Research and media discussion of police contact routinely conceptualize it as time-constrained interactions between officers and civilians. However, extant literature documents preparation for encounters and post-encounter advocacy, which each challenge restricted understandings of contact and, importantly, its relationship to mental health. We introduce “perpetual encounters” to both theoretically

While research on platform work has grown exponentially in recent years, the power dynamics between creators and algorithms on digital platforms, as well as their role in shaping online visibility, are yet to be fully understood. Against this backdrop, we ask: How does algorithmic power maintain its dominance and shape the nature of work for content creators? Through a systematic review of the literature

To what degree does parent occupation cause a child’s occupational attainment? We articulate this causal question in the potential outcomes framework. Empirically, we show that adjustment for only two confounding variables substantially reduces the estimated association between parent and child occupation in a U.S. cohort. Methodologically, we highlight complications that arise when the treatment variable

In a probability sampling survey, adaptive data collection strategies may be used to obtain a response set that minimizes nonresponse bias within budget constraints. Previous research has stratified the target population into subgroups defined by categories of auxiliary variables observed for the entire population, and tailored strategies to obtain similar response rates across subgroups. However,

Large language models (LLMs), through their exposure to massive collections of online text, learn to reproduce the perspectives and linguistic styles of diverse social and cultural groups. This capability suggests a powerful social scientific application—the simulation of empirically realistic, culturally situated human subjects. Synthesizing recent research in artificial intelligence and computational

How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups shape media discourse, to the spread of policy across institutions, to the diffusion of organizational structures and institution themselves. To study how ideas and narratives diffuse across text, we must first develop a method to identify whether

The ‘gig economy’ encompasses a wide range of jobs, platforms and workers. In this article, we provide the first quantitative evidence in support of the model of job quality developed by Wood et al. that predicts divergence across local and remote platform work. Specifically, we find that remote platform work entails significantly better pay, more flexibility, greater influence over how to do the job

This study investigates the role of two mechanisms – perceived workers’ performance and commitment – in shaping the career opportunities of teleworkers and office-based workers in the post-pandemic context of the United Kingdom. We outline a theoretical framework that integrates economic and sociological literature on work from home (WFH) and careers, and accounts for workers’ gender and parenthood

Following policy feedback theory, this article argues that normative policy feedback mechanisms also operate at the workplace level, where employees are expected to adapt their beliefs to the specific policy context in which they are embedded. Specifically, it considers employees’ gender ideologies and their association with two prominent workplace-level diversity policies: voluntary women’s quotas

A growing proportion of children live in unaffordable, overcrowded, or doubled-up housing, raising concerns among scholars of child wellbeing. These arrangements may affect children through increased exposure to insecure mobility such as frequent or reactive moves. Though scholars consider resource-strained arrangements insecure, the assumption that they lead to insecure mobility is quantitatively

This paper asks how and by whom knowledge on permafrost thaw is produced, and how politics is implicated in this (non)knowledge production. Through interviews and fieldwork in Fairbanks, Alaska, the paper argues that knowledge production on climate change should interest International Relations (IR) much more than it does. What is at stake is IR's ability to discern which political actors and priorities

Although much extreme discourse is found at the poles, we still know little about how individuals in the center make sense of immigration as “complicated” and even “too complex” to make sense of. Such issues are important to address if we are to better understand the contemporary landscape of bias and belonging and the character of attitudes in the middle. We examine the issue by drawing on a unique

Large language models (LLMs) are quickly becoming ubiquitous, but their implications for social science research are not yet well understood. We ask whether LLMs can help code and analyse large-N qualitative data from open-ended interviews, with an application to transcripts of interviews with Rohingya refugees and their Bengali hosts in Bangladesh. We find that using LLMs to annotate and code text

Although there is growing social science research examining how generative AI models can be effectively and systematically applied to text-based tasks, whether and how these models can be used to analyze images remain open questions. In this article, we introduce a framework for analyzing images with generative multimodal models, which consists of three core tasks: curation, discovery, and measurement

Experiences of work and employment continue to change but the concepts of job quality, job satisfaction and quality of working life remain compartmentalised and contextually disconnected due to entrenched disciplinary divisions, which hinder multi-level work quality theorisation. This article contributes to research on the sociology of work by integrating divergent streams of literature on these concepts

