Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 47, 2021

Se aborda el desarrollo de la sociología de las emociones en América Latina entre 2000 y 2019, como un campo de conocimiento reciente en proceso de institucionalización. Seis áreas temáticas—diversas y heterogéneas—nuclean la investigación durante el período: (a) cambio social, sociabilidad y emociones; (b) movimientos sociales y sentimientos; (c) género, genera-ciones, afectividad, cuidado; (d) migración y emociones; (e) trabajo, afectividad y emociones; (f) reflexiones teóricas y propuestas analíticas. La valoración crítica del campo arroja tres tensiones analíticas que dificultan su consolidación: en el recorte disciplinario (sociología; sociología y antropología de las emociones; filosofía y sociología); en las perspectivas de análisis (sociológicas; socioculturales; filosóficas); en el objeto de investigación (emociones; emociones y cuerpo; cuerpo y emociones), con implicaciones para la investigación social.

I was initially reluctant to become a sociologist because my father, William Foote Whyte, was a prominent sociologist. Growing up during the Cold War led me in sequence through studying physics to Russian studies and then into Chinese studies, and I finally chose sociology as the best discipline for research on China, the primary focus of my career. The theoretical and methodological eclecticism of our discipline enabled me to do research on many intriguing research problems regarding contemporary Chinese society, first at a distance from Hong Kong and then through a series of collaborative surveys conducted within China. I found I could use sociological theories to more accurately and objectively interpret Chinese social patterns, while at the same time some paradoxical features of Chinese society enabled me to challenge existing social science theories. Over the course of my career I was gratified to see the sociological study of China move from being a somewhat marginal specialty into joining the mainstream of our discipline.

Living sociology refers to the life of sociology, seen as a field of competing scientific research programs. The dynamism of each program requires, on the one hand, engaging internal contradictions and external anomalies and, on the other hand, extended dialogue among the programs themselves. Living sociology also refers to the life of sociologists as they participate in the society they study. My understanding of these two dimensions of reflexive science—the scientific and the hermeneutic—developed through the interaction of teaching and research. I trace the way I learned the extended case method in Zambia and reformulated it through collaborations with students at Berkeley, arriving at the idea of the scientific research program. I show how I tried to contribute to the Marxist research program by wrestling with anomalies that sprung from my experiences working in factories in the United States, Hungary, and Russia. Finally, I describe how teaching social theory led me to Marxist conversations with structural functionalism and with the work of Pierre Bourdieu as well as prefiguring an extended conversation between W.E.B. Du Bois and the sociological canon.

The conventions ethnographers follow to gather, write about, and store their data are increasingly out of sync with contemporary research expectations and social life. Despite technological advancements that allow ethnographers to observe their subjects digitally and record interactions, few follow subjects online and many still reconstruct quotes from memory. Amid calls for data transparency, ethnographers continue to conceal subjects’ identities and keep fieldnotes private. But things are changing. We review debates, dilemmas, and innovations in ethnography that have arisen over the past two decades in response to new technologies and calls for transparency. We focus on emerging conversations around how ethnographers record, collect, anonymize, verify, and share data. Considering the replication crisis in the social sciences, we ask how ethnographers can enable others to reanalyze their findings. We address ethical implications and offer suggestions for how ethnographers can develop standards for transparency that are consistent with their commitment to their subjects and interpretive scholarship.

Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences—cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy—significantly reshaping sociologists’ approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece—research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.

Recent decades have seen Georg Simmel's canonical status in American sociology solidify and his impact on research expand. A broad understanding of his influence, however, remains elusive. This review remedies this situation by evaluating Simmel's legacy in American sociology since 1975. We articulate Simmel's sociological orientation by elaborating the concepts of form, interaction, and dualism. Employing a network analysis of references to Simmel since 1975, we examine how Simmelian concepts have been adopted in research. We find Simmel became an anchor for change in urban and conflict studies, where scholars moved from his earlier functionalist reception toward a formalist interpretation. This formalist reception consolidated Simmel's status as a classic in network research and symbolic interactionism during the 1980s. Recent work in economic sociology and the sociology of culture, however, builds on Simmel's growing reception within relational sociology. We conclude with several ways to further articulate Simmel's ideas in the discipline.

Socialization is a key mechanism of social reproduction. Yet, like the functionalists who introduced the concept, socialization has fallen out of favor, critiqued for ignoring power and agency, for its teleology and incoherence, and for a misguided link to “culture of poverty” arguments. In this review, we argue for a renewed, postfunctionalist use of socialization. We review the concept's history, its high point under Parsons, the reasons for its demise, its continued use in some subfields (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, education), and alternative concepts used to explain social reproduction. We then suggest that something is lost when socialization is avoided or isolated in particular subfields. Without socialization, conceptions of social reproduction face problems of history, power, and transferability. We close by outlining a postfunctionalist agenda for socialization research, providing a framework for a new theory of socialization, one that builds off of cognitive science, pragmatism, the study of language, the reinterrogation of values, and the development of ideology in political socialization.

