Social Sorting Research Articles

Introduction to the digital welfare state: Contestations, considerations and entanglements

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Sociology focused on critical analysis of the digital welfare state. The digitalisation of welfare policy, institutions and service delivery has led to increased scrutiny, social sorting and surveillance of welfare recipients and other marginalised groups. This collection of papers contributes to current debates about digital welfare using sociological approaches which foreground the role of power relations and human agency in shaping these dynamics. We provide introductory insights into themes explored within the collection, including the connection of digitalisation with ‘the social’, the role of digital technologies in truth-making, and the importance of humans and their labour in operationalising digital welfare. In addition, we highlight the value of sociological research in revealing the various processes and relationships through which state power is constituted and expressed digitally.

Allocating Housing Assistance After the Decentring of Social Housing: From Rationing to Social Sorting

ABSTRACT Anglophone countries are diversifying their responses to housing insecurity, decentring social housing and expanding use of market-oriented assistance that aims to promote “housing independence” . Drawing on fieldwork in three Australian jurisdictions, this paper examines the impact of this shift for how housing assistance is allocated. We argue that allocations practices can no longer be understood as centred on the rationing of a single product – social housing. Rather, they nowadays perform a “social sorting” function that mimics those developed in consumer marketing, where personal information is collected to classify and segment consumers to match them to tailored “products”. These practices sort households based on their “capacity for independence”, aiming to maximize market engagement and reserving social housing for those with the most complex needs. We conclude that these sorting practices ignore both the realities of private renting in Australia (as elsewhere) and the self-defined housing needs of low-income households.

Embattlement and Resilience Among White Evangelical Democrats

Why do individuals defect from the partisan pull of their social identities? Previous explanations of social sorting often neglect to account for these defectors whose partisanship cannot be explained by simply tallying up their social identities. I call these individuals political heretics. To better understand this phenomenon, I leverage white evangelicals, one of the most socially and politically sorted groups in the United States, who support the Democratic Party as a case study. I find that, based upon 68 face-to-face interviews across seven churches, two explanations emerge that explain their heresy. First, some find their way into Democratic congregations that shield them from the pressure exerted by residing in a religious tradition that has undergone extensive political sorting. Second, some choose to remain in predominately Republicans churches and offset the cost of this political pressure with some other benefit. However, for those who choose the latter, electing to remain in a church where they are in the political minority, they face significant headwinds to either update their political preferences or leave. Despite these embattled defectors choosing to remain in Republican congregations, the pressure of polarization may eventually force them out.

The “fish tank”: social sorting of LGBTQ+ activists in China

ABSTRACT Since 2013, LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and other) activism in China has existed in a gray area between non-criminalization in legal terms and fragmented strategies of suppression. The expansion of home-grown social media platforms has provided a (relatively) safe haven for LGBTQ+ people to connect, and a growing number of LGBTQ+ groups have established themselves in the country. However, in recent years, laws, policies, and mass closures of LGBTQ+ social media accounts have chipped away at organizational capacity. In this exploratory study, we center the voices of LGBTQ+ activist communities in China. Drawing from 26 interviews, we explore the effects of increased surveillance in digital and physical spaces on queer communities via the theoretical concept of “social sorting.” The findings suggest that LGBTQ+ communities were already under extensive institutional and digital surveillance prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has further amplified state-led surveillance and censorship. The norm setting of an ideal citizen of China has occurred through enhanced institutional marginalization, digital censorship, and police monitoring and harassment. These practices have harmed but not broken the resolve of LGBTQ+ communities, who had been finding unconventional ways to connect prior to the pandemic, albeit constrained as if in a metaphorical fish tank.

The rise of market‐based “choice” programs: 100 years of social sorting in social welfare services

AbstractSocial service programs in the United States increasingly focus on giving individuals and families more “choices.” The approach is exemplified by “choice programs,” where people receive services through various forms of market participation. Examples of choice programs include defined contribution retirement plans, housing vouchers, charter schools, and health insurance marketplaces. Individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum have become accustomed to choice programs, and one's social status greatly affects the types, qualities, and prices of services people receive. The importance of the conversation around choice programs for providing access to resources is immense. Yet, despite contentious debate about their utility, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the institutionalization and widespread adoption of choice programs across a diverse range of social service domains. This article synthesizes stratification literature on retirement, healthcare, education, and housing to document the historical rise of choice programs. Particular attention is given to explaining how behavioral patterns and routines become second nature, altering who benefits, who is left out, and the overall effectiveness of the social welfare system.

