American Journal of Sociology 115(2)

Pathways to Meaning: A New Approach to Studying Emotions at Work
Don Grant, Alfonso Morales, and Jeff Sallaz

Research on the emotional consequences of interactive service work remains inconclusive in large part because scholars have not analyzed the mechanisms that lead frontline employees to adopt the meanings disseminated by their employers. The authors argue that the theoretical framework best suited for remedying this situation is the negotiated order perspective. It suggests that whether employees adopt a corporate-sanctioned meaning, and with what emotional effect, depends on the conjunction of several social conditions. The authors also propose a novel analytical strategy that can identify these conditional pathways and formalize the combinatorial logic of the negotiated order perspective: fuzzy-set techniques. To illustrate the utility of this approach, the article examines a university hospital that has tried to create a more meaningful and emotionally rewarding work environment for its nursing staff. Consistent with expectations, findings show that employees can embrace the same corporate-sanctioned meaning under different sets of conditions and with different emotional consequences.

The Puzzle of Korean Christianity: Geopolitical Networks and Religious Conversion in Early Twentieth-Century East Asia
Danielle Kane and Jung Mee Park

This article uses the puzzle of Christian success in Korea to develop a model for understanding religious diffusion beyond national borders. The authors argue that the microlevel network explanations that dominate the research on conversion cannot by themselves account for the unusual success of Protestantism in Korea. Instead, events in East Asia in macrolevel, geopolitical networks provoked nationalist rituals that altered the stakes of conversion to either promote or retard conversion network growth. At the turn of the 20th century, unequal treaties both opened this region to missionaries and provoked nationalist rituals. In China and Japan, these rituals generated patriotic identities by attacking Christianity, and network growth slowed or reversed. In Korea, Christianity became compatible with these rituals, and conversion networks grew. This example highlights the greater explanatory power of nested networks for understanding international religious diffusion, relative to microlevel accounts alone.

Origins of Homophily in an Evolving Social Network
Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan J. Watts

The authors investigate the origins of homophily in a large university community, using network data in which interactions, attributes, and affiliations are all recorded over time. The analysis indicates that highly similar pairs do show greater than average propensity to form new ties; however, it also finds that tie formation is heavily biased by triadic closure and focal closure, which effectively constrain the opportunities among which individuals may select. In the case of triadic closure, moreover, selection to “friend of a friend” status is determined by an analogous combination of individual preference and structural proximity. The authors conclude that the dynamic interplay of choice homophily and induced homophily, compounded over many “generations” of biased selection of similar individuals to structurally proximate positions, can amplify even a modest preference for similar others, via a cumulative advantage–like process, to produce striking patterns of observed homophily.

The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms
Robb Willer, Ko Kuwabara, and Michael W. Macy

Prevailing theory assumes that people enforce norms in order to pressure others to act in ways that they approve. Yet there are numerous examples of “unpopular norms” in which people compel each other to do things that they privately disapprove. While peer sanctioning suggests a ready explanation for why people conform to unpopular norms, it is harder to understand why they would enforce a norm they privately oppose. The authors argue that people enforce unpopular norms to show that they have complied out of genuine conviction and not because of social pressure. They use laboratory experiments to demonstrate this “false enforcement” in the context of a wine tasting and an academic text evaluation. Both studies find that participants who conformed to a norm due to social pressure then falsely enforced the norm by publicly criticizing a lone deviant. A third study shows that enforcement of a norm effectively signals the enforcer’s genuine support for the norm. These results demonstrate the potential for a vicious cycle in which perceived pressures to conform to and falsely enforce an unpopular norm reinforce one another.

Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance: Irish Political Prisoners on Protest
Denis O’Hearn

Social activists and especially insurgents have created solidary cultures of resistance in conditions of high risk and repression. One such instance is an episode of contention by Irish political prisoners in the late 1970s. The “blanketmen” appropriated and then built a solidary culture within spaces that had been under official control. Their ability to maintain such a collective response was enhanced by an intensifying cycle of protest and violent reprisal, including extreme stripping of their material environment, in which the prisoners gained considerable initiative. This study uses interviews and contemporary writings by prisoners, prison authorities, visitors, and movement activists to examine how the dynamic of protest and repression transformed insurgent prison culture—through material, emotional, and perceptive changes—and the importance of leadership in the transformation. Special attention is given to prisoner activities in appropriated spaces that reinforced the culture of resistance: promoting the Irish language, cultural production, and the production of propaganda.

Does Race Matter in Neighborhood Preferences? Results from a Video Experiment
Maria Krysan, Mick P. Couper, Reynolds Farley, and Tyrone A. Forman

Persistent racial residential segregation is often seen as the result of preferences: whites prefer to live with whites while blacks wish to live near many other blacks. Are these neighborhood preferences color-blind or race conscious? Does neighborhood racial composition have a net influence upon preferences, or is race a proxy for social class? This article tests the racial proxy hypothesis using an innovative experiment that isolates the net effects of race and social class, followed by an analysis of the social psychological factors associated with residential preferences. The authors find that net of social class, the race of a neighborhood’s residents significantly influenced how it was rated. Whites said the all-white neighborhoods were most desirable. The independent effect of racial composition was smaller among blacks, who identified the racially mixed neighborhood as most desirable. Further, whites who held negative stereotypes about African-Americans and the neighborhoods where they live were significantly influenced by neighborhood racial composition. None of the proposed social psychological factors conditioned African-Americans' sensitivity to neighborhood racial composition.

American Journal of Sociology, September 2009: Volume 115, Issue 2