This review offers a framework for studying the measurement, consequences, and sources of poverty in times of crisis. Recent crises—such as COVID-19, the Great Recession, and environmental disasters—expose limitations of the standard social science toolkit for studying poverty and offer lessons for improving poverty and policy research. Regarding measurement, evidence suggests that the intrayear volatility of incomes and blurred boundaries between resource-sharing units deserve greater focus in poverty measurement debates. Regarding consequences, research emphasizes the need to quantify poverty's distinct roles as a risk factor versus stratifying feature during crises. Regarding sources, evidence from recent crises offer direct tests of competing theories of poverty and offer clear lessons for policy strategies to reduce poverty. I conclude that sociologists’ conceptual toolkit is uniquely well-suited to capture the multifaceted nature of poverty; the discipline should more forcefully incorporate its principles into a renewed study of poverty and public policy.

The role of gender in far-right parties and movements received little attention until the twentieth century, when feminist and masculinity studies began to draw attention to women's participation in these politics and the gendered nature of men's far-right activism. In the past decade, research in this area has flourished, creating a distinct subspecialty. This review focuses on recent scholarship on the discourse and practices of femininity/women and masculinity/men in the far-right and the transnational antigender movement opposed to feminist and LGBTQ+ political gains. It also suggests topical and methodological directions for the next stage of research and reflects on the ethical, political, and safety challenges that scholars of the far-right and gender encounter today.

Signaling theory (ST) describes how people deal with and overcome uncertainties about others’ attributes and intentions relevant to their interactions. I integrate ST into a multilevel framework to highlight how people's need to overcome these uncertainties shapes collective outcomes and to spell out the different conditions for the theory's predictions. After a nontechnical outline of the integrated ST framework, I review three strands of sociological scholarship that have applied ST, broadly construed: ( a ) the job market and the education-to-work transition, ( b ) trust and cooperation in social and economic exchange relations, and ( c ) signaling norms and boundary making in intergroup relations. After recounting how ST has spurred the sociological imagination, I sketch promising research directions.

Research on Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) populations in the United States has been shaped by a fundamental paradox: MENAs are statistically invisible in the administrative data infrastructure yet socially hypervisible in other domains. This review outlines key demographic characteristics of the MENA American population and argues that by addressing the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox through innovative research questions and methods, previous scholarship has advanced sociology in three areas: identity, racialization, and integration. As upcoming changes to federal race and ethnicity standards take effect, the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox may shift as sociologists more easily collect and analyze data about MENA Americans. However, this information may be misused, misinterpreted, or handled unethically without sufficient background context and responsibility to community members. Future research will require data disaggregation to explore intersectional and intragroup minority issues, examination of the evolving content and meaning of MENA panethnicity, and ongoing assessment of the MENA group's relative racial position.

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.

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.

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.