American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
Scientific facts are an essential element of modern life. Yet, despite an abundance of illuminating work in science and technology studies (STS), we lack a rigorous sociological framework for explaining how scientific facts emerge, gain traction, and then change over time. This article fills that gap. Drawing on Fleck ([1935] 1981), Haydu (1998), and a wealth of STS scholarship, I develop a comparative-historical approach called “reiterated fact-making” that analyzes scientific facts according to (1) the prevailing conditions of possibility; (2) the networks of expertise, social mobilization, and power built up around them; and (3) the epistemic and material path dependencies that accrue over the course of their careers. To demonstrate the utility of this framework, I draw on a mixed-methods study and explain the uneven histories of three genetic variants (XYY, Fragile X, and the 22q11.2 microdeletion) that have been used to delineate and diagnose new medical conditions associated with neurodevelopmental differences for the past several decades—taking on very different scientific, clinical, and social meanings as facts in the process. Reiterated fact-making helps us combine comparative-historical sociology and STS to explain how scientific facts can combine deep continuity and radical transformation as they are enrolled in shifting fields of research and practice.

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
Babies in the United States fare worse than their peers in other high-income countries, and their well-being is starkly unequal along socioeconomic and racialized lines. Newborn health predicts adult well-being, making these inequalities consequential. Policymakers and scholars seeking to improve newborn health and reduce inequality have recently looked to direct cash transfers as a viable intervention. We examine the only unconditional cash transfer in the United States, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), to learn if giving pregnant people money improves their newborns’ health. Alaska has paid its residents a significant dividend annually since 1982. The dividend’s size varies yearly and is exogenous to Alaskans and the local economy, permitting us to make causal claims. After accounting for fertility selection, we find that receiving cash during pregnancy has no meaningful effect on newborn health. Current theory focuses on purchasing power and status mechanisms to delineate how money translates into health. It cannot illuminate this null finding. This case illustrates a weakness with current theory: it does not provide clear expectations for interventions. We propose four components that must be considered in tandem to predict whether proposed interventions will work.

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
How does work come to be constructed as a service to the worker? In the United States, the payment of subminimum wages to disabled workers has been legal since 1938 and was entrenched by 1986 legislation eliminating the previously mandated floor of 50 percent of the minimum wage. This article draws on primary historical materials to explain the passage of these amendments, which I analyze as a case of delaborization, a process through which work is mystified as such and reclassified as something else (e.g., service). I find that the managers of segregated workshops for disabled manual laborers rose to control disability employment policy in the aftermath of deinstitutionalization. Professionals mobilized disability stigma to frame the subminimum wage as a social welfare issue subject to their expertise and to lobby successfully for its entrenchment. Weaknesses in the disability–labor coalition enabled this seizure of jurisdiction. This research illuminates professional expertise, the withdrawal of labor unions, and identity-based stigma as major mechanisms driving delaborization, an important contemporary influence on the organization of work. The case of the subminimum wage thus develops sociological literatures on labor, disability, and politics.

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 4, Page 615-649, August 2024.
Theorists have proposed that a value of close friends and family—strong ties—is the ability to confide in them when facing difficult issues. But close relationships are complicated, and recent studies report that people sometimes avoid strong ties when facing personal issues. How common is such avoidance? The question speaks to theoretical debates over the nature of “closeness” and practical concerns over social isolation. We develop an approach and test it on new, nationally representative data. We find that, when facing personal difficulties, adult Americans are as likely to avoid as to talk to close friends and family. Most avoidance is not actively reflected on but passively enacted, and, contrary to common belief, is not limited to either specific network members or particular topics, depending instead on the conjunction of member and topic. Building on Simmel, we propose that a theory of the fundamental need to conceal and reveal helps account for the findings. We suggest that there is no more empirical justification for labeling strong ties as those who are trusted than for labeling them as those who are avoided. In turn, isolation might be less a matter of having no intimates than of having repeatedly to avoid them.

