American Journal of Sociology

Institutions draw strict boundaries around included groups of people, and changing them typically requires professional advocating and lobbying work to introduce new laws or policies. Institutional scholars focus almost exclusively on how skilled, organizational actors initiate these changes, giving scant attention to what happens next. Yet legal or policy-driven change often occurs before there is widespread public approval for, or understanding of, it. How do we get from legal change to social change at normative and cognitive levels? Drawing on interview and survey data with 116 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer individuals who gained access to legal marriage, this article shows how beneficiaries of legal change do the institutional work necessary to transform it into something that carries social advantages. LGBQ individuals used legal inclusion to expand understandings of marriage and delegitimize continuing disrespect. I name this leveraging-legitimacy work and argue that, in doing it, the beneficiaries of change become crucial change agents in ongoing processes of institutionalization.

The emotional dimensions of parenting among upper-middle-class parents have not been fully theorized or measured. In this article I employ 60 in-depth interviews with professional white, Chinese, and Indian parents living in the same well-off suburban town to show how parents think about and attend to their teenage children’s emotional well-being. I find that attending to children’s emotional well-being sometimes competes with attending to achievement in ways not predicted by previous theories of class and parenting. Further, within the upper middle class, immigrant Asian and U.S.-born white parents employ different cultural repertoires to address their children’s emotional well-being, bolstering their own group status as they do so. The findings suggest that scholars of class influences on parenting should pay greater attention to affective dimensions, including how parents address concerns about emotional well-being, and how strategies vary by ethnicity, generation, and other lines of difference.

Although stratification research has long recognized the importance of mapping out the underlying boundaries that govern the flow of workers in the labor market, the current literature faces two major challenges: (1) the determination of mobility boundaries and (2) the incorporation of changes in mobility boundaries. The authors propose a network approach to address these challenges. The approach conceptualizes the occupational system as a network, in which the nodes are occupations and the edges are defined by the volume and direction of workers who move between the nodes. A flow-based community detection algorithm is introduced to uncover mobility boundaries based on the observed mobility network. Applying this approach to analyze trends in intragenerational occupational mobility in the United States from 1989 to 2015, the authors find that the boundaries that constrain mobility opportunities have become increasingly rigid over time, while, at the same time, decoupled from the boundaries of big classes and microclasses. Moreover, these boundaries are increasingly sorting workers into clusters of occupations with similar skill requirements.

Situated in China’s Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign in 1958, this study examines the spatial diffusion of “launching high-yield satellites”—exaggerating grain yields, which contributed to the 1959–61 GLF famine that claimed millions of human lives. The authors conceptualize exaggerating grain yields as a political innovation adopted by local cadres to endorse the GLF and signal political loyalty to their superiors. Using geocoded county-level event history data from historical newspaper archives, the authors found that the diffusion of exaggerating grain yields across the country was primarily driven by the interaction between geographic proximity and political proximity.

Some teenagers are willing to bully, harass, and torment their schoolmates in order to achieve popularity and other goals. But whom do they bully? Here, we extend the logic of instrumental aggression to answer this question. To the extent that friendships are the currency of social status, we should expect social aspirants to target their own friends, their friends’ friends, and other structurally equivalent schoolmates. This tendency, we argue, extends beyond what would be explained by propinquity, and we expect that victimization by friends will be particularly distressing. We test these hypotheses using panel social network data from 14 middle and high schools at two time points during a school year. Findings from temporal exponential random graph models suggest that our expectations are correct: the tendency to be cruel to friends is not significantly influenced by propinquity, and victimization by friends has adverse consequences for mental health.