Existing research on the platform economy highlights a contradiction between autonomy and control. Based on an analysis of online chats and in-depth interviews with food delivery couriers in Riga, the capital of Latvia, we theoretically deepen the explanation of the sense of autonomy identified in algorithmically managed workplaces by analysing how workers’ identity is related to the other identities

Cognitive labor is an obdurate source of inequality between partners, and is usually considered so because the nature of the work makes it “invisible” to those involved. Yet given that talk of the “mental load” is now widespread and the pandemic amplified awareness of disparities, gender scholars have reason to question its “invisibility.” I ask: Are partners in heterosexual relationships aware of

Scholars posit that the flexibility stigma—a belief that workers who use flexible workplace policies, such as parental and sick leave—exacerbates gender inequality. However, a large body of research argues that the smaller number of men who take leaves face even more severe stigma than women because they violate norms of masculinity as well as the employers’ expectation that employees prioritize paid

There is a growing heterodoxy of sociological social mobility scholarship which offers an alternative to dominant research and policy paradigms. This article aims to develop this body of literature through qualitative case study analysis of two young women – one upwardly mobile, one socially stable – and their classed and gendered trajectories into (and potentially out of) the nursing profession. Bourdieu’s

The call to revisit Live Methods prompted us to consider the legacy of this text at Goldsmiths college, where the editors and many of the contributors were writing from in 2012. We are PhD students in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, a space where Live Methods has left a marked influence through practices of teaching, learning and research. At Goldsmiths, the 2021–2023 academic years saw

This article focuses upon unnoticed objects in the home, such as those stuffed in a junk drawer, to explore how we can be attentive to the everyday in cultivating a ‘live sociology’ which illuminates the close at hand, locating the shared, public and moral in the everyday. I argue that attentiveness to the vibrancy of everyday things can expand the possibilities of a vital sociology. Attentiveness

The Covid-19 pandemic made the liveness of the social world readily apparent. Everyday rhythms and routines were, for many, upended and new and uncertain ones were rapidly and repeatedly re-made. A plethora of intense and flattened feelings – from anxiety to depression to pleasure – were generated. This article considers our collaborative research project on everyday experiences of time during the

Live Methods argued that there is an ethical imperative for sociologists to really listen to what precariously positioned people say. Research methods can be exploitative in how they render people’s presence. This paper discusses how I practised Live Methods in one ethnography conducted with young migrants in London over 15 years. This research was meant to last two years, but continued on the basis

When Tina Turner sang ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ she could have been singing about live methods . This article reflects on my experience as a reluctant ethnographer with children during COVID-19. I argue that it was ‘love’ for the community I was researching with that led me to use live methods . In this article I reflect on how love is the driving force in live methods . Taking inspiration from

In this introduction to Live Methods Revisited, we reflect upon the conjuncture in which Live Methods was originally published as a way of contextualising and appraising its legacy. In doing so we focus on an aspect of Live Methods which has had less attention – the politics of methods. Live Methods offered a reassertion of the promise and potential for sociological practice through reimagining methods

Rooted in a three-year (2018–2021) research collaboration between Indigenous and white settler researchers in Canada, this article asks: how do we use, adapt and remake methods developed in Euro-western contexts for very different geopolitical contexts, specifically Indigenous ones? How do we do this without minimizing the harms caused by Euro-western methods and epistemologies (some of which are ongoing)

Just a few years after the U.S. government’s decision to fully fund the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 1990, an important harbinger of things to come was the publication of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The authors’ most controversial claim was that human intelligence was at least 60 percent genetic. At that time, the national advisory group

Strong welfare states are often assumed to be lacking in intergenerational family care engagements. This article challenges this narrative by putting conceptualisations of individualisation and autonomy into conversation with theories on relationality and care, relating this to biographical narratives of intergenerational care practices during the expansion of the Swedish welfare state. The research

This article proposes a fully nonparametric model to investigate the dynamics of intergenerational income mobility for discrete outcomes. In our model, an individual’s income class probabilities depend on parental income in a manner that accommodates nonlinearities and interactions among various individual and parental characteristics, including race, education, and parental age at childbearing, and

