Different while being similar: The dual institutional process and differential organizational status.

Connecting the neoinstitutional theory with Bourdieu's field theory, we develop a framework on the dual institutional process of integration and differentiation in a field. While the neoinstitutional theory has focused on similar organizational structures, we shift the research focus to offer an institutional explanation of differential organizational status. Drawing insights from Bourdieu's theory and key concepts, we highlight that the very institutional mechanisms causing isomorphism-regulative forces, normative pressures, and cognitive processes-also generate systematic status differentiation among organizations via their different levels of capital, homologous structures, and various habitus in a field. Our extended framework has theoretical significance in advancing the neoinstitutional theory, the research of status in organizational and economic sociology, and the Bourdieusian perspective. By theorizing status differentiation among organizations, it also adds an important dimension to enrich our understanding of multilevel status and social hierarchies.

Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms.

Mass selection into groups of like-minded individuals may be fragmenting and polarizing online society, particularly with respect to partisan differences1-4. However, our ability to measure the social makeup of online communities and in turn, to understand the social organization of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous, unstructured and large-scale nature of digital discussion. Here we develop a neural-embedding methodology to quantify the positioning of online communities along social dimensions by leveraging large-scale patterns of aggregate behaviour. Applying our methodology to 5.1 billion comments made in 10,000 communities over 14 years on Reddit, we measure how the macroscale community structure is organized with respect to age, gender and US political partisanship. Examining political content, we find that Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 US presidential election. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, individual-level polarization is rare; the system-level shift in 2016 was disproportionately driven by the arrival of new users. Political polarization on Reddit is unrelated to previous activity on the platform and is instead temporally aligned with external events. We also observe a stark ideological asymmetry, with the sharp increase in polarization in 2016 being entirely attributable to changes in right-wing activity. This methodology is broadly applicable to the study of online interaction, and our findings have implications for the design of online platforms, understanding the social contexts of online behaviour, and quantifying the dynamics and mechanisms of online polarization.

The Resurgence of Medical Education in Sociology: A Return to Our Roots and an Agenda for the Future.

From 1940 to 1980, studies of medical education were foundational to sociology, but attention shifted away from medical training in the late 1980s. Recently, there has been a marked return to this once pivotal topic, reflecting new questions and stakes. This article traces this resurgence by reviewing recent substantive research trends and setting the agenda for future research. We summarize four current research foci that reflect and critically map onto earlier projects in this subfield while driving theoretical development elsewhere in the larger discipline: (1) professional socialization, (2) knowledge regimes, (3) stratification within the profession, and (4) sociology of the field of medical education. We then offer six potential future directions where more research is needed: (1) inequalities in medical education, (2) socialization across the life course and new institutional forms of gatekeeping, (3) provider well-being, (4) globalization, (5) medical education as knowledge-based work, and (6) effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Against a descriptive turn.

While description is a valuable aspect of meaningful sociological work, this paper takes issue with Mike Savage's argument that the social sciences, and sociology in particular, should seek to prioritize description over practices of explanation and analysis, and attention to questions of causality.  The aim of this paper is not to take issue with descriptive forms of sociology in themselves, but to argue that the answer to the problems identified by Savage and Burrows in their landmark paper "The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology" is not to follow commercial forms of research by prioritizing practices of description and classification at the cost of asking fundamental questions about the "why?" and the "how?" of social life and politics. Rather, this paper argues that it is imperative that sociology does not simply describe inequalities of different types, but questions, explains, and analyses the structures and mechanisms through which they are created, reproduced, and sustained. The argument will be developed in three stages. First, this paper will restate the main points of Savage's call for descriptive sociology; second, it will address his critique of "epochalist thinking" and subsequent opposition to the idea of neoliberalism; and third, it will respond to his use of Thomas Piketty's work as a model for developing sociological descriptions of class and inequality.

LIMPRINT: A Sociological Perspective on "Chronic Edema".

Background: Chronic edema is a condition that is biologically complex, distressing for patients and sociopolitically weak. Like many other complex and chronic conditions, it has a low status within health care. The result is that it has a low priority in health policy and consequently is undervalued and undertreated. While evidence-based practice promotes a hierarchy of evidence, it is also the case that clinical practice is influenced by a hierarchy of social status. These are as much political as they are scientific. Methods and Results: This article will provide an explanation for why chronic edema is a low priority. It will do this through a critical review of the literature. We examine this through the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu. The sociology of Bourdieu frames an understanding of power relations through habitus, field, and capital. We will employ these theoretical tools to understand the way that chronic edema is situated within the policy arena. We identify a number of social mechanisms that affect the status of chronic edema, including diagnostic uncertainty, social capital, scientific capital, cultural capital and economic capital. Conclusion: We argue that a whole system approach to care, based on human need rather than unequal power relations, is a prerequisite for the delivery of good health care. The specialty of chronic edema is not a powerless group and we identify some of the ways that the social mechanism that acts as barriers to change, can also be employed to challenge them.

Making space for 'the social': connecting sociology and professional practices in urban lighting design.

