Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 42, 2016

Este artículo presenta una revisión crítica de las contribuciones recientes de la investigación sobre religión en América Latina. Por mucho tiempo, los cientistas sociales han considerado que la religión católica es un rasgo característico de la cultura y las sociedades de esta región, motivo por el cual, los primeros estudios privilegiaron la influencia política de la Iglesia católica con respecto al Estado y a la sociedad en su conjunto. La “otredad” de las religiones vernáculas o populares recibieron menos atención, con investigadores que desvalorizaron la presencia de las religiosidades indígenas y africanas. Sumado a ello, el campo religioso de América Latina está actualmente experimentando un proceso de diversificación y reconfiguración debido en parte al crecimiento de diferentes denominaciones cristianas, particularmente evangélicas y pentecostales. El cambio religioso está también ocurriendo en los márgenes de las Iglesias institucionales a través de las espiritualidades Nueva Era, neopaganas, neoindias, neoesotéricas, y las religiosidades “a mi manera”, así como a través de las hibridaciones de la religiosidad popular, indicando nuevas vías de experimentación de lo sagrado. Esta dinámica propone retos teóricos y conceptuales a los académicos que se dedican a analizar la diversidad religiosa y el rol renovado que las religiones juegan en las sociedades contemporáneas con respecto a la secularización, el sincretismo y la hibridación, así como en su relaci´on con la emergencia de identidades alternativas (de género, sexuales, ideológicas y políticas).

This is an autobiographical review of the published research that I did over five decades of my academic life, from 1965 to 2015. It highlights the common thread that brings together my intellectual project through a great diversity of topics: the quest for a grounded theory of power. The review presents the gradual emergence of this theory without disguising the difficulties and contradictions in its development. I consider power relationships to be the foundational relationships of society in all domains. Here, I show how my research used this approach to study urban structure and spatial dynamics; the uses and consequences of information technologies; the process of globalization; the formation of a new social structure, the network society; and the interaction between communication and power in a digital environment. Finally, I propose a network theory of power in the network society, the society we are in.

More of the social world lives within electronic text than ever before, from collective activity on the web, social media, and instant messaging to online transactions, government intelligence, and digitized libraries. This supply of text has elicited demand for natural language processing and machine learning tools to filter, search, and translate text into valuable data. We survey some of the most exciting computational approaches to text analysis, highlighting both supervised methods that extend old theories to new data and unsupervised techniques that discover hidden regularities worth theorizing. We then review recent research that uses these tools to develop social insight by exploring (a) collective attention and reasoning through the content of communication; (b) social relationships through the process of communication; and (c) social states, roles, and moves identified through heterogeneous signals within communication. We highlight social questions for which these advances could offer powerful new insight.

Corruption, in both the developing and the developed world, has been studied in many disciplines, especially economics and politics, but there is considerable scope for a sociological contribution. There has been a large body of cross-national research using indices of perceived corruption, but the clandestine nature of corruption makes it difficult to validate these indices. More fruitful are recent surveys, similar to crime victimization surveys, of respondents' experiences of being asked for a bribe. This research has found many regularities, but understanding of the causal mechanisms involved remains sketchy. Sociological concepts derived from exchange theory, and sociological variables such as Protestantism, generalized and particularistic trust, and educational level appear to be important predictors of national rates of corruption in the developed world, but the mechanisms are not well understood. We argue that more focused and disaggregated research focusing on different forms and contexts, rather than the current broad-brush approaches, is the best way forward.

This article reviews trends in the practice and study of research collaboration, focusing on journal publications in academic science. I briefly describe the different styles and types of collaboration and then focus on the drivers of the trend toward increased collaboration and on its consequences for both individual researchers and science more generally. Scholarship on collaboration seems partial to delineating its benefits; this review highlights the increasing body of research that focuses instead on the possible costs of collaboration. The synthesis reveals several topics that are ripe for investigation, including the impact of collaboration on the contributing authors and their work, the use of multiple methods and measures, and research integrity. I applaud a few recent efforts to overcome the perennial file-drawer problem by gaining access to collaborations that do not result in publication and thus are typically removed from public review and the research analyst's eye.

It is widely assumed that the use of medical care will lead to improvements in health, yet questions remain about the medical system's contributions to health disparities. In this review, we examine these issues with a specific focus on how health care systems may actually generate or exacerbate health disparities. We review current knowledge about inequality and bias in the health care system, including the epidemiology of such patterns and their underlying mechanisms. Over the past three decades, we observe growth in our knowledge about provider cognitive and psychological processing, including the development of precision measuring tools to analyze provider bias, racial and otherwise. In the same timeframe we observe decreased emphasis on social, interactional, organizational, and structural factors that shape variation in medical treatment. We frame our discussion within a modified social ecological model and discuss tools for moving forward and reinvigorating sociological presence in this important research area.

