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- Volume 48, 2022
Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 48, 2022
Volume 48, 2022
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Gobernanza Criminal y la Crisis de los Estados Latinoamericanos Contemporáneos
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. S-1–S-23More LessCrecientemente las sociedades latinoamericanas enfrentan el surgimiento de nuevos órdenes en que los funcionarios estatales y las autoridades políticas comparten el poder con organizaciones criminales. La gobernanza criminal (es decir, la creación de un orden paralelo basado en la imposición de reglas sobre el comportamiento ciudadano por parte de organizaciones criminales a menudo con la colaboración de agentes estatales) como se denomina a este tipo de configuración, plantea desafíos importantes para la democracia y el estado de derecho. También constriñe y a veces reconfigura el acceso a derechos de ciudadanía civil, política, y social por parte de la población. Este artículo revisa críticamente la bibliografía sobre la interacción entre estado y delincuencia en América Latina abordando cuestiones conceptuales y metodológicas. Al hacerlo, se distinguen tres líneas de trabajo que, en paralelo, han contribuido a mejorar nuestra comprensión de la gobernanza criminal: estudios sobre violencia, trabajos sobre estado y estatalidad, y trabajos que analizan específicamente los esquemas de gobernanza criminal. El artículo postula que, en conjunto, estas tres líneas de investigación han realizado un trabajo encomiable al describir y conceptualizar formas emergentes de gobernanza que se desvían de nociones tradicionales. Sin embargo, también argumenta que dichas líneas avanzaron en paralelo, lo que no solo ha redundado en una pobre integración, sino también, en la reproducción de puntos ciegos a nivel teórico y metodológico. Todo ello debilita lacapacidad analítica y heurística de cada una. El artículo también señala que se requiere más trabajo para entender las consecuencias que los nuevos ordenes de gobernanza criminal generan respecto al funcionamiento de los regímenes políticos e instituciones estatales. La conclusión propone pasos concretos para fortalecer el análisis y fomentar una agenda más integrada, sugiriendo también una agenda de investigación.
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The Role of Doubt in Conceiving Research: Reflections from a Career Shaped by a Dissertation
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 1–21More LessThe doctoral dissertation often shapes the career that follows it, influencing both opportunities encountered and research conducted. This article describes the ways this has been true for me and then argues that, given the dissertation's importance, graduate programs do not focus sufficiently on strategies for conceiving research. As a result, many students flounder at the dissertation proposal stage. Drawing on the role of doubt in my career and in science more generally, I propose changes in doctoral programs to reduce the problem.
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Causal Network Analysis
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 23–41More LessFueled by recent advances in statistical modeling and the rapid growth of network data, social network analysis has become increasingly popular in sociology and related disciplines. However, a significant amount of work in the field has been descriptive and correlational, which prevents the findings from being more rigorously translated into practices and policies. This article provides a review of the popular models and methods for causal network analysis, with a focus on causal inference threats (such as measurement error, missing data, network endogeneity, contextual confounding, simultaneity, and collinearity) and potential solutions (such as instrumental variables, specialized experiments, and leveraging longitudinal data). It covers major models and methods for both network formation and network effects and for both sociocentric networks and egocentric networks. Lastly, this review also discusses future directions for causal network analysis.
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Measuring Ethnic Diversity
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 43–63More LessResearchers have investigated the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on a range of socioeconomic and political outcomes. However, approaches to measuring ethnic diversity vary not only across fields of study but even within subfields. In this review, we systematically dissect the computational approaches of prominent measures of diversity, including polarization, and discuss where and how differences emerge in their relationships with outcomes of interest to sociologists (social capital and trust, economic growth and redistribution, conflict, and crime). There are substantial similarities across computations, which are often generalizations or specializations of one another. Differences in how racial and ethnic groupings are constructed and in level of geographic analysis explain many divergences in empirical findings. We conclude by summarizing the type of measurement technique preferred by outcome, when relevant, and provide considerations for future researchers contemplating how best to operationalize diversity. Finally, we highlight two less widely used yet promising measures of diversity.