Lighting is increasingly recognized as a significant social intervention by both lighting professionals and academic social scientists. However, what counts as 'the social' is diverse and contested, with consequences for what kind of 'social' is performed or invented. Based on a long-term research programme, we argue that collaboration between sociologists and lighting professionals requires negotiating discourses and practices of 'the social'. This paper explores the quality and kinds of spaces made for 'the social' in professional practices and academic collaborations, focusing on two case studies of urban lighting that demonstrate how the space of 'the social' is constrained and impoverished by an institutionalized division between technical and aesthetic lighting. We consider the potential role of sociologists in making more productive spaces for 'the social' in urban design, as part of the central sociological task of 'inventing the social' (Marres, Guggenheim and Wilkie 2018) in the process of studying it.

Cross-domain comparison and the politics of difference.

This paper makes the case for cross-domain comparison as an undertheorized form of comparative analysis. The units of analysis in such comparisons are not (as in most comparative analysis) predefined units within a domain or system of formally similar yet substantively different categories or entities; they are the domains or systems of categorically organized differences themselves. Focusing on domains of categorical difference that are central to the contemporary politics of difference, we consider two examples of cross-domain comparison. The first compares sex/gender and race/ethnicity as systems of ascribed identities that are increasingly, yet to differing degrees and in differing ways, open to choice and change. The second compares religion and language as domains of categorically organized cultural difference that are centrally implicated in the politics of cultural pluralism. We situate these cross-domain comparisons, premised on a logic of 'different differences', between generalizing and particularizing approaches to the politics of difference, arguing that these domains are similar enough to make comparison meaningful yet different enough to make comparison interesting. We outline five analytical focal points for cross-domain comparison: the criteria of membership and belonging, the categorical versus gradational structure of variation within domains of difference, the consolidation or proliferation of categories of difference, the procedures for dealing with mixed or difficult-to-classify instances, and the relation between categories of difference and the production and reproduction of inequality. We conclude by considering several potential objections to cross-domain comparison.

A dynamic and multifunctional account of middle-range theories.

This article develops a novel account of middle-range theories for combining theoretical and empirical analysis in explanatory sociology. I first revisit Robert K. Merton's original ideas on middle-range theories and identify a tension between his developmental approach to middle-range theorizing that recognizes multiple functions of theories in sociological research and his static definition of the concept of middle-range theory that focuses only on empirical testing of theories. Drawing on Merton's ideas on theorizing and recent discussions on mechanism-based explanations, I argue that this tension can be resolved by decomposing a middle-range theory into three interrelated and evolving components that perform different functions in sociological research: (i) a conceptual framework about social phenomena that is a set of interrelated concepts that evolve in close connection with empirical analysis; (ii) a mechanism schema that is an abstract and incomplete description of a social mechanism; and (iii) a cluster of all mechanism-based explanations of social phenomena that are based on the particular mechanism schema. I show how these components develop over time and how they serve different functions in sociological theorizing and research. Finally, I illustrate these ideas by discussing Merton's theory of the Matthew effect in science and its more recent applications in sociology.

Expanding Systems Thinking: Incorporating Tools from Medical Sociology into MFT Education and Research.

The field of marriage and family therapy has historically focused on dynamics within family systems, and at times the role of social and cultural factors external to the family. To date, however, little scholarship has examined how therapists themselves are embedded within a mental healthcare system. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how structural components of the mental healthcare system shape the practice of therapy. We draw from the field of medical sociology to illustrate how three dominant structures-managed care, diagnosis, and evidence-based models-are intertwining and mutually reinforcing systems that have significant and long-term implications for systemic therapists and researchers. We recommend incorporating a sociological understanding of such structures into MFT education and research.

Finding Wealth in Waste: Irreplicability Re-Examined.

Irreplicability is framed as crisis, blamed on sloppy science motivated by perverse stimuli in research. Structural changes to the organization of science, targeting sloppy science (e.g., open data, pre-registration), are proposed to prevent irreplicability. While there is an unquestionable link between sloppy science and failures to replicate/reproduce scientific studies, they are currently conflated. This position can be understood as a result of the erosion of the role of theory in science. The history, sociology, and philosophy of science reveal alternative explanations for irreplicability to show it is part of proper, informative and valuable science. Irreplicability need not equate research waste. Sloppy science is the problem, also when results do replicate. Hence, the solution should focus on opposing sloppy research.

Clinical forecasting: Towards a sociology of prognosis.

Much of our understanding of prognosis in clinical settings comes from end-of-life situations but prognostication is also a concern in chronic illnesses. Parents of children living with seizures wonder what the future holds: will the child outgrow their seizures, or will they remain a part of their child's life? Based on video recordings of clinic consultations between pediatric neurologists and families, we examine how clinicians convey a child's prognosis. We find that neurologists mainly communicate the prognosis indirectly through the goals they set for the child, the time frame of attaining these goals, and the uncertainties they highlight regarding the attainability of the goals. By modulating goals and erring on the side of optimism, clinicians maintain a collaborative relationship even if the prognosis turns increasingly dire.

Outline of a sociology of decisionism.

