Annual Review of Sociology - Current Issue

Experience sampling (ES)—also referred to as ecological momentary assessment (EMA)—is a data collection method that involves asking study participants to report on their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, activities, and environments in (or near) real time. ES/EMA is typically administered using an intensive longitudinal design (repeated assessments within and across days). Although use of ES/EMA is widespread in psychology and health sciences, uptake of the method among sociologists has been limited. We argue that ES/EMA offers key advantages for the investigation of sociologically relevant phenomena, particularly in light of recent disciplinary emphasis on investigating the everyday mechanisms through which social structures and micro (individual and relational) processes are mutually constitutive. We describe extant and potential research applications illustrating the advantages of ES/EMA regarding enhanced validity, illuminating micro-temporal processes, and the potential for linkage with spatially and temporally referenced data sources. We also consider methodological challenges facing sociological research using ES/EMA.

Black feminist theorizing developed outside the formal academy to meet the needs of Black women but did not end there. This review offers entrée to some current “wars” and debates on politics of knowledge about Black feminist theories, concepts, and praxis that have deepened within sociology and increasingly extend into live conference panels, online debates, and legislatures. Shared characteristics within Black feminism include persistent and critical attention to Black women's knowledge production, power, and social change—but there is much more. Drawing on sociology and other disciplines, this review of Black feminism/intersectionality covers families of Black feminisms, disciplinary citation trends, methodological considerations, and tensions around embodiment in claims to Black feminism and intersectionality. In the conclusions, we propose directions to untether conflicts, unsettle wars, and move toward joy and liberation as the struggle continues.

Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We propose a practical approach that conceptualizes meaning as an instance of an actor interpreting a stimulus. Reviewing existing literature, we find that most sociological accounts understand interpretation either as categorization or as semantic association. We show that an integrated approach is analytically useful for conceptualizing shared interpretation and the process by which people coordinate their interpretations. This provides a framework for addressing interpretative heterogeneity when studying attitudinal or behavioral variance. We conclude by highlighting how recent advances in computational linguistics have opened exciting new possibilities for the study of interpretation, and suggest several avenues for future research.

What does feminist theory have to offer sociology? Defining feminist theory as work that problematizes the gender binary and the relations of domination that constitute and emerge from it, we explore four key aspects of feminist scholarship. We begin with work that explores gender as a structuring trope. We then turn to how gender is coconstituted with other structures of power and domination. Next, we survey how feminists have theorized the relationship between nature and the social through the body. Finally, we examine feminist epistemological claims. We conclude by demonstrating the inextricability of feminist conceptual work and feminist politics. As we move across these bodies of work, we show how they are linked with one another and suggest some of the ways in which thinking like a feminist would help sociologists better grasp the dynamics of the social worlds we study.

A world in flux confronts the present generation, raising fears of systems gone awry. Whether it is the prospect of runaway climate change or the dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence, these dilemmas suggest that scientific and technological remedies have not been matched by progress in harnessing social and political capacities for collective action. Part of this impasse stems from a gap between the multidimensional nature of contemporary global crises and unidimensional modes of understanding and managing them. In this article, we describe an integrative approach rooted in the paradigm of social ecology that might enable us to tackle these challenges more comprehensively. We discuss, for example, how a social ecological perspective focuses attention not only on the carbon footprint of society but also on the social footprint of carbon. We review the tenets of social ecology and reflect on its promise for spurring new modes of collaborative research and collective action, including more effective strategies for planetary governance.

This article provides a sociology of Twitter (now known as X) and charts the development of the study of the platform and its data in sociological venues through an analysis of 1,644 articles published since 2009. This review helps readers understand developments in the field and provides a road map for advancing future Twitter-related sociological research. The works cited in this review advance sociological research on a variety of subfields, including but not limited to race, social movements, segregation, politics, violence, and stratification. After a brief introduction of definitions as well as methodological approaches used to study the platform (computational, qualitative, and mixed), I explore how Twitter has been used in sociological research. Furthermore, using social movements and activism as a case study, I highlight what the platform's usage and communication reveal about the social world. I conclude with a road map for advancing Twitter-related sociological research in the current atmosphere in which Twitter has been renamed X. Ultimately, a sociology of Twitter does not need to be tethered to the platform per se, as it also provides a framework for understanding new platforms if they become home for what people previously posted to Twitter/X.

Conspiracy theories are a constant feature of human society but have recently risen in prominence with the flurry of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and their public display in social media. Conspiracy theories should be studied not only because of their potential harm but also because they are related to other sources of misinformation such as folk theories, rumors, and fake news. Recent understanding of their spread has shifted the focus from investigating the believers to characteristics of the social processes that motivate and persuade, with a new view of the conspiracy theorist as a bricoleur dealing with threats through social (re)construction of reality. These tendencies are strengthened by the markets for attention and approval constructed by social media platforms, and bots also amplify them. We identify an agenda of multiple important and urgent paths for future research that will help understanding of conspiracy theories in society.