Who are the Cosmopolitans? How Perceived Social Sorting and Social Identities Relate to European and National Identities

Transnational European identities influence public debates and electoral dynamics across Europe, with sociodemographic factors strongly associated with these identities. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to how people’s perceptions of a political group’s sociodemographic profile relate to their identification with Europe. I argue that such perceptions, in combination with social identities, are significantly associated with the strength of individuals’ identification with political groups. An individual is more likely to have a robust European identity if they perceive that social groups they like share the same pro-European opinion. In contrast, if they perceive that groups they like align with the anti-European camp, they are likely to have a weaker European identity. By employing novel survey data from Italy and Austria, I find empirical support for my argument. This paper contributes to the debate on the mechanisms that connect social and political identities and explains how cleavages emerge in the mass public.

Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic Intersections of Gender, Sexuality & Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization

Abstract In this essay, we highlight the colonial invention of oppositional and binary categories as a dominant form of social sorting and meaning-making in our society. We understand language as a tool for the construction, maintenance, and analysis of these categories. Through language, these categorizations often render those who sit at the margins illegible. We center the Black woman as the prototypical “other,” her condition being interpreted neither by conventions of race nor gender, and take Black womanhood as the point of departure for a description of the necessary intersecting and variable analyses of social life. We call for an exploration of social life that considers the raciolinguistic intersections of gender, sexuality, and social class as part and parcel of overarching social formations. In this way, we can advocate for a shift in linguistics and in all social sciences that accounts for the mutability of category. We argue that a raciolinguistic perspective allows for a more nuanced investigation of the compounding intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social status that often function to erase Black womanhood.

What holds us together? Measuring dimensions of social cohesion in Canada

Social cohesion is a multi-dimensional concept referring to social connectedness, or the ‘glue’ that connects members of a society through bonds of solidarity and trust, within and across communities and organizations, and within society at large. The concept of social cohesion continues to garner interest in public and policy circles, perhaps reflecting the intuitive appeal of the concept and the role that cohesion can play in societies’ abilities to respond to challenges, to function effectively, and to support rewarding lives. As a latent concept that is not directly observable or measurable, social cohesion is often measured through key dimensions. In this context, a dimension refers to a constituent part of social cohesion. Using factor analysis and data from Statistics Canada’s 2020 General Social Survey on Social Identity, this study identifies nine key dimensions of social cohesion. Latent class modelling is then used to sort respondents into three latent classes or groups (“Low”, high “Confidence-Belonging” and high “Trust-Participation” cohesion groups) of individuals that share common traits and prioritize certain dimensions of social cohesion. The probabilistic classification of individuals in accordance with latent classes provides valuable insights into social sorting mechanisms and how this extends to cohesiveness within Canadian society.

Privacy and anti-surveillance advocacy: the role/challenge of issue salience

PurposeThe proliferation of surveillance-enhancing laws, policies and technologies across African countries deepens the risk of privacy rights breaches, as well as the risks of adverse profiling and social sorting. There is a heightened need for dedicated advocacy and activism to consistently demand accountability and transparency from African states, governments and their allies regarding surveillance. The purpose of this paper is to understand the issue frames that accompany anti-surveillance and privacy advocacy in Ghana and the related implications.Design/methodology/approachUsing a qualitative and interpretivist approach, the author focuses on three different surveillance-oriented incidents/programs in Ghana and analyzes the frames underpinning the related advocacy and narratives of various non-state actors.FindingsPrivacy and anti-surveillance advocacy in Ghana tends to be less framed in the context of privacy rights and is more driven by concerns about corruption and value for money. Such pecuniary emphasis is rational per issue salience calculations as it elevates principles of economic probity, transparency and accountability and pursues a high public shock value and resonance.Practical implicationsEconomics-centered critiques of surveillance could be counterproductive as they create a low bar for surveillance promoters and sustains a culture of permissible statist intrusions into citizens’ lives once economic virtues are satisfied.Originality/valueWhile anti-surveillance and privacy advocacy is budding across African countries, little is known about its nature, frames and modus compared to such advocacy in European and North American settings. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is likely the first paper or one of the first dedicated fully to anti-surveillance and advocacy in Africa.

