Knowledge that Transforms

Despite long-standing evidence linking higher unemployment rates to increased suicide rates, a puzzling trend emerged in the United States after the Great Recession: suicide rates continued to rise even as unemployment rates declined. Drawing on theories of social networks and reference groups, we advance the concept of “sameness”—in this case, the extent to which an individual’s employment status aligns with the fate of others in one’s community—to clarify how unemployment rates influence suicide. Constructing a multilevel dataset of U.S. suicide deaths from 2005 to 2017, we find that while unemployed individuals face a higher risk of suicide compared to the employed, this gap diminishes in communities with high local unemployment rates. Moreover, the “sameness” effect extends beyond geographic contexts to temporal ones, as national unemployment spikes reduce suicide risk among the unemployed and diminish the importance of local sameness. Together, these findings suggest a mechanism of “situational awareness,” whereby local and national economic contexts shape the meaning of unemployment, shifting its interpretation from personal failure to system failure and reducing its stigma. Our article offers a novel framework for examining the effects of cross-level interactions in suicide research, highlighting the crucial role of culture as deeply intertwined with social network mechanisms in shaping contextual influence.

White, male-dominated professions in the United States are marked with substantial gender and racial inequality in career advancement, yet they often face pressures to increase diversity. In these contexts, are theories of employer biases based on gender and racial stereotypes sufficient to explain patterns of hiring discrimination during common career transitions in the external labor market? If not, how and why do discrimination patterns deviate from predictions? Through a case study of software engineering, we first draw from a large-scale audit study and demonstrate unexpected patterns of hiring screening discrimination: while employers discriminate in favor of White men among early-career job applicants seeking lateral positions, for both early-career and senior workers applying to senior jobs, Black men and Black women face no discrimination compared to White men, and White women are preferred. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we explain these patterns of discrimination by demonstrating how decision-makers incorporate diversity value—applicants’ perceived worth for their contribution to organizational diversity—into hiring screening decisions, alongside biases. We introduce diversity commodification as the market-based valuative process by which diversity value varies across job level and intersectional groups. This article offers important implications for our understanding of gender, race, and employer decision-making in modern U.S. organizations.

In recent years, sociologists have labored to understand how economists have gained influence over policymaking. We extend this research by shifting focus from the matter of influence to the matter of policy training. Granted that economists already have influence, how do future policy professionals learn economic rationales? How is this mindset transmitted to hesitant students? By asking these questions, we bring socialization back into institutional research on “new” professionals. Utilizing data from an ethnography of a Masters of Public Affairs program, we find that students learn economics through a process of “ambivalent reproduction”: they learn to “think like an economist without becoming one.” They remain skeptical and reject the notion that they are economists, and when they use economics in their future policy work they do so in limited ways. Nonetheless, ambivalent reproduction sustains the policy status-quo and allows economics to remain influential without true belief. Ambivalent reproduction provides a new means for understanding the loosely coupled influence of economics on policy, and it contributes to the sociology of economics, inhabited institutionalism, and professional socialization.

Researchers have long debated how radio broadcasts affected the dynamics of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, with some arguing that the radio was highly consequential, and others suggesting such effects have been overstated. This article contributes to these debates—as well as to debates regarding the role of old and new media in collective action—by examining whether and how Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (Radio RTLM) coverage was associated with two core aspects of the violence: (1) subnational onset of genocidal violence and (2) participation in genocidal violence across subnational spaces. Drawing on new data on Radio RTLM coverage, we find that areas with coverage were more likely to experience immediate onset of violence. However, our analysis of participation in the genocide—which uses more accurate measures of participation and of radio coverage than prior studies—finds no significant association between Radio RTLM coverage and subnational levels of participation. After illustrating that these results are robust to numerous model specifications, we theorize that information broadcast over the radio’s airways contributed to the creation of a critical mass that initiated genocide in localized spaces. We conclude by considering the importance of understanding the role of media in the subnational onset of violence.

This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.

Cultural capital is a central concept in stratification research. Crucial to the Bourdieusian habitus, upper strata familiarity with the dominant culture is assumed to be ingrained via socialization, allowing its members to smoothly navigate educational institutions and higher segments of the labor market. Although cultural capital is deemed partially implicit, such “non-declarative” or “embodied” cultural capital has largely escaped empirical scrutiny; arguments about its importance are typically post hoc interpretations of associations between measures of declarative cultural capital (survey items on elite cultural consumption) and variables of interest. To advance stratification research, we developed tools to empirically capture non-declarative cultural capital: Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring (1) positive association and (2) self-identification with elite culture, embedded in a survey fielded among a high-quality panel representative of the Dutch population ( n = 2,436). We find our IATs validly measure non-declarative cultural capital. As expected, scores are only weakly coupled with declarative cultural capital, and associated with (parental) socioeconomic position. Using these IATs liberates non-declarative cultural capital from its deus ex machina status and answers the black-box critique of the Bourdieusian habitus as an explanation for socially stratified patterns across a range of fields.