Fundamental cause theory (FCT) was originally proposed to explain how socioeconomic inequalities in health emerged and persisted over time. The concept was that higher socioeconomic status helped some people to avoid risks and adopt protective strategies using flexible resources: knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections. As a sociological theory, FCT addressed this issue by calling on social stratification, stigma, and racism as they affected medical treatments and health outcomes. The last comprehensive review was completed a decade ago. Since then, FCT has been tested, and new applications have extended central features. The current review consolidates key foci in the literature in order to guide future research in the field. Notable themes emerged around types of resources and their usage, approaches used to test the theory, and novel extensions. We conclude that after 25 years of use, there remain crucial questions to be addressed.

This article discusses how the sociology of emotions in Latin America, a recently established field of knowledge still in the process of institutionalization, first developed between 2000 and 2019. Research in this period focused on six wide-ranging and heterogeneous thematic areas: (a) social change, sociability and emotions; (b) social movements and feelings; (c) gender, generations, affectivity and care; (d) migration and emotions; (e) work, affectivity and emotions; and (f) theoretical reflections and analytical propositions. Critical evaluation of the field has uncovered three areas of analytical tension that impede its consolidation: disciplinary boundary-setting (sociology, sociology and anthropology of the emotions, philosophy), analytical perspectives (sociological, sociocultural, philosophical), and the object of research (emotions, emotions and the body, the body and emotions), all of which have implications for social research.

Recent decades have seen a surge of interest in negative ties and the negative aspects of social relationships. Researchers in different fields have studied negative ties and their consequences for various individual outcomes, including health and well-being, social status in schools and other organizations, and job performance and satisfaction, but they have mainly done so in disconnect. The result is a dearth of theoretization, manifested in a multitude of concepts and measures, that has made synthesis difficult and left numerous questions unanswered. By critically assessing these literatures, this review maps unresolved issues and identifies important lacunae in current investigations of negative ties. It is organized around three key issues: What are negative ties? How prevalent are they and where do they come from? And what are their consequences? The review concludes by proposing an agenda for future research.

The concept of emotional labor has been very useful for elucidating how the expansion of a service economy perpetuated new forms of work that maintained gender divisions and inequalities. Research has been slower to catch up to the ways that emotional labor has racial implications as well, but recent studies are making important contributions and moving the literature in this direction. In this review, I consider how increasing racial diversity in the US population informs how emotion work is performed in the current economy. I also discuss how other macrostructural changes such as the rise of aesthetic labor, the gig economy, and the overwhelming growth of the service industry can reshape our understanding of the intersections between race and gender in emotional labor.

The pairing of massive data sets with processes—or algorithms—written in computer code to sort through, organize, extract, or mine them has made inroads in almost every major social institution. This article proposes a reading of the scholarly literature concerned with the social implications of this transformation. First, we discuss the rise of a new occupational class, which we call the coding elite. This group has consolidated power through their technical control over the digital means of production and by extracting labor from a newly marginalized or unpaid workforce, the cybertariat. Second, we show that the implementation of techniques of mathematical optimization across domains as varied as education, medicine, credit and finance, and criminal justice has intensified the dominance of actuarial logics of decision-making, potentially transforming pathways to social reproduction and mobility but also generating a pushback by those so governed. Third, we explore how the same pervasive algorithmic intermediation in digital communication is transforming the way people interact, associate, and think. We conclude by cautioning against the wildest promises of artificial intelligence but acknowledging the increasingly tight coupling between algorithmic processes, social structures, and subjectivities.

Trust is key to understanding the dynamics of social relations, to the extent that it is often viewed as the glue that holds society together. We review the mounting sociological literature to help answer what trust is and where it comes from. To this end, we identify two research streams—on particularized trust and generalized trust, respectively—and propose an integrative framework that bridges these lines of research while also enhancing conceptual precision. This framework provides the springboard for identifying several important avenues for future research, including new investigations into the radius of trust, the intermediate form of categorical trust, and the interrelationships between different forms of trust. This article also calls for more scholarship focusing on the consequences (versus antecedents) of trust, addressing more fully the trustee side of the relation, and employing new empirical methods. Such novel approaches will ensure that trust research will continue to provide important insights into the functioning of modern society in the years to come.

In this article, we take stock of the institutional logics perspective and highlight opportunities for new scholarship. While we celebrate the growth and generativity of the literature on institutional logics, we also note that there has been a troubling tendency in recent work to use logics as analytical tools, feeding disquiet about reification and reductionism. Seeding a broader scholarly agenda that addresses such weaknesses in the literature, we highlight nascent efforts that aim to more systematically understand institutional logics as complex, dynamic phenomena in their own right. In doing so, we argue for more research that probes how logics cohere and endure by unpacking the role of values, the centrality of practice, and the governance dynamics of institutional logics and their orders. Furthermore, we encourage bridging the study of institutional logics with various literatures, including ethnomethodology, phenomenology, professions, elites, world society, and the old institutionalism, to enhance progress in these directions.