Randomized audits and correspondence studies are widely regarded as a “gold standard” for capturing discrimination and bias. However, gatekeepers (e.g., employers) are the analytic unit even though stated implications often center on group-level inequalities. Employing simple rules, we show that audits have the potential to uncover applicant-side inequalities and burdens beyond the gatekeeper biases

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize social science research. However, researchers face the difficult challenge of choosing a specific AI model, often without social science-specific guidance. To demonstrate the importance of this choice, we present an evaluation of the effect of alignment, or human-driven modification, on the ability of large language models (LLMs)

Over the past decade, social scientists have adapted computational methods for qualitative text analysis, with the hope that they can match the accuracy and reliability of hand coding. The emergence of GPT and open-source generative large language models (LLMs) has transformed this process by shifting from programming to engaging with models using natural language, potentially mimicking the in-depth

This article concerns the challenge of making postcolonial and decolonial art under postcolonial capitalism. A pioneer in the Gulf's growing art scene, the Sharjah Biennial has carved a niche for itself as an incubator of postcolonial and decolonial art. This article first locates the biennial's focus within the trajectories of postcolonial, decolonial, and Black radical theory across the increasingly

This article explores how young people reimagine social relations and negotiate difference within a deeply divided context in a period of increasing national contention. It explores if and how they combine an ethno-national situatedness and wider shared horizons. It uses a ‘situated cosmopolitan’ frame as a heuristic and shows how the case illustrates the difficulty of this stance. The article reports

Although the ratio of women’s to men’s housework hours has declined, women still spend more time than men doing household tasks in most high-income contexts. This article examines one of the hypothesized mechanisms underlying the persistence of housework disparities—fairness perceptions—via a survey experiment in the United States. We ask: What factors contribute to fairness assessments of unequal

This article asks what reflexive practices one can learn from, with and against Pierre Bourdieu’s works on and in Algeria and later contributions. Addressing the question enables a revision of Bourdieusian reflexivity and a new contribution to the methodological reflexivity debate in international relations (IR) and International Political Sociology (IPS). It furthers the identification of three reflexive

Human rights rationales have in recent years been increasingly mobilized in international efforts to bring national legal frameworks on migrant smuggling in line with international law. This article explores the role of human rights in borderwork during the externally funded legal reform process of Senegal's legal framework on migrant smuggling. Adopting a multiscalar governmentality lens, it sheds

As institutions increasingly use predictive algorithms to allocate scarce resources, scholars have warned that these algorithms may legitimize inequality. Although research has examined how elite discourses position algorithms as fair, we know less about how the public perceives them compared to traditional allocation methods. We implement a vignette-based survey experiment to measure perceptions of

The Covid-19 pandemic created extraordinary conditions for social protection systems globally, with both material and discursive implications. In the UK, these unprecedented circumstances led to an influx of (first-time) social security claims, expectations of increased social solidarity and more positive public discussion around benefits. One might expect this to affect attitudes towards claiming

We advance health lifestyle research by developing the concept of agentic recombination to capture how individuals uniquely combine health behaviors to form adult health lifestyles. Using data from the 2005 to 2019 Transition to Adulthood Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we examine intergenerational transmission of health behaviors, directionality of health behaviors, and health lifestyles

What is the relationship between inequality and social ties? Do personal networks, group memberships, and connections to social resources help level the playing field, or do they reinforce economic disparities? We examine two core empirical issues: the degree of inequality in social ties and their consolidation with income. Using 142,000 person-wave observations from 15 high-quality U.S. data sets

Food and eating are critical sites for analysing everyday life and social change. Amid growing concerns about health, sustainability and neoliberal pressures for individual responsibility, there is increasing pressure to reshape how individuals relate to food. This study addresses the evolution of food practices across the life course, examining how social class and trajectories shape food-related

The article delves into the governance of urban marginality, focusing on the interplay of the Wacquantian distinction between the left and right hands of the state in governing urban marginality and the gender dimension of this governance. Studies of state involvement in managing urban marginality have concentrated on the content of policies and services, neglecting their modes and forms. Our research

In this article, I examine the strategies of resistance deployed by people who have experienced street harassment. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 47 heterosexual women and LGBTQ+ people, I document how participants skillfully and contextually deployed resistance strategies to disrupt harassment. Notably, participants often represented resistance practices as moments of affective, subconscious