Many jobs in the twenty-first century have become short-term, precarious, and unstable. To help explain this phenomenon, I consider the fragmentation of economic activity across networks of transacting organizations—a trend known to affect pay, but with unknown implications for the stability of work. I focus on a key part of this trend: the growing role of subcontracting. Combining research on the reasons for subcontracting with organizational theories of dependence and diversification, I argue that many subcontractor establishments face volatile demand and have few margins to cut costs other than labor. These factors compound to destabilize work for employees. Drawing on restricted-access French microdata, I show that employment at subcontractor establishments is substantially more unstable than elsewhere. I then trace this instability to key features of their organizational structure. Subcontractors employ a narrower range of occupations, are less profitable, and spend a greater share of their total expenses on labor than do non-subcontractors. Together, these attributes can account for almost two fifths of subcontractors’ excess employment instability. Finally, I show how subcontractor establishments are less able to insulate their employees from swings in demand. Following a drop in revenue, the employees of subcontractor establishments are more likely to exit than are those of non-subcontractor establishments. These findings demand a richer view of employment instability, entailing not only the demise of conventional employment practices—the focus of much recent research—but also the function and structure of organizations.

This article examines how time both exacerbates and destabilizes existing inequality by stratifying agency. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in nine cancer clinics and 196 in-depth interviews with 96 patients navigating a terminal cancer diagnosis toward the end of life, we show the centrality of “temporal misalignment”—a mismatch between the temporalities enacted by individual actions and those imposed by institutional contexts structuring when and how action is possible. A combination of ethnographic data and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) reveals how effective use of resources requires cancer patients to (1) triage conflicting demands of treatment, work, family, and bureaucratic schedules; (2) reconcile mismatched trajectories of disease progression and healthcare institutions; and (3) anchor uncertain decisions at present in an anticipatable future. These efforts to manage temporal misalignment not only reproduce resource disparities, but also create new, imminent, and often embodied constraints on agency that even the most advantaged patients find resource-draining and goal-displacing as the disease progresses. Reconceptualizing time as a ruptured relationship between agency and contexts offers important sociological insights into how resources, institutions, and culture operate and intertwine to shape inequality in healthcare and beyond.

The opportunities for understanding how treatment effects vary across different segments of the population have led to a rise in the use of quantile regressions for identifying unconditional quantile treatment effects (QTEs). However, existing quantile regression models fall into two categories: those that are unsuitable for identifying unconditional QTEs and those that often struggle with the complex data structures common in sociology and other social sciences. In particular, existing methods face difficulties with large data sets and high-dimensional fixed effects. The authors introduce a two-step approach to estimating unconditional QTEs, which is easy to use and aligns with the needs of sociologists. First, the treatment variable is decomposed into a systematic and random part, and then, the random variation in the treatment status is used as the sole independent variable in a quantile regression model. Through a series of simulations and three empirical applications, the authors provide strong evidence that the residualized quantile regression (RQR) approach provides approximately unbiased estimates of unconditional QTEs comparable with existing methods. Moreover, the RQR approach offers greater flexibility and enhances computational speed compared with existing models, and it can easily handle high-dimensional fixed effects. In sum, the RQR approach fills a pressing void in quantitative research methodology, offering a much-needed tool for studying treatment effect heterogeneity.

Protest surveys are one of the most common methods for studying participation in social movements. As the use of digital tools has become more common in academic research, they are being applied to facilitate data collection at protest events. The authors analyze the benefits and drawbacks of these digital tools for data collection at protest events. They present the results of a field experiment that tests two increasingly common forms of data collection: surveys collected through electronic tablets and through QR (quick response) codes. The field experiment was conducted at four anti-Trump rallies on the east coast of the United States in 2025. The authors find benefits and drawbacks to each technique. The findings focus on differences in response rates, delayed refusal, and the demographics of survey respondents. The authors conclude by discussing how to apply these findings to collect the most robust sample of protest participants.

Highlights I examine the role of chronic conditions in the widening educational health gap. The prevalence of chronic conditions increases similarly for adults with and without a college degree. Links between chronic diseases, disability, and mortality have evolved differently across educational strata. These differences contribute to the widening educational gaps in disability and mortality. These patterns are not driven primarily by health behaviors or insurance coverage.

Highlights This article presents causal effects of the Great Recession on U.S. fertility. Effects are identified using a new cohort discontinuity design. The design identifies effects for single-year cohorts of women, as well as for single-year cohorts of White and Black women. Estimated effects are negative for U.S. women born in the period 1964‒1992. Negative effects are largest for younger cohorts and for Black women.

Highlights We provide causal evidence that asking about intentions to stay rather than migrate reduces expressed migration aspirations by 12 percentage points, confirming a significant “mobility framing effect” in survey responses. Researchers should consider using more balanced survey instruments when eliciting mobility intentions and may risk overestimating migration when inferring future migration flows from aspirations measured through surveys.

Highlights Parental separation raises children’s peer rejection but not friendship integration. Peer rejection increases after separation and remains high for up to four years. No moderating effects were found for the child’s age, the child’s gender, or parental education. Separation impairs peer relations primarily by heightening children’s socioemotional difficulties.

How does access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) impact labor unrest? In Brazil, strike activity has increased since around 2013, coinciding with the rapid diffusion of smartphones and mobile internet. To explain this shift, I combine qualitative interviews with subcontracted service workers and quantitative analysis of private sector strikes (SAG-DIEESE dataset). Interviews show that ICTs facilitated strike coordination for workers dispersed across small, spatially isolated workplaces. Statistical patterns are consistent with this mechanism: Since the period of ICT diffusion, strike growth has been steeper in industries with highly dispersed workforces; moreover, higher internet access within industry categories is associated with more strikes, especially in categories with higher dispersion. However, strike increases were sharper for lower-risk strikes over employment violations than for higher-risk strikes demanding better contracts. The findings suggest that ICTs expanded workers’ capacity to coordinate labor protest, especially in spatially fragmented industries, but riskier action still depends more on traditional labor organizations.

After decades of market fundamentalism, the resurgence of industrial policy worldwide marks a major shift in economic governance. In the United States, this turn accelerated under the Biden administration, which enacted a series of landmark laws that put industrial policy squarely back at the center of national economic strategy. But to what extent did this wave of state activism mark a true departure? Skeptics have argued that “Bidenomics” marked a continuation of pro-business policies that merely “derisked” private investment. A second camp contends that US industrial policy never disappeared but persisted in “hidden” forms. This article advances a different interpretation. It contends that Bidenomics represented a fundamental reconfiguration of state-market relations and signaled the emergence of a twenty-first-century American developmental state. Three features distinguished this shift: directionality , targeting strategic sectors, regions, and communities; conditionality , linking corporate support to broad social objectives enforced by state discipline; and politicization , as industrial policy became a “visible” site of political contestation. Using policy analysis, expert interviews, and media sources, the article traces how this strategy has reshaped the architecture of state-market relations in the post-neoliberal era.