The diffusion of behaviors and ideas is a core concern in many fields and highly relevant to collective action and innovation adoption. A common assumption is that well-connected individuals within social networks are especially influential and so are good targets to initiate behavioral interventions. Here, we argue that the effectiveness of network-based targeting depends on how social ties are organized within a network. We theorize that there is a structural “network paradox”: when social ties are concentrated around a small number of well-connected individuals, a focus on targeting those individuals becomes less effective at generating broad diffusion. We further argue that this paradox is especially pronounced for behaviors that require high levels of social reinforcement to spread. We conducted a three-part study including theoretical analysis, empirical analysis based on a randomized field trial of health practices in Honduras, and simulations. Across all three studies, the results highlight the critical role of network structure in shaping diffusion dynamics under targeting protocols that privilege individuals with more ties. Such protocols may fail when those individuals are clustered together. Our findings have implications for understanding leadership and influence, innovation, public health and developmental economic interventions, and marketing.

Power is central to sociological accounts of economic inequality; however, buyer power—market conditions in which one or a few dominant employers can limit workers’ outside options for employment—has received little attention relative to worker power. We study how the entry of Walmart Supercenters, the archetype of a high-buyer-power employer, affects the size and protective strength of union membership (a key dimension of worker power). We analyze (1) whether greater worker power dissuades Walmart Supercenters from entering a local labor market, (2) whether a successful Supercenter entry subsequently erodes local union membership, and (3) whether unions provide a protective effect against declining earnings after a successful Supercenter entry. We apply stacked difference-in-differences estimates based on county-year variation in Walmart Supercenter openings using restricted-access Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. We find that Walmart Supercenters are less likely to enter a local labor market that has high levels of union membership, even when conditioning on attempted Walmart entries. When Walmart Supercenter openings do occur, union membership declines by an average of 3.5 percentage points, and this is channeled through declining union membership in retail. Remaining union members are not protected against Walmart’s downward pressure on earnings; in fact, annual earnings among workers who were unionized pre-treatment decline faster than for non-union members after a Walmart Supercenter opens. Worker power can be effective at preventing a rise in buyer power, but conditional on increases in buyer power, worker power tends to decline in terms of both size and protective strength. The sociological study of labor market power ought to consider how prevailing levels of buyer power can moderate the ability of organized labor to achieve its social and economic aims.

How do citizens in authoritarian contexts interpret nationalist messages embedded in everyday life? While research shows that nationalism is reproduced through routine practices, less is known about how audiences interpret, adapt to, or contest official messages—and why. I argue that outward nationalist alignment persists not through uniform conviction, but because divergent interpretive pathways converge on surface-level conformity. This study examines China’s entertainment industry, where the state mobilizes celebrities to amplify nationalist messages. Using a two-stage mixed-methods design, I first survey internet users ( N = 2,211) to show that audiences judge celebrities’ nationalist transgressions as significantly more severe than non-political misconduct, with systematic variation across social groups. To uncover the interpretive logics behind this heterogeneity, I draw on 55 in-depth interviews, identifying four orientations shaped by individuals’ primary information repertoire and lived experiences of positioning within the national community. These orientations range from emotional affirmation to pragmatic compliance to tactical reinterpretation that enables indirect critique. By revealing how everyday encounters with celebrity culture—such as scrolling past a star’s nationalist post—normalize nationalist expectations, I demonstrate that the ideology endures even where internalization is limited. Grounded in the Chinese case, the study advances debates on cultural governance, audience reception of official messaging, and symbolic boundary-making in authoritarian settings.

