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Research has indicated that one of the primary reasons that White Working Class voters supported Trump in the last election was due to their hostility to changing ethnic relations in the United States. This paper explores whether this hostility is inevitable by looking at samples of white working class respondents in an area where this ethnic transition is most advanced: California. The ethnic changes that have affected this state have not been uniform: some counties have experienced much more of it than others, making for points of comparisons. It was hypothesized that ethnic hostility among this group would be negatively related to ethnic composition: that counties where there was the smallest amount of ethnic transition would find the highest degree of ethnic hostility, while those with the greatest amount would experience the lowest. The evidence partially supported this hypothesis, but found much depended on what was happening in the larger white community. More specifically, it was found that counties where there had been increases in the proportion of college educated whites produced the greatest accommodation to ethnic changes among the white working class population. I speculate in the conclusion of this paper about why this might be the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science and its systematic scientific thinking and analysis provides a venue to question social norms of historical and systemic segregation and discrimination. This study discusses how the use of population datasets, like the education datasets collected by the Office of Civil Rights, can be used to investigate patterns of social injustice especially among small, under-represented groups that may otherwise have "too small of an 'n'" to be analyzed or discussed in samplebased datasets. Large scale datasets allow for some persistent patterns of inequality, inequity, and disparities to be demonstrated, especially with oversampling to address these concerns. Population data, however, ensure representation. This paper outlines the procedures using a case of high school curricula opportunities of AP course enrollments and test-taking to represent the segregation in learning opportunities among American high school students. This paper measures the amount of disparity in the curriculum using a version of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) which does well to estimate the amount of "market share" certain subgroups of students have over the Advanced Placement curriculum in the US. It also does well to adjust the "moving denominator" of the sequence in this college pipeline trajectory. This aspect of the measure advantages it over other more commonly used measures of inequality, like the Gini coefficient. These findings dovetail with the educational studies on resegregation of educational opportunities as well as the current research regarding the unequal learning experiences of students in American high schools. It complements studies on within-school segregation by moving the discussion forward to understand the between-school and between-district learning opportunity differences that are becoming the new approach to stratifying education and shines a policy light on the growing racial disparities left in education that were not addressed under Brown v. Board of Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature is concerned with the study of the "financialization of the firm", i.e. the increasing dominance of financial markets and financial motives in nonfinancial firms. Scholars concerned with this "rise of finance" in nonfinancial firms and its consequences often uncritically assume the existence and widespread diffusion of such a phenomenon. Yet, empirical evidence for this assumption is still scarce. In addition, with little knowledge about the antecedents of firm-level financialization, findings about the consequences of financialization may be falsely generalized across the whole nonfinancial corporate sector. This paper critically interrogates the phenomenon of financialization, by sketching out its trajectory over the recent decades, using a large sample of manufacturing companies from the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. I find little support for universalistic claims of a broad "rise of finance". Such a "rise" is limited to the dimension of nonfinancial companies' payouts to financial markets, is geographically centered in the Anglo-Saxon economies, and is mainly driven by a subgroup of highly financialized companies. In this paper I furthermore identify potential antecedents of firm-level financialization, and test their effects in a panel regression. I find that companies' supply chain organization, corporate governance policies, business risk, and the availability of investment opportunities stand out as important factors. Overall, my study casts doubt on claims about the universalistic, unidirectional dynamic of financialization. The phenomenon might instead be better understood as a temporary and reversible shift in nonfinancial companies' financial market relations, the determinants of which require more detailed inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have demonstrated how gentrification and urban change produce new social and economic inequalities. "Green gentrification" is proposed as a term referring to the ways these inequalities increasingly take place through discourses of nature and sustainability. This paper examines urban environmental changes in Bayview-Hunters Point, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of San Francisco. Based on ten years of engaged fieldwork, I show how long-time Black Bayview-Hunters Point residents live with, suffer the health consequences of, and protest the dusts of market-based redevelopment. Their experiences reveal how gentrification does not only produce social and economic inequalities, but can produce distinct forms of environmental injustice. This paper brings critical spatial theory and the "new materialisms" literature into conversation with environmental sociology, and specifically with scholarship on environmental justice. I contribute to an "intersectional environmental justice" framework (Malin and Ryder 2018) by considering the interlocking nature of race, waste, and space in the production of environmental injustices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In common sociological research, income inequality is measured at the aggregate level. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate there is more than meets the eye when inequality is indicated by a single measure. In this paper, I introduce an alternative method that evaluates individuals' contributions to inequality as well as the between-group and within-group components of such contributions. I first highlight three common inequality measures, the Gini index and two generalized entropy measures--Theil's T and Theil's L indices--by presenting their individual components as a method for evaluating inequality. Five hypothetical datasets are used to illustrate these individual components first. The empirical analysis to follow focuses on the differences between the 2007 and 2017 Current Population Survey data revealed by these individual inequality components. The individual inequality measures can reveal patterns of inequality concealed by single measures at the aggregate level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does nationalism interact with non-state institutions to develop as both substantive and symbolic identity? This paper tracks the project of Russian nationalism in the post-Soviet period and its ambivalent operationalization of Islam as both constitutive of and alien to the Russian nation. State and popular actors have emphasized the role of religion in the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state to mobilize public support, frame policy, and integrate as well as exclude portions of the population. The Muslim Spiritual Boards of Russia, one of a set of quasicorporatist institutions that regulate religious life among constituent communities and negotiate the status of religion between the state and public, play a direct role in responding to and crafting narratives around competing conceptions of the Russian nation. This project aims to embed the Spiritual Boards in the context of the wider non-state social sphere, shifting popular pressures, and the priorities of the state. In particular, it focuses on Moscow; a case that provides the greatest degree of analytical leverage across these factors and is uniquely critical as the center of the state and major religious institutions, while representative of broader