American Journal of Sociology 119(6)

American Journal of Sociology, May 2014: Volume 119, Issue 6

Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System
Matthew Norton

The article argues that coordinated state action depends not just on organizational forms and institutions but also on “cultural infrastructures,” systems of state meaning making. Cultural infrastructures are potentially consequential sites for explaining processes of state formation. The article develops this argument through an analysis of the production of coercive power against piracy in the early modern English empire. It analyzes the cultural dynamics involved in the transformation of piracy from an ambiguous legal category to a violently enforced social boundary, focusing on the interplay of codes, interpretive institutions, and social performances. Violence directed against the pirates in the 1710s and 1720s turned on an earlier, contentious period of state formation focused on the cultural infrastructures that made the authoritative classification of piracy possible.

Contradictions in the Commodification of Hospital Care
Adam D. Reich

The “moralized markets” school within economic sociology has convincingly demonstrated variation in the relationship between economic activity and moral values. Yet this scholarship has not sufficiently explored either the causes of this variation or the consequences of this variation for organizational practice. By examining different moral-market understandings and practices in the context of a single market-based organizational field, this article highlights the contradictory character of processes of commodification, as different historically institutionalized ideas conflict, in different ways, with the market logic that increasingly organizes the field as a whole. The article examines the contradictory commodification of hospital care in three hospitals within one Northern California community.

Moving beyond Stylized Economic Network Models: The Hybrid World of the Indian Firm Ownership Network
Dalhia Mani and James Moody

A central theme of economic sociology has been to highlight the complexity and diversity of real world markets, but many network models of economic social structure ignore this feature and rely instead on stylized one-dimensional characterizations. Here, the authors return to the basic insight of structural diversity in economic sociology. Using the Indian interorganizational ownership network as their case, they discover a composite—or “hybrid”—model of economic networks that combines elements of prior stylized models. The network contains a disconnected periphery conforming closely to a “transactional” model; a semiperiphery characterized by small, dense clusters with sporadic links, as predicted in “small world” models; and finally a nested core composed of clusters connected via multiple independent paths. The authors then show how a firm’s position within the mesolevel structure is associated with demographic features such as age and industry and differences in the extent to which firms engage in multiplex and high-value exchanges.

The Missing Link in the Diffusion of Protest: Asking Others
Stefaan Walgrave and Ruud Wouters

Mobilization for protest is a process of diffusion in interpersonal networks. Extant work has found that being asked by people one knows is a key determinant of participation, but the flip side—asking others—has been neglected. The authors examine which prospective participants are most likely to ask others to participate and whom they ask. Drawing on a new and unusual data set including evidence on more than 7,000 participants in 48 demonstrations across Europe, the authors find that activists who are committed to the demonstration’s cause (willing to recruit others) and who are part of participation-friendly networks (able to recruit others) are the most active recruiters. Asking others is dependent on being asked: participants tend to recruit people similar to those who have recruited them and, most importantly, participants who are recruited via strong ties are less active recruiters themselves.

Fewer and Better Children: Race, Class, Religion, and Birth Control Reform in America
Melissa J. Wilde and Sabrina Danielsen

In the early 20th century, contraceptives were illegal and, for many, especially religious groups, taboo. But, in the span of just two years, between 1929 and 1931, many of the United States’ most prominent religious groups pronounced contraceptives to be moral and began advocating for the laws restricting them to be repealed. Met with everything from support, to silence, to outright condemnation by other religious groups, these pronouncements and the debates they caused divided the American religious field by an issue of sex and gender for the first time. This article explains why America’s religious groups took the positions they did at this crucial moment in history. In doing so, it demonstrates that the politics of sex and gender that divide American religion today is deeply rooted in century-old inequalities of race and class.