ABSTRACT Most individuals have a general awareness of how long they might live—their subjective life expectancy (SLE). However, these perceptions often differ from actuarial estimates of life expectancy. We examine factors associated with SLE and deviations from actuarial estimates, including demographic characteristics that drive actuarial life tables, socioeconomic status, and psychosocial measures such as perceptions of health and health locus of control. We further consider how COVID-19 experiences are associated with SLE. Analyzing a national probability sample of 1771 adults aged 18 and over living in the United States, we found that Hispanic respondents underestimate their life expectancy, whereas Black respondents, males, and persons of higher socioeconomic status tend to overestimate life expectancy. Additionally, people with higher health locus of control, self-esteem, and self-rated health also tend to overestimate their life expectancy. Within the context of the pandemic, respondents who knew someone with COVID-19 had lower subjective life expectancy.

ABSTRACT A version of this paper was delivered as the presidential address at the North Central Sociological Association Annual Conference in April of 2025. All sociologists have a responsibility as teachers, researchers, and community members to ensure that the work that we do is “good for society.” Given our political and social climate, it is important that all groups are welcomed and included in our courses; this is particularly the case with groups that have experienced underrepresentation, marginalization, and oppression. Through students’ feedback of course content and material, this study examined the ways that various groups of students benefit from a sociology course on race and ethnicity, including students who are White, male, and socialized in upper- and middle-class families and communities.

ABSTRACT In addition to the use of arrests, the state represses protest through legislation. In this paper, I synthesize literature from the fields of political sociology and social movements to explain how legislators justify repressive legislation. Through a qualitative analysis of anti-mask bills introduced in Arizona, Montana, Oregon, and Wisconsin prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I found that masked protest was depicted as threatening, which allowed legislators to tie masked protest to criminality. However, these depictions of threat varied in their applicability for each state. Redefinition of the problem enabled legislators in Arizona—the only state where an anti-masking bill passed—to overcome constitutional and cultural support for the right to protest. Future research should examine how policymakers’ construction of protest as threatening shapes social movement activity.

ABSTRACT This study examines the impact of Islamic spirituality on employee performance, with employee happiness as a mediator and organizational culture as a moderator. This study employs survey data from 300 Muslim employees working in multinational companies in Indonesia, with data analysis conducted using the SEM-PLS method. The results reveal that Islamic spirituality positively influences employee performance, with employee happiness significantly mediating the relationship between Islamic spirituality and employee performance. Additionally, organizational culture strengthens the effect of Islamic spirituality on employee performance. This study integrates the concept of Islamic spirituality with employee performance, incorporating the mediating role of employee happiness and the moderating role of organizational culture—an area that remains underexplored in the current literature. The findings contribute to spiritual leadership theory by demonstrating that Islamic spirituality can enhance both employee happiness and performance, while also emphasizing the role of organizational culture in amplifying the relationship between Islamic spirituality and employee performance. Practically, these findings provide insights for multinational companies on integrating Islamic spiritual values into organizational culture to enhance employee well-being and performance.

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates the role of metropolitan labor markets in neighborhood crime. We fit multilevel models with 8,931 tracts as level one units and 87 large metropolitan areas as level two units, finding that metropolitan labor market structure influences neighborhood violent and property crime rates. Neighborhoods in metropolitan areas with more workers in high-level postindustrial primary sector jobs have lower levels of crime. In contrast, neighborhoods in labor markets with more low-level service industry workers (those dominated by secondary sector positions) or a higher concentration in wholesale and transportation industries exhibit higher crime. We also demonstrate that neighborhood labor instability increases violent and property crime more substantially in metropolitan labor markets with a larger low-level service sector.

ABSTRACT Studies on repression have focused on states’ actions, where law enforcement agencies surveil, detain, manipulate, and harm civilians. This study points to a trend of privatization of repressive capabilities, committing those to market forces. The paper discusses the commodification of high-end, exclusive security functions and their risks to democracy, individuals’ rights, and the rule of law. Initially intended to address manpower shortages in wars, privatized military and security functions have evolved into a booming market. When demand declined after the conclusion of the Iraq War in 2011, the industry explored domestic opportunities, translating the skills and experience gained in conflict areas to domestic clients. These commodities differ significantly from the tools and skills typically available to domestic law enforcement or civilians. In turn, those can be used to expand disparities domestically and encroach on democratic processes. Affluent clients and local governments can utilize elite methods and tools of surveillance and repression, mostly targeting those with less power in society. The paper explores this process and its implications across three cases: Black Cube’s involvement in the Harvey Weinstein case, TigerSwan’s employment of counterterrorism tactics against protesters, and Palantir’s surveillance services to the Los Angeles Police Department.