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Reproducibility in the Social Sciences
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 65–85More LessConcern over social scientists’ inability to reproduce empirical research has spawned a vast and rapidly growing literature. The size and growth of this literature make it difficult for newly interested academics to come up to speed. Here, we provide a formal text modeling approach to characterize the entirety of the field, which allows us to summarize the breadth of this literature and identify core themes. We construct and analyze text networks built from 1,947 articles to reveal differences across social science disciplines within the body of reproducibility publications and to discuss the diversity of subtopics addressed in the literature. This field-wide view suggests that reproducibility is a heterogeneous problem with multiple sources for errors and strategies for solutions, a finding that is somewhat at odds with calls for largely passive remedies reliant on open science. We propose an alternative rigor and reproducibility model that takes an active approach to rigor prior to publication, which may overcome some of the shortfalls of the postpublication model.
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American Religion in the Era of Increasing Polarization
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 87–107More LessAmericans are increasingly polarized by a variety of metrics. The dimensions, extent, causes, and consequences of that polarization have been the subject of much debate. Yet despite the centrality of religion to early discussions, the analytical focus on America's divides has largely shifted toward partisan identity, political ideology, race, and class interests. I show that religion remains powerfully implicated in all dimensions of American polarization, and sociologists must once again make religion more central to their analyses. After outlining research on American polarization, focusing on the role of religion, I survey findings within the burgeoning literatures on cultural transformation processes, (White) Christian nationalism, complex religion, and Americans’ attitudes toward science in order to underscore the centrality of ethno-religious identities, religious demography, and religious institutions for both shaping and exacerbating various forms of polarization. Lastly, I propose an agenda for elucidating religion's ongoing role in understanding polarization beyond public opinion research at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. Though polarization research has been dominated by political scientists, leveraging religion in our analyses—not merely as a sui generis variable, but as a site of complex social behavior—facilitates novel sociological contributions to these literatures via our relative attention to multiple levels of analysis, theoretical eclecticism, and methodological fluidity.
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Culture and Durable Inequality
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 109–129More LessIn recent decades, sociologists have generally avoided explicitly discussing the role of culture in processes of social inequality. We argue that the prevailing disciplinary theory of inequality, the framework laid out in Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality, necessarily relies on cognitive processes and cultural concepts. The four primary mechanisms driving inequality—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—involve justification, categorization, coordination, and (e)valuation. We survey research on social inequality that illustrates each of these four processes. Our review reveals important empirical patterns about how disparities between groups emerge and endure. We observe that while sociologists often conduct work that implicitly relies on cultural concepts, other social science disciplines are also doing vital work in this area because they engage directly with cultural concepts. We identify key areas where sociologists are well positioned to use cultural concepts to uncover important findings regarding inequality, as well as to propose interventions for mitigating or preventing inequality.
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Accounting for Credit
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 131–147More LessThis article examines differing accounts of how and why consumers use credit as well as the consequences of credit for inequality and social solidarity. We articulate these explanations as (a) political economy, (b) racialized, (c) relational, and (d) ranked accounts. The first account looks to the political economy to understand what drives credit use and its consequences. In the second, access to credit and the terms of access depend on the formal and informal rules that support a hierarchy of groups ostensibly based on racial categorization. In the third, the consumer makes decisions about how to use credit as a consequence of how she is managing the different types of relationships implicated in its use. The final account focuses on consumer credit ratings as a categorization process that consumers and businesses use when ranking individuals and when assessing the bases for solidarity; the ratings themselves shape future individual and group behaviors as well as life chances. We conclude by identifying future directions for research.
