Skill-based selective migration policies are a dominant contemporary form of migration governance in labor receiving countries. Researchers have critiqued these policies, noting discrepancies between their intended goals and the actual labor market outcomes for immigrants. The social construction of skill offers a sociological interpretation of this migration phenomenon, emphasizing that skills and their categorization in international migration are intrinsically political. Skills are socially constructed by actors in specific local, national, transnational, and global contexts. This article reviews scholarship that explores these dynamics from Asian perspectives. It identifies the various positions that countries in Asia occupy in skill mobility and highlights the critical issues related to both outbound and inbound skill migration in this region, as well as intraregional mobilities. The concluding section cautions against a reproduction of skill hierarchy in social science research and advocates a social construction approach to analyzing skill mobilities in different world regions.

Survey experiments are an underutilized but powerful tool for sociologists interested in studying causal research questions. Survey experiments can yield insights into the breadth of causal relationships, by studying treatment effects in population samples or across subgroups, and can yield a deeper understanding of causal processes that are not readily observed with other social science methodologies. In this article, we begin by considering the conditions under which survey experiments are a uniquely useful method and highlight emblematic examples of recent sociological research. We then discuss some of the challenges and limitations of survey experiments as a research method before offering a brief practical guide to sociologists interested in conducting survey experiments. We conclude with reflections on the future of survey experimental research in sociology.

This review articulates sociology's emerging approach to public administration, building on long-standing interest in bureaucracy. The sociology of public administration aims to understand how public administration perpetuates or mitigates inequalities through how well it performs (or does not) and for whom—balancing interest in performance and inclusivity. Sociological work on public administration has exploded in the past decade, illuminating the internal workings of the state apparatus and interrogating microlevel practices of governance, administration, and the chains by which policy comes to be enacted and experienced in the lives of citizens. This scholarship has concentrated around three themes: (a) public administration as a fragmented patchwork with high variation in performance, including administrative burdens that disproportionately affect marginalized groups; (b) public administration as a social arena with blurred boundaries, with unclear and negotiated jurisdictions for action, and where interpersonal and interorganizational connections have equivocal effects on the work of the state; and (c) understanding public administration as socially constituted, not only by rules on paper but by the people who do the work of the state, bringing identities, experiences, cognition, and cultural understandings to bear. The article also includes a supplemental appendix discussing public administration's role in institutionalizing categories that permeate everyday life, producing both legibility and illegibility.

In this review, we advocate for deeper exploration of Latino racialization by highlighting three core complexities: complexities of racial categorization, state-based racialization, and within-group variation. We review research on these complexities, focusing on the US Census and immigration system as key state mechanisms that have shaped and obscured Latino racialization. Our goal is to review and outline dynamic features of Latino racialization, illustrating that such processes operate both in aggregate forms and in ways that reflect within-group variation, impacting Latinos who are not as frequently centered in the broader Latino category. We propose an expansive definition of racialization and introduce a conceptual model to address racial alignments (and misalignments) among its core elements: racial identification, racial ascription, and shared experiences of structural racism. The model accounts for multiple complex mechanisms by which racialization plays out and demonstrates that Latino racialization mirrors broader patterns in racial formation and is not so uniquely complex.

Scholarship on finance has flourished in the aftermath of the Great Recession. While the sociology of finance typically centers developments since the financial turn of the 1970s, a burgeoning body of interdisciplinary scholarship sheds new light on the evolution of financial practices, institutions, and relations in earlier years. This review explores key contributions and themes from the new histories of finance, focusing on works published in the past decade that offer valuable insights for sociologists. We first review new contributions on ancient, medieval, and early modern finance, which illuminate the origins of money and credit, the development of financial thinking, and the relationship between finance and imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Second, we survey new work on the development of modern financial markets in the long road to the financial turn of the 1970s. Together, these studies reveal how money, credit, and finance are embedded in political and legal institutions, and how financial systems act as tools of social policy, economic growth, war, and racial subjugation. Finally, long-run perspectives on finance provide an important reminder that borrowing, lending, and the management of attendant risks are not new phenomena unique to our neoliberal era.

This review explores research on the sources of Black and White wealth and debt differentials and how these differentials recreate inequalities in both wealth and nonwealth outcomes. We discuss how the relationship between wealth and life outcomes is bidirectional, yet studies of racial wealth inequality overwhelmingly focus on wealth as an outcome. We suggest that studies that examine the relationship from wealth to life outcomes are necessary to enable full understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the production and reproduction of racial wealth inequality and to identify policies in the United States to reduce racial inequality. We highlight research on entrepreneurship, race, and wealth to illustrate these dynamics. We conclude with a call for scholars to focus on community-level wealth, given scholarly and policy interests in closing the racial wealth gap.

This article examines the relationship between biography, chance, and persistence in accounting for the assembly of an American sociologist. It traces the accumulation of experiences involved in a research journey aimed at explanation of social behavior and institutional change. The process of discovery leading to a new theory may arise from serendipitous observations gained through fieldwork, while new combinations of ideas also emerge from social interactions with acquaintances, colleagues and friends. Cross-disciplinary intellectual trade offers rich opportunities for advances in the social and behavioral sciences.

Word embeddings are language models that represent words as positions in an abstract many-dimensional meaning space. Despite a growing range of applications demonstrating their utility for sociology, there is little conceptual clarity regarding what exactly embeddings measure and whether this matches what we need them to measure. Here, we fill this theoretical gap by clarifying how cultural meaning can be understood in spatial terms. We argue that embeddings operationalize context spaces, where words’ positions can reflect any regularity in usage. We then examine sociologists' embeddings-based measurements to argue that most sociologists are instead implicitly interested in capturing concept spaces, where positions strictly indicate meaningful conceptual features (e.g., femininity or status). Because meaningful features yield regularities in usage, context spaces can proxy for concept spaces. However, context spaces also reflect surface regularities in language—e.g., syntax, morphology, dialect, and phraseology—which are irrelevant to most sociological investigations and can bias cultural measurement. We draw on our framework to propose best practices for measuring meaning with embeddings.

Everyone agrees that US Black deaths happen earlier than white deaths on average, but it is surprisingly challenging to find the best ways to summarize, quantify, and compare this gap. This review argues that there are three main strategies for doing so, falling on a spectrum of more conventional (though with many novel variants) to unexpected. Distributional approaches quantify population death rates or lifespans, and there is a proliferation of new, creative distributional measures. Comparative approaches benchmark Black excess deaths against other deaths; some versions can be normatively powerful but rest on normative assumptions that are open to challenge. Meaning-based approaches attempt to measure losses—to decedents, their survivors, and the world—that follow from excess Black deaths. These losses range from lost votes and cultural production to traumatic proximity to death to lost chances for reconciliation. Each approach offers new empirical and theoretical opportunities to better understand unequal lifespans.

Bereavement-the loss of a loved one through death-is a common and consequential life course experience. Although bereavement, and matters of death and dying more generally, have long remained on the margins of sociology, in the wake of contemporary mortality crises, sociological research on bereavement has flourished. This review synthesizes the new sociology of bereavement. To contextualize contemporary advancements, we first describe the earlier dominance of psychopathology perspectives on the topic. We then review recent sociological contributions, describing recognition of the structural systems that underpin bereavement and shape its wide-ranging and long-lasting consequences for individuals, families, and communities. We emphasize how bereavement experiences provide a microcosm for understanding social inequalities, and that a life course perspective can provide an integrative framework for a comprehensive sociology of bereavement. We conclude by identifying promising areas for future advancements in this emerging field.