This review examines cultural production and consumption through the lens of race and ethnicity. Although the sociological study of race, ethnicity, and cultural production and consumption (RECPC) is growing, it is scattered across various subfields. This review aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how race and ethnicity intersect with cultural production and consumption by bringing this scholarship together. I discuss five dominant themes in the scholarship: classification, valuation and evaluation, representations, market outcomes, and cultural capital. The article concludes with implications for future sociological research on RECPC.

Sociology operates with an impoverished understanding of conservatism and the natural environment. The discipline's focus on antiregulatory and antiscience dimensions of conservative politics can obscure a more comprehensive, historically deep, and theoretically rich understanding of conservatism's connection to nature. We review and integrate sociological research with a large multidisciplinary global literature on conservative and far right environmental thought. Our analysis shows an intellectual tradition built around three commitments concerning the moral order of nature and society: naturalism, organicism, and pastoralism. Rather than being antiscientific, these traditions have drawn heavily on natural science for their authority. After tracing their history, we consider several contemporary manifestations, sometimes in ways that are counterintuitive to sociology's dominant understanding of conservatism. Conservative thought, including its far right edges, maintains a firm hold on global politics while climate change transforms the planet. To better understand these dynamics, sociology must continue to integrate work from other socioenvironmental fields. This review begins to correct this neglect and charts a path for future research at this increasingly impactful intersection.

Despite a centuries-long history of violent mobilization, white supremacist activism (WSA) has received relatively little sociological attention outside a small, specialized subfield. Disciplinary interest began to change after Trump's 2016 election; the 2017 violent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia; and the January 6, 2021, insurrection. In recognition, this review article focuses on what has been learned about contemporary WSA since the 1980s. We categorize studies by their unit of analysis—individual or micro, meso, and macro levels—to highlight analytic commonalities and distinctions and to underscore the central role that threat plays in the ebb and flow of WSA. As part of our discussion, we also point to unresolved and understudied issues. We conclude by identifying issues that future research should address.

Policies relevant to many key sociological processes are often subnational, enacted at the regional, state/provincial, and/or local levels. This applies notably in the politics of the environmental state, where public and private subnational environmental policies (SNEPs) have major consequences for managing climate change, addressing environmental injustices, regulating land uses, greening energy markets, limiting pollution, and much more. While sociologists focus more on national policies, diverse sociological contributions emphasize the importance of SNEPs and their origins, diffusion, implementation, and sources of backlash. We begin by providing a typology of SNEPs. Next, we highlight not only environmental sociology (with its particular attention to climate change and energy) but also the sociologies of social movements, politics, the economy, science, risk, and organizations, which have each offered unique perspectives. Finally, we outline an agenda for how sociologists can further elaborate a distinctive perspective that highlights inequality, valuation, diffusion, scale shifts, and venue-shopping up to national and global policy systems.

Over the last two decades, the sociology of entrepreneurship has exploded as an area of academic inquiry. Most of this research has been focused on understanding the environmental conditions that promote entrepreneurship and processes related to the initial formation of an organization. Despite this surge in activity, many important questions remain open. Only more recently have scholars begun to turn their attention to what happens to organizations, and the people connected to them, as they mature and move through the life cycle of entrepreneurship. These open questions, moreover, connect to many classic themes in the literature on careers, organizational sociology, stratification, and work and occupations. Using a framework that focuses on three phases of the entrepreneurial life cycle—pre-entry, entry, and post-entry—we summarize sociological research on entrepreneurship and highlight opportunities for future research.

The growing visibility of transgender and nonbinary people raises important sociological questions about how the structure of sex and gender is shifting and underscores necessary changes to research practice. We review what is known about emerging gender identities and their implications for sociological understandings of the relationship between sex and gender and the maintenance of the sex/gender system of inequality. Transgender and nonbinary identities are increasingly common among younger cohorts and improved survey measurements of sex and gender are expanding information about these changes. In the United States, an additional gender category seems to be solidifying in public usage even as the higher status of masculinity over femininity persists. The continuing power of the normative binary contributes to both violent backlash and characteristic patterns of discrimination against gender diverse people; yet, underlying support for nondiscrimination in the workplace is stronger than commonly recognized. New, more consistent efforts to account for gender diversity in social science research are needed to fully understand these changes.

Adverse environmental exposures—war and violence, natural disasters, escalating heat, worsening air quality—experienced in pregnancy are consequential for multiple domains of well-being over the life course, including health, cognitive development, schooling, and earnings. Though these environmental exposures become embodied via biological processes, they are fundamentally sociological phenomena: Their emergence, allocation, and impact are structured by institutions and power. As a result, consequential early-life environmental exposures are a critical part of the sociological understanding of social stratification, intergenerational mobility, and individual and cohort life course trajectories. We review theory and evidence on prenatal exposures, describe enduring methodological issues and potential solutions for elucidating these effects, and discuss the importance of this evidence for the stratification of opportunity and outcomes in contemporary societies.