shifts in in-migration and popular attitudes. I make a preliminary argument that the Spiritual Boards increasingly construct Islam as a source of patriotic morals and values, in line with other quasi-corporatist institutions, while channeling growing nationalist grievances toward the specter of 'foreign' Islam. The paper will use archival documents, publications and speeches, and ethnographic evidence to show how the Moscow-based Spiritual Boards produce Islam and Russian identity from their founding in 1992 to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how ethnic exclusion is implicated in creation of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe. In contrast to the perspective on markets as a mechanism to improve the allocation of material resources between rational actors, over the inefficiencies of socialist redistribution, I call attention to a visceral economy of postsocialism, which focuses on people's economic lives and sees markets as embedded in institutions and entangled in morals and emotions. I hypothesize that creation of neoliberal capitalism in the context of ethnic conflict and rise of nationalism manifests itself in significant economic marginalization of East European ethnic minorities. I use data from the Life in Transition Survey for sixteen countries on individuals' economic attitudes in 2006, 2010 and 2016, including satisfaction with economy, preference for markets as a socio-economic system, and imagined economic future for children. I also examine assessment of economic lives in postsocialism compared to 1989, end of socialism. The results show that ethnic minorities were significantly less satisfied with the economic situation and their own household's experience in 2006 than in 1989, and more discontent than the ethnic majorities, controlling for self-assessed social class standing and other relevant demographics. Moreover, even in economically prosperous times before the 2009 crisis, minorities were resigned that next generations are not going to fare better than they have, which continues to be the case after the 2015 refugee crises. Substantively, these grim findings have implications for understanding the incredibly high intolerance toward the "ethnically other," including immigrants, in Eastern Europe and receptivity to nationalist political leaders. Theoretically, the paper underscores the importance for economic sociologists to examine race and ethnicity as central to our understanding of people's economic lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last seven years, there have been major changes in two South American countries that once firmly prohibited abortion: Argentina and Uruguay. In both, social movements have mobilized to demand legal abortion, and policies have been changed to grant increased access, to different degrees. Yet in each case, advances fall short of the goal of legalization and public provision. Instead, policies restrict access to abortion to specific cases and require different implementation regimes. In some cases, it has led to challenges by feminist lawyers in the courts. How have activists, lawyers and others addressed implementation as they continue to try to expand abortion rights around these policies? What can we learn from Uruguay and Argentina to better understand the role of litigation in abortion rights and reproductive justice in the rest of Latin America and around the world? This paper draws on interviews with lawyers and activists addressing abortion rights as well analysis of key cases based on court documents and media reports to compare legal mobilization on abortion in Argentina and Uruguay. Focusing on legal mobilization in the courts as a social movement tactic, the paper views cause lawyers and litigation as important resources for each movement. It argues that movement actors pursue their goals using strategic litigation that varies based on legal opportunity structures that vary across national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music genres provide a widely shared heuristic to draw symbolic boundaries and categorize music, musicians, and listeners. Building on Silver et al.'s (2016) big-data analysis of genre combinations and boundaries from every Myspace musician profile in 2007, this paper aims to understand the cognitive mechanisms at work when musicians decide on which genres to identify their music with. Theorizing a link between genre conventions, institutional logics, and musicians' self-identification, this paper's cultural cognitivist approach argues that musicians understand music genres through socially constructed music conventions. These cultural conventions are employed when musicians are faced with the problem of orienting their genres towards potential listeners with a limited selection of available genres, and shape how musicians may use and combine music genres to self-identify their profiles. As these genres play a large role in people finding and listening to their music, selecting genres is an important aspect of the identities (and success) of musicians. Though the data is becoming dated, the theoretical implications of this paper are salient in the search to better understand how people self-identify through widely shared cultural conventions and meanings, and how others are excluded from accessing these conventions and the resources they may bequeath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of women seeking higher education from Muslim countries in the United States is increasing. The pursuit of higher education at American universities also introduces a new sociocultural context wherein cultivation and embrace of newer forms of identity becomes inevitable. This often requires negotiations of previous identities that were cultivated in the course of their earlier lives in their home countries. This paper critically probes the complex entanglements between older and newer forms of identity among international women students. In particular, it will investigate the impact of new pressures of fitting in into the U.S society, while maintaining their identity as Muslims in their everyday lives. This study uses a qualitative approach that includes intensive interviews of twenty Muslim women international students. However, in this working paper, the researcher included data from nine female international Muslim students and intends to add more while also making more clear theoretical grounds for the topic. The research subjects for the study are enrolled in different programs at a university in the US. The results are coded and analysed through a thematic analysis of the data and respondents' responses are presented in quotations. The findings show that students negotiate their identities at the religious/ethnic as well as gendered levels. They prioritize the values without losing their ties with either culture. On the one hand, international female students carry social and cultural expectations within a gendered gaze; they are surveilled by the Muslim and ethnic community members. On the other hand, they negotiate common stereotypes of racial and religious profiling of female Muslim students. Finally, the study provides important recommendation for the support of international female students in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social policies are an important means through which societies ensure the wellbeing of children. U.S. social safety net programs support the wellbeing of children and their families through a variety of different program types. This paper compares how in-kind and income support safety net programs are associated with a range of child wellbeing outcomes. Using a cross-sectional time series regression modeling strategy, this paper employs comparable measures of benefit generosity and inclusion for five in-kind and three income support safety net programs from 2003-2013 in order to analyze the relationship between state social safety net policies and a range of child wellbeing indicators. In preliminary results, generosity and inclusion levels of the in-kind policies tend to be more frequently and more highly associated with child education, health, and economic wellbeing than the income support policies. Yet, the overall pattern of association between social safety net policies and child wellbeing outcomes appears more nuanced. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications state safety net policies have on across state disparities in child wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the direct effects of immigrant narratives on intergroup relations or on social groups not explicitly targeted. Thus, the methodological and empirical innovations of the current paper fill these gaps in three key ways. First, I add to the literature methodologically by employing a behavioral game--an underutilized tool in sociology--to provide insight into how immigrant narratives influence intergroup relations. Second, I examine the effects of immigrant narratives on social groups not explicitly mentioned in the narratives. Third, I contribute to the literature by interrogating the effects of pro- and anti-immigrant narratives. The present study pursues the following question: how do immigrant narratives effect intergroup relations? More specifically, how do immigrant narratives effect giving-behaviors among whites towards Latinos and blacks? The data in the present study come from an original experiment with nearly 1000 non-Hispanic, US-born white adults residing in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Results reveal both anti- and pro-immigrant narratives effect giving-behavior along partisan lines. The findings in this paper shed light on how narratives influence perceptions of group membership and deservingness. Thus, the implications of the findings are that political discourse about immigrants can influence social interactions, socioeconomic stratification, and the ethno-racial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of a spouse's involvement in housework and a company's welfare support on working married women's resignation at three stages (before, during, and after) of childbirth. Based on statistical analysis utilizing Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families, this work demonstrates that the decision of whether to stay in or out of the labor market is no longer determined by socioeconomic statuses of oneself and spouse, but rather by women-friendly working environments and family support at every stage of childbirth. The results indicate that women with higher organizational welfare level and spending less time on housework have a lower risk of resignation. also, The women who receive more company welfare benefits have a lower risk of resignation than those who do not, and if the welfare level increases by one unit, the female resignation risk is reduced by about 7.5%. In contrast to the husband's wage variable, in the husband's housework hours, both coefficient and statistical significance were meaningful. As a result, the spouse factor influencing women's deviation from the labor market can be seen as the level of participation or sharing of domestic labor rather than wage At the same time, these findings enable us to take a broader view on what and who could reduce inequality in labor market created by gender. While most scholars believe that the clue for alleviating the gender gap in the labor market participation in a context of experiences as women, the results in this paper indicated that it can also be ameliorated by female supportive institutions and men who are accepting of a new type of masculinity/fatherhood that features committing to housework and childcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BL (Boys Love), more widely known as Yaoi outside Japan, is a category of media that focuses on male-male erotic and/or pornographic romance, originally created by and for heterosexual Japanese women at the end of the 1970s. By analyzing texts and illustrations of over 800 popular BL novels and examining various types of interviews with professional BL writers, industry people, and fans, this book-length project attempts to unveil the functions and contributions of Yaoi for Japanese women in relation to the development of feminism. In this draft paper, I demonstrate how professional BL writers consciously/unconsciously breach heteronormative gender codes to decenter the normalcy of dualistic gender. Adopting Erving Goffman's concept of gender display and Judith Butler's theory of performativity, the paper contends that these professional BL writers performatively subvert the normative gender ideology even when their actions are not willful, by conspiring with the BL industry to reproduce highly-formalized heteronormative templates and binary gender rules, but also by consciously (and unconsciously) breaching them in their creative processes. Through these (feminist) methods employed by BL writers, this study shows that there is hope in their critique of heteronormative gender roles in Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most significant ways capitalists maintain primacy of the capitalist system is through the mystification of social relations. Relations of power and exploitation are obfuscated by those who benefit, making it difficult to understand the impacts of such a system on humanity and the environment in which we live. This paper examines the results of those relations of power through the use of the Lauderdale Paradox to explain why hurricane's Katrina and Maria had such great impact on the people, flora, and fauna of New Orleans and Puerto Rico. This paper argues the pauperization of both the people and the land, through the systematic extraction of private wealth, is the impetus for the dramatic impacts of major storms on these superexploited regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that following the 2015 refugee "crisis," German media and political discourse has shied away from assimilatory practices for refugees and asylum-seekers, reverting towards a differentialist model of national belonging as outlined by Brubaker (2001). This new phase of exclusion and boundary-drawing is increasingly negotiated and discussed by way of health paradigms, denying refugees and asylum-seekers equitable access to care and sustainable livelihoods upon resettlement. Bridging the gap between sociological theories of immigrant assimilation in the German context and empirical studies of social determinants of refugee health, this paper breaks down "health as citizenship" into four dimensions--sense of belonging (do health institutions promote or limit social cohesion, and do they impart social or cultural meaning), legal status (who is "entitled" to provisional care), rights (what "contract" exists between the refugee and the state), and participation (is healthcare a "privilege," and does it allow for exclusion based on migration background)--in doing so, this paper addresses what limitations remain for refugees' access to health in the German context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In understanding new algorithmic management techniques emerging in online labor platforms, sociologists and technology scholars in other fields have focused on the use of metrics and the impact of quantification on different parts of the labor process. However, these technological systems utilize multiple mechanisms to manage workers and match them with potential clients, including personal profiles, qualitative reviews, and on-platform communication systems. Using interviews and online ethnographic observations of care workers using online labor platforms to find work, this paper examines how this ecosystem of algorithmic management both transforms - and reinforces - the gendered construction of care work. However, these mechanisms do not have universal effects on the diverse population of workers that use these sites to find work. Workers' construct meaningful interactions with these technological systems differently depending on their occupational identities and experience. Experienced, professional care workers use the language of alienation and rationalization, while less experienced and casual care workers use narratives of entrepreneurship and efficiency to navigate the sites' requirements. This paper concludes by calling for a more ecological approach to understanding algorithmic management beyond metrics, and for the continuing importance of occupational cultures in an era of flexible and gig work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, The World Health Organization listed "freedom from pain" as a universal human right. Pharmaceutical companies capitalized upon this promise, offering patients chemical solutions to physical and emotional problems. However, while prescription drugs moderate pain they do not address underlying causes of physical and emotional pain such as poverty, victimization, or the inability to access alternative healthcare treatments. In fact, these factors might be responsible for many of pain patients' symptoms, including that derived from suffering from physical injury, emotional trauma, and obesityrelated problems. As a result, prescribers write scripts for pharmaceutical drugs to treat the symptom of pain, but the underlying causes are left unaddressed. In doing so, such issues are exacerbated by such liberal prescriptions in the absence of other crucial social