The South has historically been the epicenter of racial inequality in the US. But the geography of racial inequality has shifted in the decades since the Civil Rights movement. Today, Black-white income disparities are lower in the South than the rest of the country. @robertmanduca.bsky.social
How do states build and lose the capacity to decarbonize? Livio Silva-Muller analyzes how Brazil achieved one of the most successful cases of decarbonization ever recorded, how those results were later undone, and how Brazil’s experience sheds light on other cases. @liviosilva.bsky.social
Party organization requires a distinct social structure—one produced by capitalist dispossession. Two regions, both agrarian, indigenous, and revolutionary: Only one amenable to party organization. Underlying economic structures determined fundamentally different political outcomes.
Are internal labor markets still valuable? We construct a new LinkedIn-based measure of internal career ladders and link it to USPTO data on 446K U.S. inventors. Firms that promote from within are associated with more productive inventors—a pattern that fades near retirement.
Are key aspects of the self-concept malleable or do they fluctuate around stable baselines? The authors find that changes in adolescence and the transition to adulthood persist over time but from around 30 to midlife changes are less durable. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
The January 2026 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online at www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/2026...
Khanna shows that men don’t extend equal support for gender equality to all groups of women. An experimental group processes approach shows how men’s gender attitudes are shaped by race & class identities of the women in question and the relation between women’s identities & men’s own identities.
Interested in submitting an article to the AJS for consideration? Go to our authors' resources page for guidelines: ajs.uchicago.edu/for-authors/
How do street-level regulators cope with pressure from labor and capital alongside limited capacity? Examining Gilded Age factory inspectors, this article introduces "soft regulatory capture" to show how regulators adapt to competing constraints and how this can lead to institutional restructuring.
Is the criminal legal system becoming more gender egalitarian? A new study of 30+ years of Texas data finds the gender gap in convictions is growing, but incarceration is becoming more equal. What does this mean for gender and the carceral state? #CriminalLegalSystem #Gender
How do Black and White Americans assess the legitimacy of another person’s racial self-identification? Using a series of survey experiments, authors @marissathompson.bsky.social, Sam Trejo, @ajalvero.bsky.social, and @daphmarts.bsky.social illustrate the characteristics that drive racial conceptions
Did free secondary education reduce the role of genes in shaping life outcomes? Using the 1944 Education Act in England, the authors find that the reform weakened the link between genes and education, income, and wealth—boosting equality of opportunity.
Businesses, associations, and places of worship are key aspects of immigrant community life. Why do some groups build dense organizational ecologies but others don’t? A new analysis of 25,117 ethnoreligious organizations in 4900 communities suggests that culture—not social structure—drives density
The November 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online at www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/curr...
What are Americans’ perceptions of immigrants’ politics? How do beliefs about whether newcomers are future allies or adversaries shape immigration attitudes? A new #AJS article shows that perceived partisan (mis)alignment powerfully informs US public opinion on immigration.
What happens when public servants are asked to betray the values that brought them to service? New research traces how asylum officers under Trump navigated moral crisis and how their ability—or inability—to form with peers a shared aspiration for moral resolution determined who stayed or who left.
Does using algorithms to make decisions eliminate exceptions—or simply change them? A new study takes a deep dive into the world of tenant screening to find out when people with problematic pasts still get a pass. How do exceptions for unpaid debts, criminal records, and eviction histories persist?
Interested in submitting an article to the AJS for consideration? Check out our authors' resources page first: ajs.uchicago.edu/for-authors/
How does the incarceration of a student’s mother or father shape how teachers grade them? A new #AJS article by @erinjmccauley.bsky.social employs a vignette survey experiment to reveal that the effects of parental incarceration on teachers’ assessments of student work are profound and racialized.
When classifying others, White, Black, Latino, and Asian Americans all discount White self-identification more than they discount self-identification as Black, Latino, Asian or MENA. Classification and status theories make sense of why.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
The WWII GI Bill made millions of veterans homeowners, but it also increased Black-White gaps in homeownership and wealth. Results demonstrate how historic policies not only exacerbated past inequalities but also how these inequalities have persisted and intensified into the present.
The September 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online at www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/2025/131/2
Leveraging admin data (n=1 billion+), our 29-scholar team identifies a consistent 30-year trend in 12 OECD countries: Top and bottom earners increasingly work in different establishments! Fueled by deindustrialization, firm restructuring, and digitalization, this trend might erode social cohesion.
The WWII GI Bill made millions of veterans homeowners, but it also increased Black-White gaps in homeownership and wealth. Results demonstrate how historic policies not only exacerbated past inequalities but also how these inequalities have persisted and intensified into the present.
The July 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online: www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/2025...
The May 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online at www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/curr...
New study on elite tax migration. Using IRS data, we show that while tax rates matter, embeddedness matters more. Millionaires don’t flee high-tax states unless their networks are disrupted. Embeddedness > incentives. States can still tax the rich. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
When classifying others, White, Black, Latino, and Asian Americans all discount White self-identification more than they discount self-identification as Black, Latino, Asian or MENA. Classification and status theories make sense of why.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
How are struggles between states and competing governors carried out? In an ethnography of Colombian roads, Alex Diamond shows that it comes down to the relationships that communities build with either state officials or guerrilla commanders, depending on where they turn for help with public goods.
Hannah Waight and Adam Goldstein show that inequality perceptions have become increasingly polarized by partisanship.This gap has been driven by Republicans, whose increasing disavowal of growing inequality contributed to an overall decline in Americans’ perceptions in the new gilded age.