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Gender in the Elite
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 149–169More LessResearch on elites experienced a resurgence in sociology over a decade ago, but this work was largely gender neutral. Recently, a body of work on elite women and gender dynamics in elite families emerged and is growing rapidly. We propose here that gendered processes are critical for understanding the reproduction of elite privilege and inequality and highlight three subjects that dominate contemporary literature in this area. First, we address who counts as an elite and gender differences in pathways to the elite. Second, we discuss elite family dynamics and the mechanisms that create traditional gender divisions of labor in elite households. Third, we underscore the significant power that elites have and discuss gender differences in the sources of power. We conclude by identifying areas for future directions, including honing empirical and theoretical understandings of the complex relationship between gender and rising class inequality.
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The Knowledge-Based Economy and the Global South
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 171–191More LessResearch on knowledge-based economies and innovation tends to focus on the highest-ranked knowledge-advanced countries in the Global North and on high-growth countries in the Global South. In this article, we review the research on knowledge-based economies in the Global South and identify two important analytical shortcomings: the tendency to conflate upgrading with innovation and the tendency to focus on domestic factors. Moving beyond the familiar case studies, we explore the literature on pockets of knowledge-based industries in economies that are not dominantly knowledge-based. We then shift the focus from the private sector to explore the literature on state-led knowledge-based innovation, particularly welfare provisions and surveillance. We conclude by challenging the notion that innovation is simply the next step in industrial development and call for a more historically and geographically specific sociological approach to understanding innovation and knowledge-based industries, particularly in the Global South.
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The Legacy of Shareholder Value Capitalism
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 193–211More LessAmerican society has now been living in the wake of shareholder value capitalism for four decades. The shareholder value movement began as an invasion of the market for corporate control by financially oriented investors who critiqued sitting managers as not paying sufficient attention to the interests of shareholders during the economic crisis of the 1970s. It altered the relationship between financial markets and the managers of publicly held corporations. Subsequently, publicly held corporations have worked to raise share prices any way they can. While managers initially resisted shareholder value initiatives, they came to embrace them when their pay became tied to the share price. This created an incentive to discover new forms of financial extraction whenever a given set of strategies stopped producing new gains. We consider the impact that these reorganizations had on inequality and the relationship between shareholder value capitalism and financialization. We end by discussing the continuing relevance of shareholder value for understanding contemporary American capitalism. We also identify several avenues for future research on the evolution and consequences of shareholder value in the twenty-first century.
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Centering Age Inequality: Developing a Sociology-of-Age Framework
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 213–232More LessThe construct of age occupies a curious position in mainstream sociology: It is omnipresent but theoretically underdeveloped. The most prevalent approaches—age as control variable and age as life course—elide the aspect of age most relevant to the discipline, namely its operation as a system of inequality. Building on the foundation laid by scholars of life course sociology, age studies, and gerontology, I propose a new framework for thinking about age. The framework integrates insights from these fields and identifies inequality as a key axis on which several dimensions of age turn, thus placing age squarely in the domain of sociological research centering on inequalities. The article concludes with a discussion of how this framework can enhance the empirical and theoretical contributions of age-focused research. In particular, research that delves into how institutions, performances, and identities reproduce age inequality flows from this framework and constitutes a valuable contribution in its own right. Moreover, such an orientation positions the sociology of age as integral to the discipline, given its commitment to understanding how inequalities infuse social life.
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Durable Wealth: Institutions, Mechanisms, and Practices of Wealth Perpetuation
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 233–255More LessResearch indicates that positions of very high private wealth can often be maintained by families over many generations. This article puts front and center the institutions, mechanisms and practices through which families at the very top of the wealth distribution protect and enlarge their wealth. Opportunity hoarding is based on legal institutions, most importantly inheritance law, trust law, advantageous financial regulations and estate tax policies. Wealthy owners also pay for a growing number of legal and financial experts whose task it is to protect their fortunes. The stipulations of legal institutions are shaped through lobbying, campaign donations and the influencing of public opinion, facilitating the intergenerational preservation of large fortunes. Philanthropy appears to be not primarily a means of supporting general welfare, but rather a further instrument of wealth protection of the super-rich through its role in legitimizing large fortunes and the reaping of tax benefits. The entrenched character of large fortunes opens up questions regarding the normative identity of contemporary societies.
