Department of Sociology

As postdoctoral training has become a requirement in many STEMM fields the influence of postdoc hiring on STEMM labor force inclusion and diversity has increased, yet postdoc hiring processes have received only limited attention from researchers. Drawing on status theory and data for 769 postdoctoral recruitments, we systematically analyze the relationship between gender, race-ethnicity, and postdoctoral hiring. The findings show: (1) differences by gender and race-ethnicity in application rates, and in whether an applicant is seriously considered, interviewed, and offered the postdoc position; (2) hiring disparities correlate with between-group differences in applicants' network connections, referrer prestige, and academic human capital; (3) between-group differences in network connections have the greatest power to account for hiring disparities; and (4) hiring processes may differ by applicant gender or race-ethnicity, the female representation in the STEMM field and the race of the search committee chair. We discuss competing interpretations of the results and highlight directions for future research.

Community violence-defined as unsanctioned violence between unrelated individuals in public places-has devastating physical, psychological, and emotional consequences on individuals, families, and communities. Immense investments in policing and incarceration in the United States have neither prevented community violence nor systemically served those who have been impacted by it, instead often inflicting further harm. However, the logics that uphold policing and incarceration as suitable or preventative responses to community violence are deeply ingrained in societal discourse, limiting our ability to respond differently. In this perspective, we draw from interviews with leading voices in the field of outreach-based community violence intervention and prevention to consider alternative ways to address community violence. We begin by demonstrating that policing and incarceration are distinguished by practices of retribution, isolation, and counterinsurgency that are counterproductive to the prevention of community violence. Then, we identify alternative practices of outreach-based community violence intervention and prevention that include (1) fostering safety nets through relationships among individuals, families, and neighborhoods, (2) fighting poverty and increasing access to resources, and (3) building political capacity among organizations to transform the broader systems in which they are embedded. They also include accountability practices that are preventative and responsive to the needs of those who are harmed. We conclude that elevating the language, narratives, and values of outreach-based community violence intervention and prevention can transform our responses to violence, interrupt cycles of harm, and foster safer communities.

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The United States’ long-standing approach to the People’s Republic of China—“engagement”—is at an end, replaced by a tougher approach, labeled “strategic competition.” Foregrounding the role of knowledge communities in the making of US foreign policy, I show that engagement’s demise followed less a rational process responding to shifts in Chinese behavior and the balance of power, and more a paradigmatic turnover in key individuals’ views of China within the government and the China expert community. Adopting a sociological perspective attuned to the social and professional underpinnings of US foreign policy, I trace the paradigmatic turnover in US views of China to three processes: politicization, professional status competition, and personalization. Drawing on a range of sources, including over one hundred original interviews with members of the US China expert community, this article traces the entanglement of engagement at once political, professional, and deeply personal.

Historians typically explain the Marshall Plan (1948–52) as an effect of a bipartisan embrace of liberal internationalism, which became the dominant ideology of US foreign policy. However, predominant accounts downplay interpretive contention, historical contingencies, and counterfactual possibilities that are very much in evidence. There was no bipartisan liberal internationalist consensus immediately after World War II; indeed, there were no “liberal internationalists” until 1947. The present analysis identifies two interconnected processes behind the Plan: the emergence of a new kind of political actor, the credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal, and the coalescence of an unlikely coalition of Trumanites, New Dealers, and congressional conservatives. Together, these processes enabled the passage of a large-scale, Keynesian-style spending initiative that excluded Russia, despite the electoral weakness of New Dealers, and the consolidation of liberal internationalist ideology in American foreign policy—with significance for today's era of renewed great power competition.

Recent years have seen the rapid descent of relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China (prc). Hopes for cooperation in places of common concern like climate change gave way to strains in almost all areas. In place of "engagement,"the administration of Donald J. Trump adopted a tougher approach of "strategic competition"that its successor so far has continued. This article explores the relationship between the demise of engagement and opinions coming from the American China expert community. Specifically, it questions the impact on engagement of five secular dynamics that these China authorities have experienced - generational turnover; the field's vast expansion and diversification; increased disciplinary specialization; the enhanced prominence of the generalist in national security discussions in place of China specialists; and changes in the media leading to more skeptical journalistic voices on U.S.-prc relations. Without over-emphasizing either the influence of the expert community on U.S. decision-making, or underplaying the more repressive and authoritarian actions of the Chinese Communist Party, this article suggests that the China expert community has been more of a factor in the end of engagement than current accounts of academics and commentators acknowledge.

Conditions in immigrant detention centers facilitate the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19. However, there is no publicly-available data on detainees' health characteristics, making it difficult to estimate the prevalence of risk among detained people. We use cross-sectional survey data from the only survey of detained immigrants, conducted in California in 2013-2014, to assess the prevalence and health-related correlates of health conditions among detained immigrants. We calculated the proportion of detained immigrants with chronic conditions, their interruptions in care, and stratified by sociodemographic characteristics, evaluating differences using two-tailed tests. Among 529 detained immigrants, 42.5% had at least one chronic health condition; 15.5% had multiple chronic conditions. 20.9% experienced disruption in care upon entering detention. 95.6% had access to stable housing in the U.S. Many detained people face health conditions that confer greater risk for poor outcomes with COVID-19. Stable residence can facilitate release of detainees via Alternatives to Detention programs.

This paper casts American influence over the Schuman Plan of May 1950 as a hegemonic field effect, pushing forward recent attempts to develop more dynamic models of hegemonic ordering in world politics. Far from an automatic enactment of US preferences for European unification by French policy-makers, as prevailing macro-level theories imply, the Schuman Plan-French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman's proposal to pool French and German coal and steel-was the product of a "structural homology"that developed between the French and American political fields after 1945. American officials in Paris, empowered by their control of Marshall Aid, fostered an alignment of the French and American political fields, empowering centrist coalitions and technocratic planners in France, who favored pro-capitalist, pro-European integration policies, of which the Schuman Plan was a signature artifact. The paper explores the implications of this historical case for the further development of relational meso-level theories of hegemony.

The current study examined whether social status and social integration, two related but distinct indicators of an adolescent's standing within a peer network, mediate the association between risky symptoms (depressive symptoms and deviant behavior) and substance use across adolescence. The sample of 6,776 adolescents participated in up to seven waves of data collection spanning 6th to 12th grades. Scores indexing social status and integration were derived from a social network analysis of six schools and subsequent psychometric modeling. Results of latent growth models showed that social integration and status mediated the relation between risky symptoms and substance use and that risky symptoms mediated the relation between social standing and substance use during the high school transition. Before this transition, pathways involving deviant behavior led to high social integration and status and in turn to substance use. After this transition, both deviant behavior and depressive symptoms led to low social integration and status and in turn greater substance use. These findings suggest that the high school transition is a risky time for substance use related to the interplay of increases in depressive symptoms and deviant behavior on the one hand and decreases in social status and integration on the other.

In the study of adolescent health, it is useful to derive indices of social dynamics from sociometric data, and to use these indices as predictors of health risk behaviors. In this manuscript, we introduce a flexible latent variable model as a novel way of obtaining estimates of social integration and social status from school-based sociometric data. Such scores provide the flexibility of a regression-based approach while accounting for measurement error in sociometric indicators. We demonstrate the utility of these factor scores in testing complex hypotheses through a combination of structural equation modeling and survival models, showing that deviance mediates the relationship between social status and smoking onset hazard at the transition to high school.