ABSTRACT This article critically examines the limitations of both methodological nationalism and methodological cosmopolitanism within the social sciences, particularly in the context of transnational and global transformations. It proposes a nuanced analytical framework that integrates the strengths of methodological cosmopolitanism while addressing its epistemological shortcomings by reconstructing the concept of “grounded nationalism” within the cosmopolitanization process. Grounded nationalism emphasizes the dynamic and context-dependent nature of nationalism, highlighting its continuous reconstruction through social practices and institutional frameworks in a cosmopolitanized world. The article applies this framework to the transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam, illustrating how Shi‘i identity, authority, and practices have evolved through interactions between local, national, and global forces. By reconstructing grounded nationalism in this context, the study offers a new lens for understanding the complex and fluid interplay between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary reconfiguration of Shi‘i Islam. This approach challenges traditional methodologies, advocating for a more flexible, context-sensitive analysis that captures the multifaceted nature of global and local dynamics, particularly in the evolving landscape of Shi‘i Islam.

ABSTRACT Building on existing research about intensive involvement, this study examines how mothers activated socioeconomic resources to benefit their children’s K-12 education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews with 50 mothers at the beginning of the pandemic, the findings indicate that socioeconomically advantaged families relied on economic capital and mothers’ availability for assisting with virtual school, homeschooling, and facilitating educational opportunities. High-income families used economic capital in combination with cultural and social capital to broker individualized instructional support for their children, including tutors and network-based learning environments called pods, while moderate-income families relied on larger facilities for instructional support or taught children how to use technology on their own. Their income-divergent approaches were also evident in affluent mothers’ efforts to enhance college application prospects, compared to moderate-income mothers’ encouraging their children to take responsibility for their academic futures. The findings contribute to knowledge about stratified forms of parental involvement that emerge during times of uncertainty and indicate the importance of both household income and employment status for brokering educational opportunities.

ABSTRACT This survey-based experimental vignette examines undergraduate students’ judgments of how restrictive colleges should be in admitting applicants with felony records. Using OLS regression models and thematic coding of qualitative survey responses, we find that students offer only contingent support for the inclusion of college applicants with felony records. Support for restrictiveness in admissions is stronger when considering applicants with violent records compared to those with drug-related records and is unaffected by the applicant’s race. Political ideology, concern about campus crime, and legal cynicism strongly predict support for restricting admissions. Qualitative results reveal that students struggle with the tension between progressive ideals of second chances and punitive logics focused on public safety and prioritizing opportunities for those considered more deserving. Our qualitative results also indicate that race shapes deliberations of admissions for applicants with drug records but not for those with violent records. We conclude that student support for the restrictive inclusion of students with violent and drug felony records mirrors broader public opinion on criminal justice policy reform, potentially hindering the full restoration of rights and opportunities, particularly among those deemed unworthy, when policies are crafted narrowly to appease public sentiment.

ABSTRACT Despite evidence suggesting caregivers encounter workplace stigmatization, the consequences of perceived family-responsibilities discrimination remain underexamined. Informed by stress process theory, the present study explores how this form of discrimination relates to a range of outcomes, including psychological distress, physical health, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, sleep problems, and work-to-family conflict among working caregivers. Whether relationships between this form of discrimination and the outcome variables diverge by gender is also considered. To address the research questions, we use data from the National Study of the Changing Workforce, with a sample of workers with caregiving responsibilities in the form of parenting at least one child under the age of 18 and/or providing elder-care on behalf of an in-law who was 65 years of age or older during the past year (N = 718 men and 850 women). The results reveal that such discrimination is associated with higher levels of psychological distress, sleep problems, work-to-family conflict, poorer physical health, and decreased job and life satisfaction uniformly across gender. Overall, these findings suggest that this form of perceived discrimination has numerous pernicious effects for both men and women caregivers, pointing to the need for workplaces to reduce discrimination based on family responsibilities.