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Sociology of Whiteness
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 257–276More LessThe past 20 years have witnessed a tremendous accumulation of research in whiteness studies in general, and in the sociology of whiteness in particular. In contrast to the earliest days of research in this subfield, much recent work has moved beyond preoccupations with whiteness as a seemingly invisible, default racial category to instead consider whiteness as a complex identity and basis of structural privilege and neocolonial dominance. Predominantly autobiographical and strictly theoretical work has been augmented by sophisticated empirical studies from a variety of methodological traditions. Contemporary scholars continue to grapple with epistemological concerns and the issue of how to dismantle that which is totalizing and hegemonic.
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Women's Health: Population Patterns and Social Determinants
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 277–298More LessWomen's health, and what we know about it, is influenced by social factors. From the exclusion of women's bodies in medical research, to the silence and stigma of menstruation and menopause, to the racism reflected in maternal mortality, the relevance of social factors is paramount. After a brief history of research on women's health, we review selected patterns, trends, and inequalities in US women's health. These patterns reveal US women's poor and declining longevity relative to those in other high-income countries, gaps in knowledge about painful and debilitating conditions that affect millions of women, and deep inequalities that underscore the need to redress political and structural features of US society that enhance health for some and diminish it for others. We close by describing the challenges and opportunities for future research, and the promise of a social determinants of health approach for advancing a multilevel, intersectional, and biosocial understanding of women's health.
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Deaths of Despair in Comparative Perspective
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 299–317More LessA socially patterned epidemic of deaths of despair is a signal feature of American society in the twenty-first century, involving rising mortality from substance use disorders and self-harm at the bottom of the class structure. In the present review, we compare this population health crisis to that which ravaged Eastern Europe at the tail end of the previous century. We chart their common upstream causes: violent social dislocations wrought by rapid economic change and attendant public policies. By reviewing the extant social scientific and epidemiological literature, we probe a collection of dominant yet competing explanatory frameworks and spotlight avenues for future sociological contributions to this growing but underdeveloped domain of research. Deaths of despair are deeply rooted in socioeconomic dislocations that shape health behavior and other proximate causes of health inequality; therefore, sociology has great untapped potential in analyzing the social causes of deaths of despair. Comparative sociological research could significantly extend the extant public health and economics scholarship on deaths of despair by exploring the variegated lived experience of socioeconomic change in different institutional contexts, relying on sociological concepts such as fundamental causes, social reproduction, social disintegration, alienation, or anomie.
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Immigrant Organizations
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 319–341More LessWe call for incorporating organizations into migration scholarship, and for considering immigrants in organizational research. By centering immigrant organizations (IOs) as a unit of analysis, migration scholars can reconsider whether and how IOs affect well-being, integration, political voice, identities, globalization, and development. Migration scholars must learn from scholars of organizations, but organization scholars must in turn question assumptions of nativity and citizenship in their research. Doing so illuminates the unique challenges—and, at times, opportunities—faced by IOs, especially regarding inequities tied to legal status and stigmatization. We further argue that cross-national and transnational analyses of IOs help unpack organizational embeddedness—that is, the ways in which contexts at the local, national, binational, and geopolitical levels generate opportunities and constraints. Studying IOs raises critical questions of civic inequality and organizational stigma but also highlights IOs’ potential to give voice to and effect positive change for migrant communities.