The civil rights and women's movements led to momentous changes in public policy and corporate practice that have made the United States the global paragon of equal opportunity. Yet diversity in the corporate hierarchy has increased incrementally. Lacking clear guidance from policymakers, personnel experts had devised their own arsenal of diversity programs. Firms implicated their own biased managers through diversity training and grievance systems and created a paper trail for personnel decisions, but they maintained the deeper structures that perpetuate inequality. Firms that changed systems for recruiting and developing workers, organizing work, and balancing work and life saw diversity increase up the hierarchy, but those firms are all too rare. The courts and federal agencies have found management processes that do not explicitly discriminate to be plausibly unbiased, and they rarely require systemic reforms. Our elaborate corporate diversity programs and public regulatory systems have largely failed to open opportunity, but social science research points to a path forward.

This review explores the two sides of university governance. From a meso perspective, it deals with universities as organized structures where priorities have to be set, decisions made, budgets allocated, teaching programs developed, and research achieved. This perspective relates to the sociology of organizations, and this review first explores the four founding models that aimed to qualify university governance and how they have helped understanding the evolution of universities in recent years. But at a macro level, university governance deals with universities as a sector and focuses on how they interact with one another, their relationships to the state, and how they are affected by national as well as transnational and global transformations. University governance is studied as a state-steered national system, as a field, or as a competitive arena.

Studies of populism have shifted from substantive to discursive/performative and institutional perspectives in recent decades. This shift resolved some long-standing problems but insulated the analysis of populism from theoretical and methodological debates in the social sciences. Theoretical restrictions have gone hand in hand with geographical neglect: The near-exclusive focus on the United States, Europe, and Latin America reinforces the blind spots of these existing approaches. An integration of overlooked regions holds the potential for theoretical reconstruction, even though such comparative broadening could as well simply reproduce the persistent impasses. Moreover, post-2016 developments have induced a return to substantive issues, throwing into sharp relief what populism studies have been missing during the past decades. The main challenge today is synthesizing socioeconomic analyses with institutionalist and discourse-theoretical advances without falling into eclecticism. Breaking away from the entrenched regional orientations to embrace a more global-historical methodology could help such an endeavor.

Since the 1980s, globalization has reduced between-country inequality and increased within-country inequality in most countries. There has been a debate about whether global inequality, which combines both between- and within-country inequalities, increased or decreased. With more adequate and updated data over the past two decades, this debate has been settled. Global inequality unmistakably diminished in the age of globalization. Underlying this reduction in aggregate global inequality is the rise of China and India into the middle strata of the global income distribution, income stagnation of the working class in rich countries, and the expansion of internal inequality in poor and rich countries. This shift in global income distribution contributed to new geopolitical conflicts and political backlash against globalization in the developed world. This global distributive politics will in turn determine the future of globalization and shape the trajectory of global income inequality change.

The sharing economy is transforming economies around the world, entering markets for lodging, ride hailing, home services, and other sectors that previously lacked robust person-to-person alternatives. Its expansion has been contentious and its meanings polysemic. It launched with a utopian discourse promising economic, social, and environmental benefits, which critics have questioned. In this review, we discuss its origins and intellectual foundations, internal tensions, and appeal for users. We then turn to impacts, focusing on efforts to generate user trust through digital means, tendency to reconfigure and exacerbate class and racial inequalities, and failure to reduce carbon footprints. Though the transformative potential of the sharing economy has been limited by commercialization and more recently by the pandemic, its kernel insight—that digital technology can support logics of reciprocity—retains its relevance even now.

This article reviews studies of hiring discrimination against racial and ethnic minority groups in cross-national perspective. We focus on field experimental studies of hiring discrimination: studies that use fictitious applications from members of different racial and ethnic groups to apply for actual jobs. There are more than 140 field experimental studies of hiring discrimination against ethno-racial minority groups in 30 countries. We outline seventeen empirical findings from this body of studies. We also discuss individual and contextual theories of hiring discrimination, the relative strengths and weaknesses of field experiments to assess discrimination, and the history of such field experiments. The comparative scope of this body of research helps to move beyond micromodels of employer decision-making to better understand the roles of history, social context, institutional rules, and racist ideologies in producing discrimination. These studies show that racial and ethnic discrimination is a pervasive international phenomenon that has hardly declined over time, although levels vary significantly over countries. Evidence indicates that institutional rules regarding race and ethnicity in hiring can have an important influence on levels of discrimination. Suggestions for future research on discrimination are discussed.