services. This paper seeks to unpack the cultural contradictions that have arguably produced a prescription drug "epidemic" that disproportionately impacts the poor, women, the elderly, and those who have suffered psychological or physical abuse. Based upon 80 indepth interviews with incarcerated men and women, this paper gives voice to a population who is otherwise rendered silent and invisible and demonstrates how individuals who use prescription drugs without the oversight of a doctor primarily do so to manage challenges posed by poverty, trauma, and insufficient healthcare. In doing so, they are stigmatized and criminalized for coping with economic, social, and healthcare structures through selfmedication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a growing academic interest in populism, especially its rightwing variant, which is on the rise around the world. Populism professes an anti-establishment rhetoric and claims to represent 'common man' against dominant elites and professional cadres and has recently culminated in symbolically powerful events such as the election of Trump and Brexit. This paper looks at medical populism, as an understudied but important dimension of populism, and attempts to uncover its political-economic context and outcomes. It particularly focuses on the case of Turkish healthcare system, which has been undergoing comprehensive reform under Justice and Development Party (JDP) governments since 2003. The reform process combines the implementation of managerial and market-oriented principles in public hospitals with changes that aim at satisfying the 'patientconsumer' and that played an important role in helping JDP win several elections. The paper draws on a yearlong ethnographic study in two public hospitals in Istanbul, Turkey. Data collection methods include 74 interviews with physicians, other healthcare workers, and administrators; over 250 hours of non-participant field observation; and analysis of printed and online material related to the design, implementation, and outcomes of health care reform policies. The findings indicate that the health reform in Turkey creates a commodity of dubious quality via a celebrated process of expanding access and lowering barriers for the patients. More specifically, populism enables the diffusion of the market logic and its penetration into the healthcare sphere through a selective expansion of services and prioritization of patient satisfaction. I contend that the conjunction between populism, which takes healthcare as yet another source of voter mobilization, and market/neoliberal logic, which sees it as a source of economic gain and profit is particularly worrying in terms of its outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature researching the drivers of highly skilled migration (HSM) often prioritizes labor market returns to education and downscales the importance of public welfare. This paper develops an innovative empirical strategy that allows us to see how a selection of pull factors attracts temporary and long-term educated migrants in Europe. To do so, we built a unique longitudinal contextual dataset merging information from the European Labor Force Survey (2000-2014) with selected Eurostat and OECD country indicators. Country fixed effect time series allow us to concentrate on cross-country effects. Our evidence suggests that returns to education attract temporary HSM and long term stayers equally. However, it is also shown that public welfare and taxation operate differently for these two groups and do not deter long-term residents. Our paper proposes revisiting the assumption that HSMs are mere income maximizers. As we argue, long term HSM may well be attracted by generous welfare setups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper turns to the earliest organizational emergence of African nationalist politics in South Africa in order to explore the early moments of a wide scale transformation the paradigm of African political thought and action. The paper studies this emerging field of interconnected political organizations in order to explore organizational and relational conditions which facilitated this political paradigm transformation. The paper combines a network analysis of organizations and leaders in the first decade of African nationalist organizing with historical analysis to better account for the structural conditions which enabled this transformation. I consider two required stages of transformation: innovation and consolidation. The paper develops two models of political innovation and examines these models in the emerging field of African nationalist organizing. The paper then explores how it was possible for this innovation to consolidate and produce a unified political movement in the face of significant social divides which might have created political schisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent 30 years, China has become one of the major drug consuming countries. Though undertaking both compulsory and unbidden rehabilitation programs, the result of fighting for drug abuse is not ideal in mainland China: re-addiction rate in the same year upon the completion of compulsory rehabilitation programs is as high as 80%. Given the understatement of drug abuse issue and its solutions in Chinese academia, this paper aims on uncovering the reality of the drug abuse situation in contemporary China, and scientifically proving the importance of social environment with tolerance and caring for the success of rehabilitation programs. In addition, propensity score matching instead of OLS regression was used as the main analytical method in this paper, which may introduce the idea of "treatment effects" and provide a new path for quantitative social researchers in Chinese criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the rapid development of the Brazilian aluminum industry and the subsequent deindustrialization of its most technologically advanced and capital-intensive processing stage. The paper argues that the interaction of five phases of globalization over the last century and a half with the strategies of aluminum firms and state development strategies explains this dramatic rise and decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare services given to minorities are important to investigate in current times of polarization and anti-immigration discourse. This paper aims at understanding bureaucrat's perceptions towards migration and migrants. While previous research mostly focuses on discrimination in access to services, this paper attempts to add a dimension of understanding on how the current discourses of polarization can be related to bureaucrat's emotional uncertainty. A sample of 130 open-end responses that were part of a nation-wide survey directed towards bureaucrats from two of the main Swedish welfare institutions was analyzed with Atlas.ti using directed content analysis. Ontological security, the security of being and sense of order, served as the theoretical embarkation point for the paper. Some of the main patterns that emerged were responses reflecting feelings of threat due to migration but also frustration about existing societal structures not capable of accommodating trends of migration. Bureaucrats demands of assimilation of migrants was a way to mark boundaries, establish superiority and increase their own feeling of security. Majority group respondents also expressed views of welfare chauvinism and racialized expressions about migrants reflecting a debasement of migrants in order to increase ontological security. Simultaneously, expressions of experienced racism by bureaucrats belonging to a minority group reflected feelings of exclusion and ontological insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how ongoing reforms of the Buenos Aires police force have modified the relationship between city residents and public officials, fomenting new forms of democratic deliberation and political accountability which, ironically, tend to reinforce extant urban inequalities. Theoretically, it builds on the work of Tilly (2003), Gamson (1992), and Lee and McQuarrie (2015) to discuss how "top-down" and "bottom-up" democratic processes can exacerbate inequality. It then extends this frame to the realm of police reform, identifying the linkages between policing, crime, and democratic participation, and urban inequality, and describing how these same "bottom-up" and "top-down" processes can lead to the preferential deployment of coercive force. The paper then analyzes ongoing police reforms in Buenos Aires, Argentina, drawing on empirical data collected in interviews with public officials and systematic observations of