We checked 6 sociology journals on Friday, March 21, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period March 14 to March 20, we retrieved 4 new paper(s) in 4 journal(s).

Annual Review of Sociology

The Cultural, Definitional, and Institutional Politics of Healthcare
Jennifer A. Reich
Full text
This review article examines how politics shape healthcare. In addition to formal law and policy, the politics of healthcare include the larger cultural frameworks that politicize health and illness, rendering some bodies visible while ignoring or erasing others, and the institutions that offer or deny healthcare services. This article highlights both the definitional politics, that is, the contests of power that set the frames of healthcare, and also the politics of implementation and practice that powerfully shape healthcare institutions and experiences. In doing so, this article considers how politics structure the interactions within healthcare systems and around health and illness, and how those engaged in these care relationships must navigate power and politics within these broader organizational and cultural structures.

European Sociological Review

Targets of police attention. Discrimination in pedestrian stop-and-search of young people in Germany and France
Anina Schwarzenbach
Full text
Surprisingly little is known about pedestrian stops targeting young people on the streets of European cities. Relying on a cross-country evaluation of school survey data carried out in four German and French cities, I ask: are the police discriminating against young people in pedestrian stop-and-search? Based on results from mixed-effects negative binomial regressions and controlling for other relevant predictors and neighbourhood effects, I find mixed evidence for claims of gender and ethnic discrimination. In German cities, I find only small evidence of gender and no evidence of ethnic discrimination, challenging core assumptions drawn from conflict, minority threat, and dominance theories. Contrarily, in French cities, I find substantial evidence of gendered ethnic discrimination. The gender gap is largest for young people of Maghrebi origin. Whilst young Maghrebi males are the focus of police attention, young Maghrebi females do not experience pedestrian stops at higher rates than other ethnicities. Results also point to a remarkable similarity in pedestrian stop rates of females across ethnicities and between European cities and show only minor differences between ethnic majority males and females. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results for policing ethnic minority youth and propose avenues for future research.

Social Forces

The limits of feminization: gender composition and mental wellbeing in the medical profession
Tania M Jenkins, Alyssa R Browne
Full text
As more women enter traditionally male-dominated professions, it is important to understand how feminization has—or has not—impacted work cultures, with implications for women’s mental wellbeing. Research on proportional representation and mental health suggests that as professions feminize, women’s mental wellbeing should benefit from shifting peer cultures. However, gender stratification scholars argue that interactional cultures are also shaped by macrolevel factors like institutional rules and hegemonic beliefs that may temper cultural change. We examine the case of medicine, a profession that has feminized rapidly but unevenly over recent decades, to investigate the extent to which increasing representation of women shapes not only local peer cultures, but also the professional logics and rules that frame those local cultures, in ways that may affect women’s mental wellbeing. Drawing on interviews with physicians and trainees in more- and less-feminizing specialties, we find that masculinized norms persist across fields, regardless of feminization, because these ideals are codified through enduring professional rules and logics. These ideals can negatively shape women’s mental wellbeing, as they either disengage from their work or grow frustrated with sexist expectations—especially those in more feminized specialties who expected a more “women-friendly” experience. Our findings suggest that increasing proportional representation may be necessary but insufficient for prompting profession-wide cultural change and improving women’s mental wellbeing, given the complexity of the gender structure.

Sociological Methods & Research

Locating Cultural Holes Brokers in Diffusion Dynamics Across Bright Symbolic Boundaries
Diego F. Leal
Full text
Although the literature on cultural holes has expanded considerably in recent years, there is no concrete measure in that literature to locate cultural holes brokers. This article develops a conceptual framework grounded in social network theory and cultural sociology to propose a specific solution to fill this measurement gap. Agent-based computational experiments are leveraged to develop a theoretical test of the analytic purchase and distinctiveness of the proposed measure, termed potential for intercultural brokerage (PIB). Results demonstrate the effectiveness of PIB in locating early adopters that can achieve widespread levels of diffusion in societies segregated along bright symbolic boundaries. Findings also show the superiority of PIB when compared to classic alternative measures in the network literature that focus on locating early adopters based on structural holes (e.g., network constraint, effective size), geodesics (e.g., betweenness centrality), and degree (e.g., degree centrality), among other classic network measures. Broader implications of these findings for brokerage theory are discussed herein.