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In the 2023 ASA presidential address, Prudence Carter delves into the landscape of U.S. society, tracing some of its historical progress and confronting contemporary social, economic, educational, and political challenges. Central to her argument is an exploration of the concept of "unrealized integration" and how it has hindered the nation's march toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy. Carter describes and characterizes the current state of integration within education and society. Despite the widespread rhetoric of diversity in our organizations and institutions, she critiques its shallow application, exposing diversity's inability to rectify imbalances of power- and resource-sharing. Incorporating the idea of "tipping points," she discusses how civil rights movements, despite expanding representation and opportunity, have faced recurrent waves of political backlash and reversals. She contends that an erosion of social progress occurs when there is an imbalance in the pursuit of distributional equality (concerning material resources) and relational equality (involving social and cultural dynamics and processes that shape well-being). Additionally, she identifies three other crucial areas that warrant focus to pave the path toward realized integration within education and society. In a forward-looking call to arms, Carter underscores the imperative for sociologists to transcend epistemological and methodological boundaries; and she advocates for robust collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to harness the collective power of knowledge-generation and solution-building for pressing societal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracies are consequential and social, yet online conspiracy groups that consist of individuals (and bots) seeking to explain events or a system have been neglected in sociology. We extract conspiracy talk about the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter and use the biterm topic model (BTM) to provide a descriptive baseline for the discursive and social structure of online conspiracy groups. We find that individuals enter these communities through a gateway conspiracy theory before proceeding to extreme theories, and humans adopt more diverse conspiracy theories than do bots. Event-history analyses show that individuals tweet new conspiracy theories, and tweet inconsistent theories simultaneously, when they face a threat posed by a rising COVID-19 case rate and receive attention from others via retweets. By contrast, bots are less responsive to rising case rates, but they are more consistent, as they mainly tweet about how COVID-19 was deliberately created by sinister agents. These findings suggest human beings are bricoleurs who use conspiracy theories to make sense of COVID-19, whereas bots are designed to create moral panic. Our findings suggest that conspiracy talk by individuals is defensive in nature, whereas bots engage in offense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of ongoing concerns about the relevance of scholarly activities, we ask, what are public ideas and how do they come to be? More specifically, how do journalists and other mediators between the academy and the public use social science ideas? How do the various uses of these ideas develop over time and shape the public careers of these ideas? How do these processes help us understand public ideas and identify their various types? In addressing these questions, we make the case for a sociology of public social science. Using data from newspaper articles that engage with seven of the most publicly prominent social science ideas over the past 30 years, we make three contributions. First, we advance a pragmatic, cultural approach to understanding public ideas, one that emphasizes fit-making processes and applicative flexibility. Second, we define public ideas: social science ideas become public ideas when they are used as objects of interest (being the news), are used as interpretants (making sense of the news), and ebb and flow between these uses as part of an unfolding career. Third, we construct a typology of public ideas that provides an architecture for future research on public social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the popularity of social capital theories, the concept of community is enjoying a renaissance in sociology. Yet much research in this area relies on exclusively “structural” thinking, attributing group identification to mechanisms such as the arrangement of physical space, power relations, or high investment requirements. Often neglected is a strand of theory that attributes gemeinschaft to shared moral order and culture. Using data from the Urban Communes Project, this article directly tests the influence of both structural and cultural mechanisms in producing the experience of community. Although the results show that both structural and cultural mechanisms are positively correlated with gemeinschaft, they also confirm the existence of shared moral order as the most likely proximate mechanism for creating community in these groups. Analyses using fuzzy-set techniques illustrate how culture and structure combine to sustain—or inhibit—the experience of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's political representation, once considered unacceptable by politicians and their publics, is now actively encouraged by powerful international actors. In this article, the authors ask how the growth and discourse of the international women's movement affected women's acquisition of political power over time. To answer this question, they use event history techniques to address women's political representation in more than 150 countries over 110 years (1893–2003). They consider multiple political outcomes: female suffrage, first female parliamentarian, and achievement of 10, 20, and 30 percent women in a country's national legislature. The findings show that increasing global pressure for the inclusion of women in international politics and the changing discourse of the international women's movement help to explain women's acquisition of these multiple political outcomes. Furthermore, by adding these concepts to traditional domestic models of women in politics, the authors demonstrate that country-level political, social structural, and cultural characteristics cause countries to act in conjunction with, or in opposition to, these global pressures. This is the first time that research on women in politics has considered such a comprehensive list of countries, time points, and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on social reconstruction. Perhaps more than in any other subfield of sociology, researchers in economic sociology tend to justify their work through opposition to a rival discipline. Another potentially dysfunctional outcome of economic sociologists' oppositional posture towards economics is that, if they are too eager to find a neighboring discipline's faults, they are more likely to overlook valuable research by that discipline.