neighborhood security forums. It offers an analytic categorization of citizen grievances, highlighting the blurry line between disorder and criminality, and arguing that neighborhood security forums offer a unique venue for collective meaning work (Eliasoph 1997) in which residents and police can forge a shared understanding of what constitutes a "crime" and how police should intervene. It goes on to analyze the efforts of the Ministry of Security to reclaim public spaces throughout the City of Buenos Aires by limited their occupation by poor youth, ambulant venders, car parkers, prostitutes, and the homeless. It argues that these strategies may serve to bolster citizen trust in the police and may offer measurable political gains for elected officials but that, in terms of public security, they are only effective at the micro level. When viewed from a broader geographic vantage point, increased police intervention to reclaim public spaces for "average" citizens tends to displace these "problems" rather than resolving them, thereby exacerbating social and spatial inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to systematize the main ideas on "taste" and "art" in the writings of German sociologist Norbert Elias. Even though Elias's work is mainly known for his theory on "The civilizing process," he developed substantial ideas on problems that were later associated mainly with Bourdieusian sociology: distinction, taste, art, status. Following Elias's insights, the paper argues that "taste" should be understood as the expression of sensibilities that arise from networks of interdependence (or, as he called them, "figurations") that are situated in particular historical contexts. These sensibilities, thus, are historically contingent and sociologists should study them observing their variations over long periods of time. The paper analyses the key texts were Elias developed these ideas, above all his books "The Court Society" and "Mozart: Portrait of a Genius", and his essays on kitsch, German lyric poetry, and African art. The paper makes contributions to both the understanding of Norbert Elias's work and the theoretical vocabulary of the sociology of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly diverse societies result in more complex situations for bureaucrats in their client interactions in welfare organizations. This study explores the relation between perceived workload, anti-immigration attitudes, perceived discretion, and perceived difficulty in working with migrants. The paper examines the function of perceived discretion as moderator or mediator variable in this constellation. The relations are examined by using structural equation modeling based on a survey among Swedish welfare bureaucrats (N = 1,319). The results show that heavier perceived workload increased the likelihood of experiencing work with migrants as difficult and that greater perceived discretion decreased the likelihood of experiencing work with migrants as difficult. The results suggest that perceived discretion functions as a mediator for the relation between perceived workload and difficulty in work with migrants; potentially functioning as a 'buffer' for organizational pressure. We also found that bureaucrats who hold negative attitudes toward migrants were more likely to express their work with migrants as more difficult. This paper contributes by increasing our knowledge on how discretion has significance in relation to when bureaucrat's behavior is determined by specific organizational and personal factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Radom, a city 60 miles from Warsaw, Poland, and a major source of its young labor force, a concerned mother describes the metropolitan life of her daughter and son-in-law. They own an apartment, but "the bank lives with them." She means by that the historically novel practice of domesticating mortgages, which over the last decades have emerged as devices transforming the housing pathways of the first postsocialist generations and mediating their life course transitions. Part of a larger research on practices of householding among young middle-class Varsovians, this paper explores the lived experiences of homeownership--already realized or still imagined--through the lenses of generational divides, housing classes, trajectories of migration, and the tectonic restructuring of housing regime since the fall of socialism. Based on ethnographic research in 28 young family households in Warsaw and on interviews with 18 parents supporting their adult children's pursuit of homeownership, the paper shows how the incapability of young couples to manage on their own the mortgage on their first apartment embeds the process of financialization not merely in one, but in several kin-related households, most often parental and grandparental. Our analysis focuses on moral discourses justifying and regulating the flow of family wealth into the mortgage household, on the continued presence of parents in the householding practices in the mortgaged apartments of their semi-autonomous adult children, and on the emergent intergenerational middle-class economic imaginary, which increasingly centers on acquiring housing assets as a source of wealth, welfare, and social advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to address the broader issue of retention of low-income students in college. Research shows that the summer between the first and second years of undergraduate studies is crucial because students contemplate whether or not they will return to college the following academic year. Yet, little is known about this period. This is primarily because students often leave campus for the summer and so little data is collected about their activities. For this study, I used qualitative methods to collect data that illustrates students' summer experiences. Participants of the study had been part of a larger study beginning at the start of their spring semester. This paper addresses two critical questions regarding low-income students during their summer breaks: Where do they go? And, what do they do? Findings point to low-income students often not having stable or secured living situations over the summer, and aiming to work as many hours as possible to earn and save money, often in order to afford their summer living arrangements and their upcoming expenses related to attending college. The paper concludes with some implications for practitioners and offers ways for colleges to help support these students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When, how, and on whom the police enact violence has increasingly become a topic of public concern. Drawing on one year of ethnographic field work at police training academies, this paper identifies three ways in which identifying as a police officer and gaining membership to this occupational group requires participation in institutionalized violent practices. During their academy training, cadets: (1) participate in initiation rituals into violence; (2) practice violence and control; and (3) are subject to violence and suffering as a group. Through these experiences of enacting and enduring violence, cadets come to identify as police officers. Those who are unwilling or unable to participate in these practices are chastised, berated, alienated, and in some cases, they decide to resign. The findings from this paper expand understandings of police violence by pointing to the ways in which the identity of police officers is built and sustained by violent practices. I argue that a re-imagining of the actual identity, and the ways in which new officers gain membership to the group, is required in order change the how the police use violence in their jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a qualitative case study that compares two different American groups and efforts to surveil them by the government, namely Muslims, and Right-wing groups. Whenever a breaking news story appears on various media outlets covering a terrorist related incident, it is almost guaranteed that the perpetrator will be Muslim or have a Muslim sounding name. Regardless of political affiliation, the average viewer may lean towards correlating Muslims with terrorism. The infiltration of Muslim communities (under constant surveillance and suspicion) through the use of informants has "thwarted" terrorism and led to distrust of law enforcement within Muslim communities. Meanwhile, American right-wing groups continue to train in military like scenarios with a surplus of arms and ammunition. The members proclaim that their intent is to protect the rights of Americans, but they have a keen interest in monitoring the activities of Muslims which they