American Journal of Sociology

Criminal record checks have become a widely used method for governing access to institutional attachments in the United States. State laws that authorize or require the use of background checks serve as one important source of criminal records’ expanded reach. The current study uses novel longitudinal data to examine the proliferation of these laws at the state level between 1982 and 2013. Panel analyses provide the strongest support for a model of racial classification, with the rate of background check adoption increasing as African-Americans represent larger shares of state criminal record populations. Considerable support is also found for racial economic threat and, to a lesser extent, ethnic economic threat. Background check adoption is only weakly associated with violent crime rates and other features of state-level penal regimes.

This study extends theories of the construction of legal compliance by conceptualizing scientists as compliance professionals in relation to environmental law. The author argues that visions of nature immanent in scientific and legal fields can serve as the basis for various environmental compliance relations. The approach is developed via a historical and ethnographic case study of the delta smelt, a controversial and intensely studied endangered species. Three compliance relations became dominant at distinct junctures in the case. First is aligned visions, a relation of coordination in a constructed space of compatibility. Second is judicial subordination, a relation of domination, with scientists acting as legal underlaborers. Third is contested visions, a relation of conflict, in which scientists agonistically push against the limits of the law. The author theorizes their succession as a compliance process of boundary object construction and breakdown. The analysis aims to bring environmental law squarely within the jurisdiction of law and society.

A wide range of self-styled experts have emerged in recent years to sell professional self-improvement advice in fields as diverse as employment, health, and finances. Despite lacking traditional markers of expertise, these minor experts are gaining credibility and clientele, often at the expense of official experts in their field. Why do people turn to these experts? How do they build credibility? This article analyzes the paradoxical case of career coaches, many of whom were themselves long-term unemployed, to advance a theory of credibility construction among self-improvement experts. Drawing on qualitative data, the author finds that self-improvement experts build their credibility through strategic interactions and relational work with clients rather than through the institutional affiliations and credentials normally associated with expertise. The author identifies three complementary techniques—(1) constructing a shared moral order, (2) building affective trust relationships, and (3) sharing personal testimonials of transformation—and argues that this bundle of tactics represents an alternative and growing pathway for building expert credibility.

How do police uphold the status quo and participate in community marginalization? Scholars have answered this by examining instrumental forms of social control (e.g., legal enforcement, punishment, and physical violence). Shifting the gaze, this article develops a framework of symbolic control to explain how the cultural dimensions of policing also operate as implicit, but influential, forms of police power. It draws on fieldwork of a high school junior police academy to show the program’s engagement in valorization, a type of symbolic control that elevated the moral worth of some over others, and how valorization concurrently operated with stigmatization to shape local inequalities, amplify social tensions, and justify police presence. If instrumental social control aims to manage physical order, this article shows how symbolic control legitimizes the social and political order. Beyond policing, this valorization framework can be adapted to analyze processes of power in other contexts.

Among American states, differences in welfare programs and civil rights protections are growing. Conventional explanations point to conservative organizations that score flashy legislative victories. We draw on case studies of Medicaid and election administration in Rhode Island and Kansas to show that much policy divergence is due to a banal and ideologically symmetric process of partisan administration. Most federal policies rely on state governments for implementation. In the cases studied here, agency workers turned to interstate networks of experts, advocates, and nonprofit workers that provide competing models of policy implementation that mirror party priorities: backdoor expansion of social services and voter registration in Rhode Island and introduction of market principles into Medicaid and restrictive registration practices in Kansas. Partisan administration makes state implementation of federal policy a key field of political struggle, on which administrators working beyond public view advance partisan priorities that often cannot be realized by other means.

The United States is currently in the midst of a long, historic cultural transformation—redefining our collective representation to be inclusive of diverse sexual and gender identities. A core logic advancing this inclusion is to discursively recognize an expanded set of discrete, deconstructed identities—gay and lesbian expands to LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA+, and so on. But a newer logic stipulates that inclusion arises through using constructive identities that encompass many fluid experiences under a single term (e.g., “queer”). To understand inclusive change, the authors leverage a unique mesolevel site of cultural (re)production: service and advocacy nonprofit organizations. Using event history models, the authors investigate inclusive language change by 735 organizations from 1998 to 2016. They supplement analyses of administrative data with semistructured interviews with 13 nonprofit leaders, providing converging evidence. Findings showcase how bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down pressures explain both the inclusion of discrete identity labels and the shift to constructive logics.

Protest policing is central to research on social movement repression and of great practical importance. Here, we examine competing explanations for observed changes in the likelihood that police will attend any given protest event and make arrests, use violence, or both in New York State from 1960 to 1995. While many researchers point to changes within law enforcement as the primary cause for “softer policing” over this period, we show, using a modified Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder (KOB) decomposition, that the institutionalization of the protest sector was more responsible for changes over time in observed protest policing. This implies that too much credit has been given in the literature to law enforcement for softening responses to protest and that too little investigation has been undertaken of the softening of protest itself. Furthermore, our expansion of KOB decomposition has broad potential utility for researchers interested in understanding the confluence of social forces driving behavior.