US higher education has enjoyed growing attention from social scientists and historians. We integrate recent scholarship by framing a political and historical sociology of the sector. We show how higher education has been central to projects of nation building and social provision throughout the course of American political development. US higher education has three institutional configurations: an associational one, defined by voluntary intermural organizations; a national service one, defined by massive government patronage; and a market one, defined by competition for students, patrons, and prestige. Continuity and change over time may be understood with the theoretical tools of historical sociology: path dependence, coalescence, and robust action. Our review substantiates assertions of deep turbulence in US higher education at present and calls for a closer integration of scholarship on state building and social stratification to inform the future. [Erratum]

Corporate chief executive officers (CEOs) have occupied important positions of power in developed societies since the nineteenth century. In this article, we describe how the nature and extent of this power has changed over time in the United States: from the corporate titans of the early twentieth century, to the bureaucratic organization men of the mid-twentieth century, to a new generation of dynamic, charismatic corporate leaders today. We discuss how the shareholder value movement in the 1980s transformed the role of the CEO and how, paradoxically, as the CEOs' compensation increased, their autonomy declined, potentially reducing their ability to focus on the long-term concerns of their firms or the larger society. We review the literature on CEO compensation, tenure, and discretionary actions, including philanthropic contributions, research and development expenditures, and political action. We conclude with a discussion of the social responsibility of contemporary corporate leaders, while pointing to the need for studies with which we can compare the views of today's CEOs with those of earlier decades.

Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual mainstream and celebrating differences. We contrast earlier movement cycles mobilized around difference with efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. Our review highlights the turning points that led to shifts in protest cycles, and we trace the consequences for movement outcomes. Scholarship will advance if researchers recognize the path-dependent nature of social movements and that sameness and difference are not oppositional, static, or discrete choices. We conclude by recommending directions for future research.

We review the main distributional effects of the Great Recession and the ways in which those effects have been organized into narratives. The Great Recession may affect poverty, inequality, and other economic and noneconomic outcomes by changing individual-level behavior, encouraging the rise of new social movements or reviving older ones, motivating new economic policy and associated institutional change, or affecting the ideologies and frames through which labor markets and the key forces for economic change are viewed. The amount of sociological research within each of these areas is relatively small (compared with the amount contributed by other disciplines) and has focused disproportionately on monitoring trends or uncovering the causal effects of the Great Recession on individual-level behavior. We review this existing research and point to opportunities for sociologists to better understand how the Great Recession may be changing the economy as well as our narratives about its problems and dysfunctions.

Race has rarely mattered more in US politics than it does now. The election of President Obama has laid bare the racial divisions that continue to fracture the United States. In this review, I explore the emerging scholarship that assesses Obama's impact on social and political life in the United States. I first examine the symbolic meaning of Obama's election to black and white citizens. Second, I analyze how racism has influenced whites' political behavior and policy preferences. Next, I examine how President Obama has influenced public policy. Then, I suggest that the toxic political climate surrounding Obama is just another installment of a saga in which rapid social change is met with anxiety and anger by some whites who perceive their way of life as being under threat. Finally, I illustrate how the “Obama effect” combines with the perceived “Latino threat” to affect whites' political behavior.

Academically-focused learning activities beyond formal schooling are expanding in myriad forms throughout the world. This diverse realm of learning activities includes private supplementary education purchased by families such as private tutoring, online courses, cram schools, and learning center franchises. Some public schools also provide academically oriented after-school programs beyond their formal curricula. This review identifies factors relating to students, families, schools, and educational systems that affect participation in supplementary education. Macro forces are also related to the proliferation of learning activities outside of formal schooling. We discuss implications of this trend for educational stratification as well as challenges it creates for families and formal educational systems. Finally, we suggest promising new avenues for data collection and empirical research.

Because of the generally high socioeconomic attainments and high intermarriage rates of Asian Americans, it has been suggested that Asian Americans are reaching parity with whites and are assimilating to mainstream American society. However, other research shows the continued significance of race for Asian Americans regardless of their socioeconomic status and levels of acculturation. This article provides a review of recent research on socioeconomic attainment and intermarriage among Asian Americans as well as an overview of research on less studied but increasingly important indicators: residential outcomes, political participation, and mental health. We argue that Asian Americans are assimilating but in ways that differ from their European predecessors. In this process, racial/ethnic boundaries between Asians and whites may be solidified rather than dissolved, thus maintaining the significance of race for Asian Americans. We suggest that a racialized assimilation framework may best characterize the experiences of contemporary Asian Americans.

Recent advances in molecular genetics have provided social scientists with new tools with which to explore human behavior. By deploying genomic analysis, we can now explore long-term patterns of human migration and mating, explore the biological aspects of important sociological outcomes such as educational attainment, and, most importantly, model gene-by-environment interaction effects. The intuition motivating much socio-genomic research is that to have a more complete understanding of social life, scholars must take into consideration both nature and nurture as well as their interplay. Most promising is gene-by-environment research that deploys polygenic measures of genotype as a prism through which to refract and detect heterogenous treatment effects of plausibly exogenous environmental influences. This article reviews much recent work in this vein and argues for a broader integration of genomic data into social inquiry.