In the half-century following its mid-century emergence, the sociology of medicine in the United States has been constituted by a theoretical vocabulary anchored in concepts of roles and professions, and a methodological commitment to ideal types. More recently, research has called attention to these foci in ways that prompt close attention to categories once considered relatively homogeneous. After briefly discussing the key emphases of early work, I review contemporary literature's most active areas and intersections, especially organizations, professions and labor, and science and knowledge. In particular, the review demonstrates the behavior of the literature's key stakeholders—such as doctors and hospitals—as displaying a certain orderly heterogeneity. That is, although variation and diversity are characteristic of medical work, this heterogeneity is not random. Rather, I show that practices are organized systematically to reflect and constitute local and global communities of health care users and providers. I identify how the corpus suggests that more work could be done across key topics of the sociology of medicine to enable theoretical synthesis of these empirical results.

We examined how several health variables were associated with mothers’ probability of having a second or third child and the timing of the second birth. Data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) and linked registers were used. Parents with certain potentially chronic health problems before or in pregnancy were less likely than others to have an additional (especially a second) child, net of differences in relationship status, education, and economic resources. Some pregnancy‐related and largely temporary health problems during the most recent previous pregnancy and adverse birth experiences were associated with reduced probabilities of a second or third birth, or both, as was generally poor physical health six months after birth and postnatal depression. The latter health indicators may reflect health implications of pregnancy, delivery, and having a relatively “demanding” young child, as well as underlying health problems. Only a few estimates suggested associations between indicators of potentially chronic health problems of the most recently born child and subsequent fertility, but fertility was reduced among one‐child mothers whose first child had colic and among one‐ and two‐child mothers whose most recently born child slept little. Possible reasons for and implications of these health–fertility associations are discussed.

The Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland were among the first countries to acknowledge same‐sex couples’ partnership and parenthood rights in their legislation. We explore trends over time in the share of female same‐sex and different‐sex couples that have children following their legal union and variation by socioeconomic status. Using harmonized register data, we assess couples’ likelihood of having a child over time, with a focus on education and income. We find strong increases in female couples’ likelihood of having a child, resulting in a sharply increasing prevalence, approaching near parity with different‐sex couples in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway around 2010. Finland diverges from the other countries in terms of its later and less steep increase. Higher education is associated with a higher likelihood of having a child, whereas we find a less clear gradient by income level. The results suggest that legal changes, together with more supportive wider cultural and normative societal environments, have made same‐sex parenthood more achievable in the Nordic countries. These changes are concurrent with the observed increase in parenthood. Following this increase, female couples today are nearly as likely as different‐sex couples to have children within a legal union.

One in four young mothers in Latin America raises her children without a partner, yet more than two‐thirds do so within extended households, typically with their own parents. Despite the social implications of single‐parent families, it remains unclear to what extent the prevalence and living arrangements of single mothers have evolved over recent decades or how they vary by education and partnership status. Using Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series (IPUMS) census microdata from 17 countries (1963–2020), we show that the share of single mothers has increased over time and across all educational groups. Most continue to live in extended family households, with coresidence with parents becoming increasingly common. Living arrangements of single mothers are strongly stratified: highly educated single mothers are the most likely to live with their parents, while those with lower education and who have ever been in a union more frequently live in nuclear households. These findings highlight the central, yet socially unequal, role of extended family support in the lives of single mothers in Latin America.

Highlights Cohort fertility rates are decomposed by couples’ educational pairing using Finnish register data. Most births occur in educationally homogamous and hypogamous unions. Most births occur in unions in which at least one partner has tertiary education.

Guns are potent cultural objects in the United States, a fact that has spurred much recent social science research. Much of that work examines the beliefs, discourses, and actions of gun enthusiasts. Less understood are the cultural dimensions of guns in the wider population, where gun owners are in the minority. This paper considers the cultural life of guns by studying the language used to depict them in a prominent US mass media outlet over four decades. We use structural topic modeling to describe the New York Times’ coverage of guns from 1980 to 2019. The analysis reveals that the coverage centers danger and societal responses to it, albeit in different ways over time. Whereas local street violence and criminal punishment dominated coverage during much of the time period, high-profile mass shootings and efforts at federal legislation have become more salient in recent years. In examining depictions of guns in mass media, the paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the cultural life of guns in US society.