feel most terrorist organizations stem from. In comparison to patriotic militias, who receive laissez-faire treatment from law enforcement, a double standard arises in how Muslims are provoked and surveilled. Former informants have become outspoken on how the FBI instructed them to create plots of terrorism to justify their "war on terror." Pressure is then placed on Muslim-Americans by the government, the media, and the general public to condemn terrorism and re-declare their allegiance to American values. This paper will shed light on victims of informant provocation, surveillance of Muslim communities, the double standard in treatment through political neglect and the enablement of American militia groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore how servicewomen "do masculinity" in the military context in attempt to gain insider status in this masculine institution. Servicewomen perform identity work in a hypermasculine context that often devalues women. Although women serve in the military, this does not automatically grant them an association with masculinity--rather their inclusion is constantly called into question and they are cast as inappropriate service-members. This paper examines how women navigate being cast into stigmatized feminine identities while trying to demonstrate their masculinity. Because the military is a near-total institution, they must navigate this tension in a variety of contexts such as in the workplace, in social settings, and in their places of residence (for those who live on base). I also show how women adopt stereotypes cast upon them by servicemen and self-stigmatize as well as use these same stereotypes to stigmatize other women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic home monitoring (EHM), also known as house arrest, is often described by policy makers as a less punitive, more humane method of punishment than incarceration. In practice, studies of EHM find it is often not an alternative to incarceration, but rather it increases the level of supervision for individuals along the continuum of the criminal justice system. This fact calls into question whether direct comparisons to incarceration are appropriate in evaluating the sanction. Although previous studies of the experience of EHM have concluded that individuals do not find the sanction overly burdensome, this paper articulates the importance of considering how respondents frame their experience in comparison to incarceration. These frames lead respondents to minimize the negative collateral consequences of EHM. This paper utilizes 30 interviews with individuals who have been on EHM in Chicago, Illinois. Although many respondents conclude that EHM is not overly onerous, they nonetheless recount significant disruptions to employment, housing, and family relationships. I argue that the carceral state distorts expectations about fair punishment and causes respondents to minimize the hardships they detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on whether culture can sufficiently explain crossregional variation in civic engagement, particularly in the domain of environmental philanthropy. By environmental philanthropy, we refer to participation in civil society through monetary donation and volunteering in environmental nonprofit organizations, as well as demonstrations for environmental causes. The paper uses a comparative lens to assess environmental philanthropy by focusing on four predominantly Chinese societies - mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore - to minimalize their cultural differences. Using the data from the World Value Survey, we found that residents in mainland China shared similar environmental concerns and beliefs with people from the other regions, but they are least likely to volunteer, donate, and demonstrate for these causes. After accounting for personal characteristics, the sizeable interregional gaps on pro-environmental behaviors remain. These findings are consistent with the argument that structural differences, particularly the developing nature of civil society in mainland China (e.g., limited associational life), hinders environmental civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper includes findings from exploratory research conducted among immigrant children and children of immigrants in Central New Jersey. On the basis of participant observation and 55 indepth interviews in Trenton and Princeton, I investigate the conditions surrounding mostly Central American youngsters, some of them unaccompanied minors residing in the U.S. without documentation and others protected by DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) but enduring uncertain status. The paper focuses on variations in context of reception. I probe the role of human and financial resources, advocacy organizations, kin and friendship networks, and religiosity in the capacity of young people to resist downward mobility and destructive behavior. The paper's aim is to provide a theoretical framework for the assessment of variations in young people's capacity to adjust to hostile environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents novel research on the role of universities in shaping neighborhood outcomes. While universities have been analyzed as studentifying (Smith, D. P. & Holt, L., 2007), gentrifying (Dahl, 1961; Lafer, 2003; Rossi & Dentler, 1961) and/or growth machine (Logan & Molotch, 1987/2007) forces, there has been less attention paid to the decisions universities make about the location and timing of their investment(s), and how universities frame such investments to garner local support. This paper presents a case of one Boston neighborhood, Allston, that has experienced local influence by two major universities. In the context of the City of Boston, in which universities are tax-exempt, local universities frame the land acquisition and subsequent development as beneficial to local neighborhoods as "community development." Additionally, local universities make intentional decisions about what neighborhoods and specifically what areas within neighborhoods they wish to invest in, thereby fiscally investing in some areas and not others. Specifically, this paper extends a novel case of the role of universities in urban change by demonstrating how both intentional investment and absence from a neighborhood can facilitate distinct urban processes over time. Additionally, this paper provides evidence that universities are not indiscriminate in investing in the neighborhood (or city) in which they are located, but rather make intentional choices about fiscal, campus, and residential investments in neighborhoods, which, in turn, perpetuates/creates inequality across neighborhood(s) and urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that information and social contagions of all sorts will diffuse throughout a network under the right conditions. However, we know relatively little about why specific types of information will diffuse across some ties and not others. In this paper, the authors propose that network relations are not neutral conduits for diffusion. Instead, the character of social relations serves to promote some kinds of information transmission and suppress others, leading to filtering of information by content. This paper builds from an interactionist perspective on relations to theorize dyadic and network mechanisms of content filtering. This framework is applied to develop a new explanation for the organizational conflict during NASA's Skylab 4 mission. Qualitative analysis and topic modeling of mission transcripts reveal how content was systematically filtered out of conversations between the astronauts and ground control, leading to a critical breakdown in communications. The theoretical and practical implications of content filtering are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an important yet little-understood phenomenon governing alternative work arrangements: the rise in the "multi-layered labor contracting" structure in which the recruitment of nonstandard workers is outsourced to an intermediating organization who then selects qualified workers from a group of competing suppliers. I make the very first scholarly attempt to examine the link between such multi-layered contracting arrangements and subsequent economic outcomes for both the hiring lead firms and the workers. Based on power-dependence theory, I argue that the lead firm's discretion to work with one additional intermediating organization in this technological platform compresses supplier power, which then incentivizes suppliers to transfer the competitive price burden to workers. Using proprietary data from employment records of