Historical and quantitative examination of one scientific field -- geology -- provides the basis for exploring how Western science became institutionalized worldwide during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior research emphasizes the importance of industrialization, Protestantism, and the legacy of colonial rule. An alternative perspective is offered here -- one rooted in sociological neoinstitutionalism. Mechanisms are examined that linked non-Western colonies and nations to "world society," serving as conduits for the diffusion of Western science. The relevant mechanisms have changed over time as world society has become more organized and structured. Direct ties among nations were important early on, but links to international organizations became important in the postwar era. Historical examples and a quantitative analysis of the spread of professional geological associations from 1800 to 1990 provide evidence in support of several theories. Results suggest that the institutionalization of geology was very much an international process. Societies strongly linked to world society institutionalized geological science rapidly, supporting unconstitutional predictions. Finally, Protestantism had a positive effect on the institutionalization of geological science, while the effects of colonization and industrialism were mixed and fluctuated over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit -- rare in sociology but common in anthropology -- when an ethnographer returns to the site of a previous study. Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed to differences in: (1) the relation of observer to participant, (2) theory brought to the field by the ethnographer, (3) internal processes within the field site itself, or (4) forces external to the field site. Focused revisits tend to settle on one or another of these four explanations, giving rise to four types of focused revisits. Using examples, the limits of each type of focused revisit are explored with a view to developing a reflexive ethnography that combines all four approaches. The principles of the focused revisit are then extended to rolling, punctuated, heuristic, archeological, and valedictory revisits. In centering attention on ethnography-as-revisit sociologists directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study -- a world that undergoes (real) historical change that can only be grasped using a (constructed) theoretical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purposive social action has provided the bedrock for theoretical developments and model building in several social sciences. Since its beginnings, however, sociology has harbored, a "contrarian" vocation based on examining the unrecognized, unintended, and emergent consequences of goal-oriented activity. I present several examples of the sociological practice of bashing myths based on the logic of purposive action and offer a typology of alternative goals, means, and outcomes illustrated by both classic sociological writings and contemporary research. The multiple contingencies documented by sociologists in the past cautions against attempts to build institutions or implement programs grounded on grand blueprints. The cautionary tale supported by sociological analysis of concealed goals, shifts in midcourse, and unexpected effects does not lead, however, to the conclusion that scientific prediction and practical intervention are futile endeavors. It leads instead to an emphasis on the dialectics of social life, and on the need to take into account the definitions of the situation of relevant actors. I offer some illustrations of successful mid-range theories that are based on the analysis of dilemmas in social processes and the importance of sensitivity to the unexpected in the implementation of programmatic interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has challenged many of the "core" conceptions of theory and method that remain entrenched in sociology textbooks. In conjunction with recent developments in history and philosophy of science, sociologists of science speak of the disunity of science and describe the local-historical origins of particular scientific facts and laws. "Core" sociology textbooks devote no attention to the methodological implications of recent sociology of science. Elementary textbooks present upbeat versions of the discipline that emphasize sociology's scientific methodology; they describe sociological methods as implementations of a general research process designed along hypothetico-deductive lines. Viewed from the vantage point of SSK, such widely disseminated elementary versions of sociology promote an asociological conception of science. In this paper we suggest that the "epistemic flattening" accomplished by SSK's research on the natural sciences provides a valuable antidote to current anxieties about the coherence and scientific status of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class theorists often argue against the use of unidimensional or hierarchical analyses in class mobility research. They assert that nonvertical effects are of paramount importance in understanding the structure and process of stratification. By explicitly incorporating both vertical and nonvertical effects into the structural model of class mobility, I demonstrate the importance of both effects for understanding the structure of mobility chances within and between countries. Although vertical and nonvertical effects are equally important in explaining association patterns in