Threatening experts: Correlates of viewing scientists as a social threat.

Despite widespread trust in scientists, efforts to curtail their influence suggest some Americans distrust scientists and may even perceive them to be a social threat. Using panel survey data, we examine who holds this viewpoint and potential implications of threat perceptions. Results suggest Republicans and Evangelical identifying individuals perceived more social threat from scientists. News media uses were associated with threat perceptions in divergent ways. Threat perceptions were strongly associated with inaccurate science beliefs, support for excluding scientists from policy-making, and retributive actions toward scientists. Findings highlight the importance of social identity considerations amid concerns about partisan social sorting and politicization of science.

“They’re Just Watching You All the Time”: The Surveillance Web of Prison Needle Exchange

In 2018, the federal prison authority in Canada began implementing Prison Needle Exchange Programs (PNEPs) at select institutions. Despite longstanding and successful models of prison-based syringe distribution internationally, Canada’s correctional service introduced a highly restrictive security-based approach, placing prisoners who access the program into a surveillance web that implicates diverse actors and relies on methods such as bio-surveillance and security risk assessments. We examine these and other surveillant functions of the PNEP through the first-hand experiences of thirty former prisoners who were incarcerated at one of the prisons with such a program. These experiences point to how the surveillance web is constituted by multiple lines of sight and flows of information across health and security fields. It is further comprised of risk management practices and discretionary punishment carried out by correctional officers as well as the targeting and social sorting of people who use drugs. Former prisoner narratives also demonstrate how the PNEP is reflective of emerging forms of exclusion and processes of securitization that operate through the identification, management, and containment of specific groups. As a whole, the PNEP model implemented in Canada, and the practices that undergird it, target people who use drugs for increased surveillance, resulting in extremely low rates of program enrollment despite pervasive drug use in prison, and undermining access to an essential health care service to which prisoners are entitled. The study findings point to novel forms of carceral surveillance that enmesh observational, technological, and bureaucratic practices, and demonstrate how prisoner health and therapeutic objectives can be subsumed by securitarian logics.

Social classification and the changing boundaries of learning. A neopragmatic perspective on social sorting in digital education

ABSTRACT Allowing learners to move across learning contexts in novel ways, digital tools play an increasingly central role for the formation of learning trajectories and identities. They thus presumably also affect dynamics of social sorting in education. Against this background, this article introduces a conceptual framework for unravelling dynamics of social sorting in digital learning environments. Inspired by French pragmatic sociology, we propose classification as analytical anchor point for disentangling the intricate interplays between educational technologies, learning situations, and wider moral and social orders. We present a ‘speculative inquiry’ into current AIED to demonstrate the added value this analytical perspective. We identify a hiatus between ‘inspired’ and ‘industrial’ logics of classification in current digital learning tools and environments that are likely to yield unwanted social sorting effects. A classification lens helps foreground social dynamics underlying such patterns, thus furthering our understanding of persistent patterns of disadvantaging in (digital) education.

The Group Roots of Social Media Politics: Social Sorting Predicts Perceptions of and Engagement in Politics on Social Media

Research on political partisans suggests that social media offer ideal playing fields for the group game of politics. This study considers how political and social identities interact to influence political communication on social media. Using an original two-wave survey of Americans fielded during the 2020 election period, we analyzed how social media users’ levels of social sorting—the alignment between racial, religious, ideological, and political identities—related to perceptions of and engagement in politics on social media. Results suggest that those with higher (vs. lower) levels of social sorting were more likely to perceive their social media environments as dominated by political content and conflict, and populated with politically interested and like-minded people. Auto-regressive panel models suggested that social sorting and political use of social media may be reciprocally related. Findings indicate social sorting may be a key concept for unearthing the group roots of politics on social media.