I propose an agenda for empirical research on decision, choice, decision-makers, and decision-making qua social facts. Given society S, group G, or field F, I make a twofold sociological proposal. First, empirically investigate the conditions under which something-call it X-is taken to be a decision or choice, or the outcome of a decision-making process. What must X be like? What doesn't count (besides, presumably, myotatic reflexes and blushing)? Whom or what must X be done by? What can't be a decision-maker (besides, presumably, rocks and apples)? Second, empirically investigate how decision/choice concepts are used in everyday life, politics, business, education, law, technology, and science. What are they used for? To what extent do people understand and represent themselves and others as decision-makers? Where do decision-centric or "decisionist" understandings succeed? These aren't armchair, theoretical, philosophical questions, but empirical ones. Decision/choice concepts' apparent ubiquity in contemporary societies calls for a well-thought-out research program on their social life and uses.

How fields vary.

Field theorists have long insisted that research needs to pay attention to the particular properties of each field studied. But while much field-theoretical research is comparative, either explicitly or implicitly, scholars have only begun to develop the language for describing the dimensions along which fields can be similar to and different from each other. In this context, this paper articulates an agenda for the analysis of variable properties of fields. It discusses variation in the degree but also in the kind of field autonomy. It discusses different dimensions of variation in field structure: fields can be more or less contested, and more or less hierarchical. The structure of symbolic oppositions in a field may take different forms. Lastly, it analyses the dimensions of variation highlighted by research on fields on the sub- and transnational scale. Post-national analysis allows us to ask how fields relate to fields of the same kind on different scales, and how fields relate to fields on the same scale in other national contexts. It allows us to ask about the role resources from other scales play in structuring symbolic oppositions within fields. A more fine-tuned vocabulary for field variation can help us better describe particular fields and it is a precondition for generating hypotheses about the conditions under which we can expect to observe fields with specified characteristics.

"What else are you worried about?" - Integrating textual responses into quantitative social science research.

Open-ended questions have routinely been included in large-scale survey and panel studies, yet there is some perplexity about how to actually incorporate the answers to such questions into quantitative social science research. Tools developed recently in the domain of natural language processing offer a wide range of options for the automated analysis of such textual data, but their implementation has lagged behind. In this study, we demonstrate straightforward procedures that can be applied to process and analyze textual data for the purposes of quantitative social science research. Using more than 35,000 textual answers to the question "What else are you worried about?" from participants of the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP), we (1) analyzed characteristics of respondents that determined whether they answered the open-ended question, (2) used the textual data to detect relevant topics that were reported by the respondents, and (3) linked the features of the respondents to the worries they reported in their textual data. The potential uses as well as the limitations of the automated analysis of textual data are discussed.

Evolutionary dynamics on any population structure.

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a population can affect which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations remains difficult. Mathematical results are known for special structures in which all individuals have the same number of neighbours. The general case, in which the number of neighbours can vary, has remained open. For arbitrary selection intensity, the problem is in a computational complexity class that suggests there is no efficient algorithm. Whether a simple solution for weak selection exists has remained unanswered. Here we provide a solution for weak selection that applies to any graph or network. Our method relies on calculating the coalescence times of random walks. We evaluate large numbers of diverse population structures for their propensity to favour cooperation. We study how small changes in population structure-graph surgery-affect evolutionary outcomes. We find that cooperation flourishes most in societies that are based on strong pairwise ties.

On ideals of objectivity, judgments, and bias in medical research - A comment on Stegenga.

By using Stegenga's article Is meta-analysis the platinum standard of evidence as a case study, this paper shows how different notions of objectivity can affect discussions concerning medical research. I argue that the ideal of objectivity that underlies Stegenga's article is both unattainable in practice and insufficient and unnecessary in principle to capture some of the ways in which biases may enter medical knowledge production.

W. E. B. Du Bois at the center: from science, civil rights movement, to Black Lives Matter.

I am honoured to present the 2016 British Journal of Sociology Annual Lecture at the London School of Economics. My lecture is based on ideas derived from my new book, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. In this essay I make three arguments. First, W.E.B. Du Bois and his Atlanta School of Sociology pioneered scientific sociology in the United States. Second, Du Bois pioneered a public sociology that creatively combined sociology and activism. Finally, Du Bois pioneered a politically engaged social science relevant for contemporary political struggles including the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

Bridging cultural sociology and cognitive psychology in three contemporary research programmes.

Three prominent research programmes in cognitive psychology would benefit from a stronger engagement with the cultural context of cognition: studies of poverty focused on scarcity and cognitive bandwidth, studies of dual-process morality and studies of biases using the implicit association test. We address some limitations of these programmes and suggest research strategies for moving beyond an exclusive focus on cognition. Research on poverty using the cognitive bandwidth approach would benefit from considering the cultural schemas that influence how people perceive and prioritize needs. Dual-process morality researchers could explain variation by analysing cultural repertoires that structure moral choices. Research using the implicit association test can better explain implicit attitudes by addressing the variability in cultural schemas that undergird biases. We identify how these research programmes can deepen the causal understanding of human attitudes and behaviours by addressing the interaction between internal cognition and supra-individual cultural repertoires.