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Housing Insecurity Among the Poor Today
Stefanie DeLuca, and Eva RosenVol. 48 (2022), pp. 343–371More LessRecent events have brought attention to the millions of Americans who struggle to find and pay for housing. Housing has historically been of interest to sociologists, but it has long been subsumed within research on crime, residential mobility, and neighborhoods. In the past decade, there has been a surge of scholarship in an emerging sociology of housing that focuses on housing insecurity, forced moves, landlords, shared housing arrangements, and the stratification effects of housing policy. While other fields typically define housing insecurity as affordability, this new literature shows how housing insecurity is not only rooted in financial constraints but also situated within social relationships that create or dissolve housing arrangements, and is exacerbated or remediated by supply-side institutions and policy. This work makes clear that housing insecurity is not a one-time discrete event but a dynamic process, and that sociologists can contribute not only to measuring housing insecurity but also to understanding the social forces that shape it.
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Poor People's Survival Strategies: Two Decades of Research in the Americas
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 373–395More LessNearly a half-century ago, two scholars north and south of the US border called attention to the role played by reciprocity networks in poor peoples’ survival strategies. This article provides a synthetic picture of the qualitative research on those strategies, focusing not only on mutual aid networks but also on clientelist politics and popular protest. These are, we argue, oftentimes complementary ways of everyday problem-solving. Furthermore, most research on survival strategies has overlooked state and street violence as literal threats to poor people's daily survival. Our review systematically describes the individual and collective strategies poor residents use to navigate daily dangers. We advocate for the incorporation of personal safety into the study of poor people's survival strategies and identify as a promising research endeavor a simultaneous attention to ways of making ends meet and coping with interpersonal and state violence.
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Racialized Reshuffling: Urban Change and the Persistence of Segregation in the Twenty-First Century
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 397–419More LessThe literature on the persistence of racial residential segregation in the United States has made significant progress by moving beyond traditional explanations—socioeconomic differences, preferences, and discrimination—to focus on the complex ways in which these factors interact with the multistage process of residential sorting. Dramatic changes in metropolitan landscapes over the past two decades, however, demand an expanded theoretical framework that can account for stability and change. In this article, we review research on contemporary urban changes that offers insights for explaining segregation's persistence amid widespread change. We identify three broad categories of mechanisms that exacerbate inequities by race and class in residential sorting processes: resource inequality, hierarchy endurance, and consolidated power. We describe developments in measuring segregation and new data and methods for studying urban change that enable researchers to consider the contemporary mechanisms, forms, and scales of segregation in the twenty-first century.
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Zoning, Land Use, and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 421–439More LessZoning determines what can be built where, and is ubiquitous in the United States. Low-density residential zoning predominates in US cities far more than in other countries, limiting housing opportunities for those who cannot afford large homes. These zoning regulations have racist and classist origins, make housing more expensive, and reinforce segregation patterns. While sociologists study these consequences of zoning, and other causes of unaffordable housing and segregation, they rarely examine zoning itself. This article argues for a sociological research agenda on zoning and land use.
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Criminal Governance and the Crisis of Contemporary Latin American States
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 441–461More LessAcross Latin America, societies are confronting the rise of novel orders in which state officials and political authorities share power with criminal organizations. Criminal governance (i.e., the creation of rules regulating behavior by criminal entities often with the collaboration of state actors), as these arrangements have come to be known, poses significant challenges for democracy and the rule of law and often threatens peoples' enjoyment of fundamental rights. This article reviews the literature on state-criminal relations in Latin America by critically discussing conceptual and methodological issues. In so doing, it looks at three extant literatures that have contributed to enhancing our grasp of alternative forms of governance: studies on violence, works on stateness and the rule of law, and the literature on criminal governance. This article posits that those literatures have done a commendable job in describing and conceptualizing emerging forms of governance that deviate from traditional views. However, we also argue that these bodies of work operate in silos with little integration and display methodological biases and theoretical blind spots that weaken their overall analytical power. We also point out that much more work is needed to assess these new orders' consequences for existing political regimes and state institutions. In the conclusion, we propose concrete steps to strengthen research and foster a more integrated agenda and suggest future investigative avenues.