about a million workers seeking nonstandard work at 49 large firms, I find that an additional contracting layer between the lead firm and the worker is associated with higher returns to the firms and lower returns to the workers. When workers gain bargaining power, however, through a pre-existing firm-worker relationship, the results show that the loss from an additional contracting layer is significantly reduced. The results hold even when controlling for supplier fixed effects to control for unobservable supplier characteristics, as well as when controlling for detailed measurement of skill requirements for nonstandard jobs that may instead dictate the price-setting process. Findings from this paper have potential for improving our knowledge of hiring practices in organizations and social structural inequality using the theoretical constructs of power and price-setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the familiar historical sociological notion of the 'dual revolution' that began around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, should be analysed as a 'triple revolution', with the additional process called here the 'academization process' taken into account. This refers to the emergence and ascendance of the modern university system and the academic profession, which came to occupy a central position in a field of professions. The paper explains why previous functionalist and critical accounts of this trend are insufficient, before recommending an alternative processual theoretical framework drawn largely from the work of Andrew Abbott and Norbert Elias. The substance of the academization process is outlined, suggesting that five factors were central to the rise of the university: 1) changes in the class structure; 2) displacement of religion; 3) imperialism; 4) changing roles of women, children and disabled populations; 5) science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will the level of immigrants' transnational ties with their home countries ultimately decrease as they assimilate to the host society? This paper examines how immigrants' cultural transnational ties have changed over time and whether it is associated with their cultural assimilation. The first and second round of New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contain responses from firstgeneration immigrants who became permanent residents in the years 2003 and 2004 were included in the analyses. Immigrants' level of cultural transnational ties were measured in three different ways: the frequency of reading newspapers, hours of watching TV, and hours of listening to the radio in their native language. The findings of this paper show that immigrants' cultural transnational ties with the home country have a U-shape; it decreases from pre-migration to the year of becoming permanent residents, but recovers about 5 years later. The analyses of logistic regression suggest that immigrants' cultural assimilation (hours spent consuming English-language newspapers, TV, and radio) is positively associated with their cultural transnational ties. On the other hand, immigrants' general assimilation, such as English proficiency and years in the U.S., were negatively associated with their cultural transnational ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how young asylum seekers in Germany acquire and live with uncertain legal statuses--or liminal legality. It dovetails with recent debates in the sociology of migration critiquing dichotomous conceptualizations of legal and illegal migration, showing ethnographically how migrants experience the continuous legal borderline along which they actually live. While scholars have examined the consequences of liminal legality, uncertain legal statuses usually remain a black box. Attempting to fil this gap, I examine the actual mechanisms and decisions that create an uncertain legal status. I show that liminal legality results not only from the multiple possible outcomes of an asylum plea, but also from Germany's dichotomous cultural notions and legal applications of identity--age, nationalethnic origin, and unaccompaniment, in this paper--that do not fit migrants' more complex and less legible situations. The paper develops the term frictional identities to capture the fabricated, messy, and provisional identities that migrants acquire in their interactions with state bureaucracies. In contrast to other studies on the identification of asylum seekers, I avoid the one-sided portrayal of the state verifying and assigning migrants' identity by considering both state bureaucrats' and migrants' stakes and strategies in the negotiations about the identity categories migrants are admitted to. Empirically, the paper draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Germany conducted since 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other sectors globally, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities have proliferated in the humanitarian aid sector as organizations strive to demonstrate their impact, accountability and transparency through measurement (Espeland and Sauder 2007). At the same time, organizations increasingly call for the localization of aid, often understood as the growing reliance on local actors to make aid work. While we know this desire for data has changed how various types of aid organizations (INGOs, NGOs, CSOs, IOs) signal and demonstrate their impact to donors at the organizational level, we know less about how this, in conjunction with localization processes, are reshaping how the workers within these organizations actually "do" evaluations and data collection to demonstrate impact. This is particularly important to think about in the case of local workers, who are central targets of these localization shifts, and are already estimated to represent 90 percent of the aid workforce globally (Roth 2015: 8). This paper subsequently asks: How do two concurrent trends within the aid sector--localization and the turn to M&E--shape and affect the role of local workers? Based on over seven months of fieldwork in Jordan, a major aid hub globally, I find that workers' understandings of their relationship with their employers-- and their position as local staff--significantly matter to how they perform the role of the evaluator and contribute to data collection for the organization. Workers are aware that --that are sometimes misplaced--of their "local knowledge." At the same time, workers are aware of the growing importance of these data collection processes to their jobs and livelihoods, and subsequently work to produce desirable results for their employers both in their formal work roles, but informally and outside of the workplace as well. By using the lens of the worker as the point of departure in this paper, I show how the drive for numbers, coupled with localization, affects and is shaped by local workers in ways that is perhaps not fully accounted for in the literature just yet. By thinking about evaluation as a case of labor relations, this papers hopes to elaborate understandings of measurement practices beyond relational negotiations at the macro level between donors and NGOs. This paper further hopes to broaden our knowledge of the "unintended consequences" (Viterna and Robertson 2015) of aid practices not only in terms of beneficiaries and communities they target, but also in terms of how it structures and transforms workplace relations and hierarchies within the sector as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The immigrant integration literature frequently focuses on the role of networks during an immigrant's socioeconomic adjustment in the host country, such as setting up initial employment positions. Immigrant networks, however, have been shown to channel migrants into oppressive and hostile work environments, leaving them little room for upward mobility. As networks are decreasing in their value, there is another tool immigrants are increasingly using to integrate into the United States - the internet. The digital divide between immigrants and the native-born population has been effectively erased in recent years, and this paper examines the benefits immigrants can accrue when they rely on the internet for job-seeking information over their in-person networks. Using the Computer and Internet Use Supplement of the Current Population Survey, this paper provides evidence from 2011-2017 to demonstrate the positive income returns experienced by immigrants who go online to seek out job opportunities, and the adverse impacts of relying solely on friends and family. This quantitative analysis lies at the intersection of technology and immigrant integration and provides necessary inroads into updating our theories for how immigrants are integrating into host societies in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on participant observation with 33 members of families headed by LGBTQidentified parents, and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 14 parents from these families. It explores how parents convey messages of gender conformity and non-conformity to their children, and how children respond to these messages. Using a feminist interactionist theoretical framework, this paper considers how parents are doing gender with their children. Two interrelated themes are addressed: (1) the extent to which LGBTQ parents experienced gender policing growing up, and how these lessons carry over in their interactions with their own children; and (2) how LGBTQ parents at times challenge gender conformity through their parenting practices even as they express ambivalence about gender non-conformity and transgender identities. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes an organizational analysis of villages that experiences sustained radical movements in the Telangana region of India. Focusing on organizational forms that create and sustain radical networks of the poor, the paper addresses the structural challenges faced by movements of the poor. Unlike workers in mass production, who by their location in the economic system, possess leverage, I investigate how the poor make demands of institutions over which they possess no structural power. Using the case of the Maoist armed insurgency in India, I find that areas of sustained radical networks of the poor emerged from specific organisational formations on the ground. I elaborate each of the organisational structures that emerge, tying them to the crucial aspect of relatively autonomy that appears to become central in the functioning of sustained radical movements of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much should ethnographers involve themselves with the people, places, and process they study? One answer has become increasingly popular: invert the standard method of "participant observation" into "observant participation." This paper details the trade-offs between these two styles of ethnographic inquiry, underlines some important issues often ignored in the current ethnography debates, and considers the merits of combining participant observation and observant participation. To reach these ends, I drawn on an ethnography of 911 ambulance work in a large and dense California county. My fieldwork included "ride-alongs" with labor and management at a private ambulance firm (participant observation) and short-term employment as a novice emergency medical technician at the same company (observant participation). Reflecting on this study, I identify three issues at stake between participant observation and observant participation: field positioning, analytic gaze, and data assembly. I claim that ethnographers' decisions to lean toward one method over the other inevitably influences where they stand, the direction they tend to look, and the manner in which they extract local knowledge. Where participant observation presents more opportunities for mobile positioning, outward gazing, and inscription, observant participation presents more opportunities for fixed positioning, inward gazing, and incarnation. I detail the relative benefits and drawbacks of each method, but I also argue that there is something to gained by mixing them. What I call hybrid ethnography is promising for a somewhat obvious reason: it allows ethnographers to use the strengths of observant participation to counter the weaknesses of participant observation and vice versa. I close this paper by considering the limitations of a hybrid approach and highlight some directions for future research and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of opinion leaders in political discussions on Facebook in the period leading up to the 2016 "Brexit" referendum on membership in the European Union. From the hundreds of thousands of people who comment on the public pages of major political parties, opinion leaders are identified by using a measure designed to quantify academic impact. The paper tests the hypothesis that exposure to these opinion leaders' comments increases other users likelihood of becoming involved in the main online campaigns for the referendum. To deal with the problem of selection bias, which arises due to the observational nature of the data, a matching method is used to pair similar exposed and unexposed individuals based on observable characteristics. After controlling for each user's behaviors, the results show that exposure to opinion leaders is estimated to have a modest increase in the odds of becoming involved in the campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integrity of netizens has been tested recently. In tandem with uncovering a significant data breach by Cambridge Analytica, the European Union provided individuals more control over their online privacy by the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation. Simultaneously, social media were subjected to criticism for facilitating the spread of 'fake news'. Did this controversy impact individual trust in social media? The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed study of trust in social media, contributing to three distinct theoretical debates. First, studies on institutional trust are split over the question whether people evaluate institutions distinctly. Second, the extent to which trust in institutions reflects an evaluation of the performance in such institutions or whether its explanations should be found elsewhere is not resolved by empirical research. Third, who changes opinion in response to turmoil, in this case on data breach that are directly intertwined with social media? In our study, we rely on an innovative panel study as part of the Dutch wave of the European Values Study 2017, with a representative sample of the Dutch population questioned before and after the controversy over Cambridge Analytica and GDPR about their trust in social media. The analysis shows that trust in social media is distinct from other types of institutional trust; nevertheless, trust in politics spills over into trust in social media. We further find that approximately 65 percent does not change trust in social media after the data breach turmoil. The changers are equally split in decreased and increased over-time trust. Because of little explanations for these changes, we conclude our paper with implications for the concept of trust, and its study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands the common definition of gentrification by adding the motivation for gentrification into the debate. It suggests that while scholarship regularly ascribes economic intentions for gentrification this is not always the case. Ideological agendas are similarly powerful force for gentrification and can lead to similar outcomes. The paper introduces this ideological model, focusing on its effect on the actors involved and their tactics. Using the East Jerusalem urban renewal as a case study the paper compares and contrast the economic with the ideological model, expanding the common definition of what gentrification is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rankings have grown in importance in the last decades. This is particularly evident in, but not limited to, academia. In this paper, we want to take up this development and propose a power analytical take on rankings as a transnational(izing) phenomenon. In doing so, we make three contributions: (1) In the first part of the paper, we develop a conceptual definition of rankings: Rankings are devices of symbolic valorization, operating through subjectivation, zero-sum comparisons, quantification, and publication. We illustrate these characteristics for the most prominent forms of academic rankings. (2) Building on this, we bring forward an explanation for the success of rankings in academia and beyond: The proliferation of rankings occurred with a marketization of the academic field, through which it opened up for a lay audience. This is the backdrop against which rankings can function as dispositifs that link up different fields. (3) Related with the proliferation of rankings is their role in advancing processes of transnationalization: Rankings facilitate new modes of governance for hubs of state institutions, private corporations, media corporations, and data providers. Concluding our paper, we argue that rankings make a difference beyond rank orders. They prefer -- and are pushed by -- specific academic milieus, paradigms, and agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]