Algorithmic Social Sorting And New Legal Narratives On Digital Privacy

The use of algorithms for social sorting has imposed the need to challenge the traditional understanding of the private sphere as a sealed-off realm free from surveillance and outside intervention. The relationship between private and public has become dynamic and complex while the borderline between the two zones remains to be in a state of flux. The concept of digital privacy is related to the data doubles rather than physical bodies, and it is limited to partial control over personal data. The General Data Protection Regulation, along with the new legislations, namely, Artificial Intelligence Act and Digital Services Act offer a conceptualisation of digital privacy that recognises novel dataveillance practices that involve the collection, interpretation, use and misuse of biometric and behavioural data. This paper uses the method of conceptual analysis to investigate the new definitions of digital privacy that emerge from the corpus of legislative acts including GDPR, AIA and DSA and find out how they generate new legal narratives on privacy that recognise the dangers of echo chambers and algorithmic decision-making.

Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier by Sarah Fayen Scarlett

Reviewed by: Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier by Sarah Fayen Scarlett Alison K. Hoagland, Professor Emerita Sarah Fayen Scarlett. Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. 291. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Photographs. Table. Hardcover: $55.00. Power and hierarchy are expressed in residential neighborhoods in myriad ways—for example: lot size, street trees, architecture, landscaping, proximity to desirable things, and distance from offensive ones. Viewers read these signals and many more in order to assess a home and the status of its occupants. Sarah Fayen Scarlett takes on this social sorting in Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier, her study of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in Michigan’s Copper Country. Scarlett explores the neighborhoods, specific houses, and public spaces of people who were engaged with maintaining power in an inequitable mining industry. Company Suburbs is a fascinating study of how the built landscape reinforces social difference. To understand the residential landscape that the mining industry spawned, Scarlett takes two well-studied systems—corporate paternalism and suburbanization—and examines their intersection in the Copper Country. Initially, companies provided housing for their elite managers and mining captains, just as they did for miners and unskilled laborers. But, at the Quincy Mining Co., [End Page 130] mine officers moved away from their free housing into the elite neighborhood that became known as East Hancock. While suburbs usually connote picturesque surroundings and distance from workplaces, these neighborhoods did not afford the separation of workplace and home that residents might have desired. The mining companies controlled the available land—accommodating their managerial elite but controlling them nonetheless. Hence the term “company suburb.” Scarlett’s close study of specific houses gives depth to her argument about status and architecture. James Pryor altered his house on the east side of Houghton repeatedly. While meticulously documenting a quarter century of alterations, Scarlett relates his changing circumstances in terms of his business, family size, and wealth. Beginning in 1875 with a modest house built for a manager at Shelden-Columbian mine, Pryor produced an elaborate Queen Anne-style dwelling that faced both Main Street (later College Avenue), which was emerging as a prestigious boulevard, and Portage Lake, where his expanding lumberyard contributed to his wealth. Inside the house, room functions changed as well, finally becoming a fashionable wood-paneled interior with wall paintings and beveled mirrors. This is surely the only occasion of a historian using the room designations written in a fuse box as evidence for her argument! While Pryor’s house illustrated overlapping landscapes of the industrial and the domestic, Scarlett turns to East Hancock to examine overlapping social landscapes. To understand the world of the Finnish servant who lived in one house in 1900, Scarlett explores how she might have moved through the house—where she was in her domain and where was she on her employer’s turf—as well as how she moved through the neighborhood and town to get to and from the Finnish area. Scarlett similarly looks at movement when she shifts her attention to the Calumet area, where she tracks the construction of houses for the enormously wealthy investors of the Calumet and Arizona Mining Co. In the first decade of the twentieth century, they clustered in a few blocks of the newly developing village of Laurium. But, in 1913, strikers paraded past these very houses on their way to the Palestra, the only building on non-company land that was large enough to accommodate strike meetings. The dissonance between the strikers and the idle wealthy, the street and the mansion, serve to illustrate Scarlett’s point about contentious social geographies. In this thoroughly researched work, Scarlett combines two areas of study usually kept separate, by scholars as well as geography: industry and suburbs. Her examination of the two together reaps benefits, bringing new insights into the relationship between landscape, people, and power. [End Page 131] Alison K. Hoagland, Professor Emerita Michigan Technological University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan

When polarised feelings towards parties spread to voters: The role of ideological distance and social sorting in Spain

Affective polarisation measured with feelings towards parties tends to overestimate the degree to which people dislike voters of opposing parties. This paper explores some of the factors that account for the gap between party affective polarisation (PAP) and voter affective polarisation (VAP). In particular, I first argue and show that the PAP-VAP gap increases with ideological distance between individuals and out-parties, although this difference begins to decrease after a certain level of ideological discrepancy is achieved. Second, social sorting increases the probability that individuals extend their antipathy towards parties to their voters, thus reducing the PAP-VAP gap. Third, whereas ideological distance leads to VAP among individuals with low levels of social sorting, it does not make a difference for socially sorted people. I discuss the relevance of these two factors by utilising the third wave of the E-DEM panel. The results have relevant implications for the consequences of affective polarisation.