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 4, Page 761-788, August 2024.
Why do elite professionals leave hard-earned, privileged corporate careers? This article examines an underappreciated case of employee turnover, white-collar opt-out, which involves resignations that may not immediately lead to a similar job or life experience, but are instead followed by alternatives to fast-track careers, including seeking another occupation, stay-at-home parenting, or pursuit of leisure and self-exploration. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with Turkish professional-managerial employees of transnational corporations located in both Istanbul and New York City, I examine their narratives about the quality of working life and their decisions to opt out through the lenses of worker consent and alienation. I identify the lack of work-life balance and fulfillment with one’s labor as drivers of opting out, showing how these push factors, combined with various pull factors of non-working life and safety nets, encourage elite workers to overcome status anxiety and abandon corporate careers. The article extends labor process theory insights into high-paying corporate occupations, illuminating how so-called “good jobs” may produce a relatively low quality of working life. It also exposes the inherent limits of resource-centered approaches to inequality, showing how alienating work can undermine the quality of life of even upwardly mobile, high-skilled workers.

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 4, Page 735-760, August 2024.
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.

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 4, Page 650-683, August 2024.
Lawmakers are routinely confronted by urgent social issues, yet they hold conflicting policy preferences, incentives, and goals that can undermine collaboration. How do lawmakers collaborate on solutions to urgent issues in the presence of conflicts? I argue that by building mutual trust, networks provide a mechanism to overcome the risks conflict imposes on policy collaboration. But, in doing so, network dependence constrains lawmakers’ ability to react to the problems that motivate policy action beyond their immediate connections. I test this argument using machine learning and longitudinal analysis of federal crime legislation co-sponsorship networks between 1979 and 2005, a period of rising political elite polarization. Results show that elite polarization increased the effects of reciprocal action and prior collaboration on crime legislation co-sponsorships while suppressing the effect of violent crime rates. These relationships vary only marginally by political party and are pronounced for ratified criminal laws. The findings provide new insights to the role of collaboration networks in the historical development of the carceral state and elucidate how political actors pursue collective policy action on urgent issues in the presence of conflict.

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 4, Page 684-707, August 2024.
Recent religious declines in the United States are for a large part driven by the growing number of Americans who were raised religiously but left religion in the transition to adulthood. Nonetheless, their views and behaviors may still be influenced by their religious upbringing. We explore such legacy effects by examining how changing religiosity during the transition to adulthood influences volunteering among young adults. Analyzing panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we estimate two types of effects: effects of cumulative religious trajectories in youth, and effects of religiosity in youth that are not mediated by religiosity in adulthood. We find that histories of religious involvement shape volunteering in adulthood, but the precise nature of such effects varies across dimensions of religiosity and types of volunteering. Religious service attendance in youth promotes volunteering in adulthood mostly indirectly, through influencing religiosity in adulthood, and exclusively for activities organized by religious groups. By contrast, religious identification in youth promotes volunteering in adulthood also through other channels, and its effects on secular volunteering may persist even when people are not religious in adulthood. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of ongoing declines in religiosity in the United States.

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 4, Page 708-734, August 2024.
Lynching remains a common form of collective punishment for alleged wrongdoers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia today. Unlike other kinds of collective violence, lynching is usually not carried out by standing organizations. How do lynch mobs overcome the high barriers to violent collective action? I argue that they draw on local community ties to compensate for a lack of centralized organization. Lynch mobs benefit from solidarity and peer pressure, which facilitate collective action. The study focuses on Mexico, where lynching is prevalent and often amounts to the collective beating of thieves. Based on original survey data from Mexico City and a novel lynching event dataset covering the whole of Mexico, I find that individuals with more ties in their communities participate more often in lynching, and municipalities with more highly integrated communities have higher lynching rates. As community ties and lynching may be endogenously related, I also examine the posited mechanisms and the causal direction. Findings reveal that municipalities exposed to a recent major earthquake—an event that tends to increase community ties—subsequently experienced increased levels of lynching. Importantly, I find that interpersonal trust is unrelated to lynching, thus showing that different aspects of social capital have diverging consequences for collective violence, with community ties revealing a “dark side.”