This article offers an innovative theoretical approach to black‐white labor market inequality that combines components of threat, spatial mismatch, and urban decline theories in a queuing framework. Using a unique measure—the earnings gap between black and white workers resulting from sorting into different occupations within an occupationally and educationally delimited labor queue—the author tests hypotheses from the combined model. Results show support for the combined model, as characteristics of labor and job queues significantly influence the extent of black‐white inequality. Variables representing employers’ preferences for or against hiring black workers are also significant, suggesting the utility of jointly examining preferences and processes in the labor market.

Why do states lose the capacity to finance the expansionist military policies, economic development strategies, or domestic spending initiatives they once supported? The path‐dependent models offered by fiscal‐military, rational choice, and geopolitical theorists are evaluated in comparison with an elite conflict model of contingent historical change. The latter model is found to be better able to explain territorial and fiscal stagnation and decline as well as imperial expansion in the cases of early modern Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Britain.

Most sociological theories consider murder an outcome of the differential distribution of individual, neighborhood, or social characteristics. And while such studies explain variation in aggregate homicide rates, they do not explain the social order of murder, that is, who kills whom, when, where, and for what reason. This article argues that gang murder is best understood not by searching for its individual determinants but by examining the social networks of action and reaction that create it. In short, the social structure of gang murder is defined by the manner in which social networks are constructed and by people's placement in them. The author uses a network approach and incident‐level homicide records to recreate and analyze the structure of gang murders in Chicago. Findings demonstrate that individual murders between gangs create an institutionalized network of group conflict, net of any individual's participation or motive. Within this network, murders spread through an epidemic‐like process of social contagion as gangs evaluate the highly visible actions of others in their local networks and negotiate dominance considerations that arise during violent incidents.

Humans transformed landscapes at an unprecedented scale and pace during the 20th century, creating sprawling urban areas in affluent countries and large‐scale agricultural expanses in tropics. To date, attempts to explain these processes in other disciplines have had a disembodied, ahistorical quality to them. A sociological account of these changes emphasizes the role of strategic actions by states and coalitions of interested parties in transforming landscapes. It identifies the agents of change and the timing of transformative events. Case studies of suburban sprawl and tropical deforestation illustrate the value of the sociological approach and the wide range of situations to which it applies.

In the late 1990s, the British anti–genetic engineering (GE) movement effectively closed Britain’s market for genetically modified foods, while the U.S. anti‐GE movement had a negligible impact. In seeking to explain the different outcomes of these similar social movements, the authors draw upon the global commodity chains (GCC) literature to extend the understanding of the economic and industry‐related openings and closures social movements face as they seek to promote social change. This analysis not only illustrates the importance of economic structures and organization for movement outcomes, but also shows how the economic sphere is culturally constituted. In this fashion, it broadens the social movement literature’s understanding both of the way that political economy matters to movement efficacy and of the way that cultural processes infuse the economic sphere. The study advances the GCC literature by showing how GCCs are cultural as well as economic constructs.

Urban mass mobilization often stimulates the collapse of authoritarian regimes, but the literature on social forces in democratization has not dealt adequately with these episodes of popular protest. Nor has it systematically compared democratic revolutions with cases of authoritarian crackdown and chronic quiescence, despite the prevalence of these alternative outcomes. This article critiques the democratization literature's excessive focus on class actors and economic factors by highlighting the importance of emotive appeals to nationalist and religious sentiments and solidarities in sparking, sustaining, and sanctifying high‐risk protest against authoritarian governments. A comparative historical analysis of seven Southeast Asian countries reveals that democratic uprisings are more likely both to emerge and to succeed when communal elites—a society's primary possessors of nationalist and religious authority—assume an oppositional posture. Explaining variation in mobilization outcomes thus requires examining whether communal elites have gained political salience and retained political autonomy through long‐term processes of political development.