individual countries, nonvertical effects are the major source of cross-national variation. Two nonvertical effects are particularly important: economic sector of employment -- whether nonmanual, manual, or farm; and employment status-whether self-employed or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I propose the log-multiplicative layer effect model for comparing mobility tables. The model constrains cross-table variation in the origin-destination association to be the log-multiplicative product of a common association pattern and a table-specific parameter. Like Yamaguchi's (1987) uniform layer effect model, the log-multiplicative layer effect model provides one-parameter tests and thus facilitates analysis of the difference in "vertical mobility" between two mobility tables. Compared to the uniform layer effect model, the log-multiplicative layer effect model is far more flexible in specifying the origin-destination association. Virtually all two-way mobility models can be incorporated into the log-multiplicative layer effect model while retaining their usual interpretability. All that is required is that the tables being compared have a common pattern for the origin-destination association. Properties of the new model are demonstrated using three data sets previously analyzed in comparative mobility research. The same methodology can be generalized to the analysis of multiple two-way contingency tables if the two-way association of primary interest is specified to follow a common pattern, albeit with different levels, across the tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Easterlin's cohort-size hypothesis suggests that crime rates fluctuate according to the relative size of the birth cohort. We examine the hypothesis using arrest statistics from the Uniform Crime Reports for the years 1953 through 1989. This paper extends an earlier ASR article (Steffensmeier et al. 1987) and tests three hypotheses derived from the Easterlin framework: (1) whether cohort size is positively related to age-period-specific crime rates, net of age and period effects; (2) whether the effect of cohort size is stronger for property crimes than for violent crimes; and (3) whether the effect of cohort size is stronger for young adults than for older adults or is consistently additive across the life course. Results using two different procedures to assess the cohort-size effect generally contradict the hypotheses, leading us to question the usefulness of cohort size as an explanation of periodicity in crime rates and possibly in other social phenomena as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the micro-macro debate, ethnomethodology is generally cast as microsociology. This is misleading given that ethnomethodology is indifferent to structure at any level Instead, ethnomethodology transcends the terms of the debate with a focus on empirical social practices whereby both microstructure and macrostructure are produced by and for the membership. This is also true of conversation analysis. Modifying Collins's "interaction ritual chains" to include this indifference to structure expands ethnomethodological understanding as well as Collins's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology faces a peculiar paradox: Every general sociological proposition is both true and false. On the one hand, one can easily find exceptions to most of the propositions which are advanced as genera! sociological principles. Yet, there are many instances in which genera! sociological principles are supported by empirical findings. As a consequence, it is not clear when some sociological principle is to be counted as false. This paper argues that a proper assessment of the state of sociological knowledge and the possibility of cumulative growth in sociology depends on resolving the true-false paradox. We argue that the paradox can be resolved if sociologists make the scope of their theories explicit. We offer a formulation of scope restrictions, demonstrate how the formulation resolves the true-false paradox, and illustrate the differences between the method proposed here and other strategies for making sociological theories conditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section comment on the article, The Enclave and the Entrants: Patterns of Ethnic Enterprise in Miami Before and After Mariel, by Leif Jensen and Alejandro Portes. Debates in the social sciences frequently go unresolved. In part, this reflects the discursive character of theoretical discourse between and within academic traditions and schools of thought. Yet even when social scientists attempt to verify hypotheses through empirical tests, resolution of differences are often difficult to achieve. Portes and Jensen considered four hypotheses in their defense of the enclave economy hypothesis. The argument of the authors that their first and third hypotheses can be rejected is unconvincing. As for the first hypothesis, their organization of Table 1 obscures a systematic pattern of disadvantage in the enclave. The pattern holds whether the enclave is defined by place of work or residence. With respect to the third hypothesis both the unweighted and weighted regressions indicate that men in the enclave experience a net disadvantage in earnings. These findings are replicated when the enclave is defined by place of residence. The lower earning return to years of schooling, however, is not replicated when weighted regression is applied to their sample in which there is a small undersampling of people born in Cuba.