Division Does Not Imply Predictability: Demographics Continue to Reveal Little About Voting and Partisanship

What are the political consequences of ongoing social sorting? We evaluate the degree of social sorting and mass polarization using the predictability of partisanship and voting decisions as quantities of interest. Contrary to expectations, demographic sorting has not produced a very predictable electorate. Models trained on nothing more than demographic labels from public opinion surveys (1952–2020) predict only 63.9% of two-party vote choices and 63.4% of partisan IDs correctly out-of-sample—whether they be based on logistic regressions or tree-based machine learning models. Moreover, demographics’ predictive power over vote choice or partisan affiliation shows a surprising stability over time. We argue that while select demographics’ marginal effects may appear to be evidence of social sorting, the joint predictability of political behavior using only demographic characteristics has been, and still is, modest at best.

Embedding Heterogenous Forms of Surveillance in China's Autocratic Networked Media

In this article, Cornelia Bogen investigates the mechanisms that authoritarian governments use to subject economic actors and users to state control and the subsequent social practices. The case studies presented here illustrate how the state's deep entanglement with platforms is meant to foster both economic and socio-political outcomes by allowing platforms to promote users' entrepreneurship and restricting their online business if they are radically indifferent to media content or Party censorship rules. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that China's model goes beyond the Western concept of surveillance capitalism, because the heterogeneous logics of marketisation are interconnected with types of state surveillance different from the ones described by Zuboff (2019) for democratic countries. Against the backdrop of Fuchs/Trottier's (2015) theoretical model of social media surveillance, the societal implications of categorical suspicion, social sorting, and surveillance creep play out differently. The diffusion of China's institutional setting into e-platforms provokes culture-specific narratives (Versailles literature) and social online practices utilising networked images (barrage subtitling, human flesh search) unseen in Western online publics to date. Hence, studies of surveillance mechanisms in China's digital space need to be embedded within the larger context of political economy and state control.

Discrimination, stigmatization, and surveillance: COVID-19 and social sorting

ABSTRACT The unprecedented global public health crisis posed by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused mass upheaval of social, educational, financial, health, and justice systems around the world. Technological and other responses at the national, regional, and international level, designed to contain the spread of COVID-19, have also significantly interrupted the way that we live, work, and interact. This article explores the implications of these response efforts, and their impact on human rights, existing inequalities, and entrenched forms of discrimination. In particular, the article explores the implications of using mass surveillance and registration measures to detect, surveil, and control populations and their movements within and across borders as part of public health responses. The use of digital health credentials in automated social sorting processes and other mass surveillance and registration measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic sets an alarming precedent for future responses to global public health crises.

Surveillance, Discretion and Governance in Automated Welfare

Several scholarly studies and journalistic investigations have found that automated decision-making in welfare systems burdens claimants by forecasting their behaviour, targeting them for sanctions and surveillance and punishing them without revealing the underlying mechanisms driving such decisions. This article develops an analytical framework combining three areas of concern regarding automation: how it might introduce surveillance and social sorting, how it can entail the loss of human discretion, and how it requires new systems of governance and due process. This framework steers investigations into whether and how automated decision-making welfare systems introduce new harms and burdens for claimants. A case study on automation processes in Germany’s unemployment benefit service’s IT system ALLEGRO applies this approach and finds that this system does allow for broad human discretion and avoids some forms of surveillance, such as risk-assessments from historic data, though it nevertheless increases surveillance of claimants through sharing data with external agencies. The developed framework also suggests that concerns raised in one area – whether loss of human discretion, surveillance, or lack of due process – can be mitigated by attending to the other two areas and urges researchers and policy-makers to attend to the mitigating or reinforcing factors of each concern.