This paper explores what it means to do a sociology of families, that is, one that acknowledges and considers a wider array of family forms than typically has been explored. We begin by reviewing the existing sociological research on a range of alternative family forms, ultimately focusing on older-parent, adoptive, same-sex, and multiracial families. We describe and critically assess four theoretical approaches to examining family forms—family structure, evolutionary, characteristics, and context—and their implications for children, and we discuss the utility of an approach that views family characteristics in social context. We also recommend that instead of using alternative family forms primarily or solely as counterfactuals to the so-called traditional family, researchers should compare alternative family forms to each other, noting theoretical implications for commonalities and differences found among these groups. We call for additional research on alternative families, noting its importance for sociology, family studies, and public policy.

Cross-border migration is a visible reflection of global inequalities. Much literature deals with the link between migration and inequalities indirectly, often through topics such as migration and development or the integration of migrants. Surprisingly, little research addresses directly the role of social inequalities. This gap raises at least two major questions: First, how do social inequalities affect opportunities for cross-border migration for different socioeconomic groups? Second, conversely, how do the outcomes of migration affect social inequalities in global patterns of distribution and in life chances in the countries of emigration and of immigration? Of ultimate interest is whether migration buttresses the dominant forms of social stratification or transforms the distribution of valued goods in a fundamental way. Overall, this review suggests that cross-border migration both constitutes a path to upward social mobility for migrants and tends to reinforce durable inequalities on a deeper level.

Few sociologists treat housing as a key independent variable, despite the emergence of disparate bodies of research analyzing how housing affects outcomes that traditionally interest sociologists. Scholars across the social sciences have proposed and tested mechanisms whereby housing could shape subjective well-being, socioeconomic status, demography, and politics. We review the evidence for causal effects across these domains. Next, we make recommendations for research designs to advance this literature. Most studies only test effects of homeownership, and most are focused on the United States and Western Europe. The evidence for causation is often weak, although studies increasingly employ complex techniques for identifying effects. Throughout, we emphasize studies beyond the United States, and we conclude by discussing distinctive insights yielded by comparative research. We advocate for a comparative perspective and more expansive conceptualization of housing status as a means to build theory and evidence regarding the conditions under which housing exerts effects.

The majority of Americans live and work in suburbs, but the social problems arising in these communities are rarely studied by sociologists. Far more scholarly attention is devoted to understanding the distinctive character of urban communities. This review directs attention to three emerging trends affecting the nation's suburbs disproportionately: the suburbanization of poverty, the settlement of post-1965 immigrants in the suburbs, and the impact of reverse migration to the South on black suburbanization. The review provides a critical discussion of the valuable contributions demographers have made to our general understanding of these trends, then it engages the work of ethnographers to assess the processes underlying these outcomes. These emerging trends constitute the basis for a robust research agenda rooted in the sociology of suburbs.

Beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro and Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, this review revisits and examines sociological research on urban Black Americans from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on the approaches, frameworks, and sociological insights that emerged over this period, we examine this scholarship within two broad frames: the deficit frame and the asset frame. The deficit frame includes scholarship emphasizing both the structures that negatively affect Black urban life (e.g., disappearance of work, residential segregation, poor education, urban poverty) and the cultural “deficits” that either are adaptations to those structural realities or (as some deficit scholars argue) are the cause of urban Black hardships. The asset frame includes scholarship focusing on the agency and cultural contributions of urban Black Americans. Detailing the historical origins and contemporary use of these frames, we demonstrate how the sociology of urban Black America remains a reflection of the possibilities and problems of the broader discipline. The review concludes by outlining new conceptual opportunities offered by what we refer to as chocolate city sociology.

Sociologists have long acknowledged the importance of religion for American politics, especially for two groups of people: (a) (white) conservative Protestants, who are increasingly affiliated with the religious right, and (b) progressives, who are more and more disaffiliated from organized religion. However, a comprehensive statement of the ways in which religion matters for politics, the context in which it matters and does not matter, and how this has changed over time is lacking. Recent reviews acknowledge that at best, the relationship between religion and politics in the United States is “not straightforward” (Grzymala-Busse 2012, p. 427). We contend that this is primarily a result of the fact that neither the sociology of religion nor political sociology adequately considers the role that inequality (especially race and class but also gender) play in religious affiliation (and nonaffiliation). As a result, both fields have neglected to systematically examine the ways in which class and race may shape the relationship between religion and politics in the United States. We thus argue that both fields would benefit from engagement with theories of complex inequality that take seriously the ways in which inequalities of race, class, and gender interact (McCall 2001). In doing so, scholars also need to recognize that these structures of inequality are deeply intertwined with religious group membership—a theoretical argument that we call complex religion.