firm investment and growth, and hence that RTW promotes economic dynamism. Institutionalist theories counter that unions increase labor productivity and build a stronger local consumer base, and hence that RTW inhibits economic dynamism. We provide a novel test of these divergent hypotheses using 75 years of County Business Patterns data and county-border-pair fixed-effects regression models to address unobserved heterogeneity. We fail to find consistent evidence that RTW passage is associated with meaningful changes in employment or workplace establishment concentration relative to geographically proximate counties in non-RTW states that share a common border. We develop an alternative competitive labor policy mitigation perspective that highlights how policymakers respond to policies in neighboring states to help explain this null result. Consistent with our arguments, we find that non-RTW states made tax and incentive policy more attractive for employers during this period, and that tax and incentive policies have a meaningful association with local economic dynamism. This highlights tax incentives as an alternative policy lever that non-RTW states used to mitigate the competitive advantages of RTW states.

Computational developments—particularly artificial intelligence—are reshaping social scientific research and raising new questions for in-depth methods such as ethnography and qualitative interviewing. Building on classic debates about computers in qualitative data analysis, we revisit possibilities and dangers in an era of automation, large language model chatbots, and big data. We introduce a typology of contemporary approaches to using computers in qualitative research: streamlining workflows, scaling up projects, hybrid analytical methods, the sociology of computation, and technological rejection. Drawing from scaled team ethnographies and solo research integrating computational social science alongside in-depth observation, we describe methodological choices across study life cycles, from literature reviews through data collection, coding, text retrieval, and representation. We argue that new technologies hold potential to address long-standing methodological challenges when deployed with knowledge, purpose, and ethical commitment. Yet, a pragmatic approach—moving beyond technological optimism and dismissal—is essential given rapidly changing tools that are both generative and dangerous. Computation now saturates research infrastructure, from algorithmic literature searches to scholarly metrics, making computational literacy a core methodological competence in and beyond sociology. We conclude that when used carefully and transparently, contemporary computational tools can meaningfully expand, rather than displace, the irreducible insights of qualitative research.

Estimating the size of the undocumented migrant population remains a critical challenge for researchers and policymakers. This study assesses the viability of using social media platforms, specifically Facebook and Instagram, to recruit a survey sample of migrants and elicit their status. The research focuses on Mexican and Venezuelan immigrants in Texas, Florida, Illinois, and California. Three methods for eliciting legal status are tested: direct questions, indirect sequential questions (stepwise exclusion), and a list experiment. The study ( N = 2,027) finds that while social media recruitment is cost-effective and rapid, it faces challenges such as selection bias, misclassification, and platform-imposed restrictions. The list experiment suggests the presence of response bias in traditional surveys to sensitive legal status questions. Estimates of the share of undocumented migrants deviate considerably from available reference estimates. We argue that social media surveys are best applied in preparation for traditional surveys rather than in their place.

Periodic abstinence and withdrawal (the dominant methods in the “traditional methods” category) have been used to prevent pregnancy in both historical and contemporary contexts and, in some countries, continue to be used despite increased availability and use of modern methods. Yet research on family planning programs and contraceptive methods often focuses solely on modern contraceptive methods, thereby overlooking trends and patterns of traditional method use. In this study, we analyze population‐level survey data from 1990 to 2020 and find a global decline in the share of overall contraceptive use accounted for by these traditional methods (e.g., withdrawal and periodic abstinence), a slight decline in traditional method prevalence rates, and an overall increase in the absolute number of traditional method users. We then examine geographic and temporal variation in levels and patterns of withdrawal and periodic abstinence method use. Finally, we identify countries that have reached low levels of fertility since 1970 with higher levels of withdrawal or periodic abstinence use, or where these methods account for a substantial portion of overall contraceptive use. We find that while reported use of withdrawal and periodic abstinence is low in many settings, they remain important tools for pregnancy prevention in a number of countries.

The sociology of performance and action has primarily focused on how actors are able to create new renderings of the social world. However, this perspective has yet to explore the process through which new formations of power become encoded and forms enduring structures. In this article, I analyze the rise and spread of the evangelical activist organization Concerned Women for America to show how performances of the self serve as the basis for more stable structures of social relations. I argue that these initial performances provide frameworks of action and interpretation that serve as an ethical repertoire that people may draw on as techniques of agentive subject formation. The everyday performative work of subjects thus serves as the actualization of new expressions of power invoked by dramatic performances. I develop the theoretical language of subject refashioning to highlight how frameworks for subjectivity serve as the deeper process affected by performances.

One crucial decision that every group of protesters needs to make concerns the forms of action through which they want to convey their claims. While repertoires of contention can vary greatly across different sociopolitical contexts, we know little about why some protest forms may acquire or lose prominence within the same polity over relatively short periods. By applying a novel multimodal network analysis framework to an original protest event dataset covering political contention in Spain between 2007 and 2014 during the Great Recession, this research explores how the modularity of protest forms—that is, their transferability to different circumstances of contention—evolves in the short term. Our analyses demonstrate that the repertoire of contention becomes more flexible as the cycle unfolds, while political opportunities present weak and asymmetric effects on the transferability of different tactics, refining expectations from classic theories of contentious politics in several important ways.

Research on social problems often analyzes how different groups think or act in relation to a single issue. Less frequent are studies of how a single group thinks or acts in relation to many phenomena, any of which may be construed as problematic to a greater or lesser degree. We take this multiple phenomena – single social position approach and analyze why the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), a supra-municipal government agency, discusses some non-native species as more “invasive” than others. We use word embeddings to measure variation in the strength of association between different species and invasiveness in 599 of the TRCA’s policy documents and employ generalized additive models to explain this variation. We find that the “invasive” meaning is more strongly associated with species that are easier to observe, access, control, or manage in the TRCA’s urban context, which we term workability. Species that are terrestrial, sessile, and moderately abundant are more strongly associated with invasiveness than mobile, aquatic, and hyperabundant species. These findings suggest that problem managers conceive of issues they are responsible for managing according to how actionable problems appear. We propose workability as a key analytic lens for understanding how problem managers make decisions and construct meaning. We situate this contribution in the context of four research designs for studying social problems that we term comparative problem-solving designs.

This article advances the debate on the agency of political actors in Comparative Political Economy (CPE) theories, focusing on Growth Model Theory (GMT). GMT expects stable coalitions around dominant economic sectors, which support growth strategies through lobbying and ideological influence. Despite the explicit goal to account for the domestic politics of growth models, GMT has not developed a politics model that captures agency, uncertainty, and conflict. It thus retains the core problems of the structuralist approaches common in CPE: the reification of policy processes as “blocs” or “coalitions,” a presentism that infers preferences from outcomes, and a narrow focus on economic interests. We propose an alternative politics model based on cultural schemas nondeterministically guiding actors through uncertainty. This model can incorporate conflicting motives, interpretive frameworks, and cognitive limitations in the formation of growth strategies, while also accounting for these strategies’ potential persistence. We illustrate our criticism through a case study of Germany's political debate on the European Economic and Monetary Union. Historical evidence reveals deep divisions among policymakers, shaped by uncertainty, geopolitics, national-identity concerns, and short-term opportunism in response to intraparty and electoral threats.