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Democracy in the Global South
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 463–484More LessGiven the legacies of colonialism and the inequities of the global capitalist system, consolidated democracies in the Global South were the exception prior to the third wave of democratization in the 1970s. As democratization in the Global South grew, a first generation of work by sociologists challenged mainstream political science's preoccupation with electoral and liberal democracy and brought popular mobilization to the center of the analysis. This literature made key contributions to the debate on democratic transitions and consolidation. A more recent wave of work has focused on the democratization of democracy, examining civil society, movements, participatory democracy, transnational activism, and the wide range of political actors and forms of collective action that have emerged in a democratizing Global South. Variation across and within democracies remains high, but there have been clear cases of democratic deepening. Improving our understanding of the fabric of democratic institutions and practices, including recent cases of regression, calls for more research, especially in subnational and local contexts.
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Families in Latin America: Trends, Singularities, and Contextual Factors
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 485–505More LessWe review demographic and sociological literature on family dynamics in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and systematize major trends in union formation and fertility in recent decades. We also highlight the singularities that distinguish family patterns and trends in LAC from those in other world regions and discuss the contextual factors underlying these singularities. Latin American families have undergone substantial changes in their configurations and dynamics. We highlight the persistence of an early pattern of family formation despite considerable educational expansion and emerging subreplacement fertility levels, the bottom-up diffusion of cohabitation from low- to high-education groups, the frequent coresidence of single mothers with extended family members, and the substantial divergence in family forms and trajectories across social classes. These family trends do not conform entirely to any of the major theoretical frameworks devised to explain family change in Western societies. Pervasive socioeconomic inequality, high levels of informality in the labor market, weak social protection systems, and slow progress toward gender equality are among the contextual factors that shape the diversity and singularities of Latin American families.
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Measuring Women's Empowerment in the Global South
Vol. 48 (2022), pp. 507–527More LessOver the past two decades, we have seen an explosion in research on the topic of women's empowerment and its related dimensions, yet there remains much to be done in terms of clarifying conceptual pathways and best practices in measurement. This review traces the intellectual and historic context in which women's status and empowerment in lower- and middle-income countries have been measured, the conceptual and operationalization challenges in shaping research questions, the use of empirical measures and their connection to levels of social analysis, and the identification of emerging directions for future research. With the recognition that empowerment is as much a collective process as it is individual, we argue that a more integrative and multidisciplinary approach to empowerment is needed. This would require incorporating an intersectional lens, employing the life course approach, and tapping into diverse sources of data that can together strengthen future research.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 50 (2024)
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Volume 49 (2023)
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Volume 48 (2022)
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Volume 47 (2021)
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Volume 46 (2020)
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Volume 45 (2019)
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Volume 44 (2018)
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Volume 43 (2017)
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Volume 42 (2016)
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Volume 41 (2015)
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Volume 40 (2014)
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Volume 39 (2013)
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Volume 38 (2012)
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Volume 37 (2011)
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Volume 36 (2010)
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Volume 35 (2009)
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Volume 34 (2008)
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Volume 33 (2007)
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Volume 32 (2006)
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Volume 31 (2005)
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Volume 30 (2004)
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Volume 29 (2003)
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Volume 28 (2002)
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Volume 27 (2001)
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Volume 26 (2000)
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Volume 25 (1999)
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Volume 24 (1998)
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Volume 23 (1997)
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Volume 22 (1996)
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Volume 21 (1995)
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Volume 20 (1994)
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Volume 19 (1993)
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Volume 18 (1992)
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Volume 17 (1991)
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Volume 16 (1990)
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Volume 15 (1989)
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Volume 14 (1988)
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Volume 13 (1987)
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Volume 12 (1986)
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Volume 11 (1985)
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Volume 10 (1984)
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Volume 9 (1983)
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Volume 8 (1982)
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Volume 7 (1981)
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Volume 6 (1980)
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Volume 5 (1979)
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Volume 4 (1978)
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Volume 3 (1977)
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Volume 2 (1976)
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Volume 1 (1975)
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Volume 0 (1932)