This article narrates the authors comments on the article Ecological Demography: Its Place in Sociology written by Krishnan Namboodiri. The defense of Namboodiri of ecological demography is highly compelling. However, I believe that he misses several opportunities to convince us even more strongly of the power and utility of this neglected paradigm. Most social science disciplines do not have this level of consensus as to the nature of their subject matter. Nor does Namboodiri mention explicitly the fact that demography provides us the opportunity to use powerful deterministic models such as determination of size, distribution and composition of population by fertility, mortality, migration and social mobility. I am not sure that I understand Namboodiri's distinction between corporate and categoric units. The atheoretical label must be rejected. Demography and human ecology should stop worrying about their alleged theoretical shortcomings. Namboodiri exemplifies a self-flagellation tradition that cannot be justified. Along with transition theory, decision theory and institutional theory, all of which Namboodiri enumerates and discusses. It may seem unusual and even offensive to claim that a pair of elaborate deductive models are the theoretical bedrock of the discipline.

This article deals with the poor quality of article reviews received by the American Sociological Review (ASR). The staff have been disappointed in the overall quality of reviewing at ASR. It seems that too many reviewers do not seem to know what they need to do to write a good review, and it is time the discipline do something about the problem. A good place to start might be by reconsidering a widely held assumption about reviewing--the notion that anyone with a Ph.D. is able to review scholarly work in his or her specialty. This assumption is positive, supportive, democratic, and politically correct within the profession. But our empirical experience is that it is too often false. The fact is that our graduate programs train us to criticize works that have already been published--works that have already gone through the generally complex and chastening process of review and editing. One way to train a reviewer is to adopt a graduate student and involve him or her in your review process. The American Sociological Association should also offer a workshop on reviewing at the annual meetings where anyone could attend the workshop.

This article narrates the author's reply to the comments made by Michael A. Faia to the author's article Ecological Demography: Its Place in Sociology. As I see it, the main thrust of Professor Faia's comment on my article is that the case I outlined in behalf of ecological demography would have been stronger if I had emphasized certain features. I do not expect all scholars to emphasized the same features when they make their case for ecological demography. To me, the presence of deterministic models in any social science discipline does not make the discipline superior to others with no deterministic models. As I see them, deterministic models are convenient abstractions often extremely oversimplified to permit mathematical manipulations illustrated by the population interaction model. In my view, deterministic models are imaginary experiments which is high on internal validity but very low on external validity. This does not mean that deterministic models are useless. Turning to Professor Faia's preference for the functionalist/systemic theory there is little I wish to add to what I said in my article. If Professor Faia's functionalist/systemic framework is different from ecological demography. I would like to see a comparison of the two frameworks on how they handle the core sociology assuming that some consensus exists regarding what constitutes that core.

This article narrates the author's comments on editing, reviewing and publishing articles in the American Sociological Review (ASR). Some people complained that the ASR had been unsympathetic to their kind of sociology and that a special issue was the only sure way to remedy the situation. So far, my own appraisal is that neither their diagnosis nor their proposed cure is appropriate. In both the previous and the current editorial regimes the Deputy Editors have been responsible for assigning all reviewers. The Deputy Editors have varied scholarly histories, preferences and prejudices. However, they generally make reviewer assignments and about which they are most familiar and about which they tend to be positive. In any case they are usually do desperate to find appropriate, skilled and conscientious reviewers that they do not have enough degrees of freedom to be able to choose individuals whose prejudices they know. Even if the review process were discriminatory I think that special issues would be a dangerous and costly remedy. The ASR should be a journal that publishes the best papers available regardless of topic or research style. It is important that readers know that when a paper is published in the ASR it is not because of politics or fashion but because a reasonable, fair and rigorous peer review process has selected it on the basis of quality.