American Journal of Sociology

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

American Journal of Sociology | Vol 131, No 3

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.

American Journal of Sociology | Vol 131, No 2

The September 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online at www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/2025/131/2

The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies1 | American Journal of Sociology: Vol 130, No 2 Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is...

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.

American Journal of Sociology | Vol 131, No 1

The July 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online: www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/2025...

American Journal of Sociology | Vol 130, No 6

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.

Does immigration enforcement lead to racial inequality? We find the Secure Communities program had little impact on arrests of Latinos or noncitizens in Texas and California. But the punishments for noncitizens increased in Texas, where the justice system was coupled with immigration enforcement.

How do workers learn about and develop resources to enter alternative occupations? A new AJS article finds workplaces organize the division and contagion of labor. Bringing together workers of distinct occupations enables exchange of resources, and mobility unfolds along the nexus of collaboration.

How do local protests become global? A new AJS article by @juliettes.bsky.social shows how historical emigration patterns can inadvertently create latent network infrastructures that enable movements to spread across borders. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Why do employees feel more—or less—connected to their workplace? A new AJS study applies computational linguistics tools to assess organizational identification based on internal communication messages. People feel more attached when they’re embedded in tight-knit and wide-ranging work networks.

Network research emphasizes the value of open networks for job searches, but a new article by @lassefolke.bsky.social, @tomlyttelton.bsky.social, and Emil Begtrup-Bright uses administrative data to show that job seekers move to workplaces where they are connected to closed cliques of workers.

What makes a decision fair? A new AJS article by @joannapepin.bsky.social and @wjscarborough.bsky.social shows beliefs about gender, more so than economic explanations, alter perceptions of couples’ decision-making. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

In Nordic welfare states, not all family policies promote equality. A new AJS article by Evertsson, Moberg & van der Vleuten compares earnings penalties in same- and different-sex couples across countries, showing how policy design shapes work–care divisions www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

The March 2025 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is now available online at: www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/2025...