Critical Sociology

Aoki, Hideo; Park, Sara

doi: 10.1177/08969205261434996pmid: N/A

Tobin Ripley, Amanda

doi: 10.1177/08969205261460294pmid: N/A

This paper analyzes how contemporary art museum workers in the U.S. are advancing intersectional social justice through their labor organizing and demands for a living wage. The mixed-methods study uses social reproduction theory to situate museum work as exploited labor and to examine how this contemporary unionization wave is fighting for a reconfigured museum field that is simultaneously pro-worker, anti-racist, and feminist. The analysis focuses on considerations of pay equity, as a site of convergence for the movement’s transformational aims and material achievements.

Scarritt, Arthur

doi: 10.1177/08969205261425888pmid: N/A

How do people value extraction through having extraction exercised upon them? Accumulation by dispossession (ABD) defines the neoliberal economy – extraction rather than exploitation, rent seeking rather than profit, taking rather than making. Most research emphasizes that people consent to this elitist neoliberal order because it is obscured as freedom-enabling market competition. This, however, begs the question: how do people consent to ABD through the very process of having ABD exercised upon them? Asking this of higher education, I found a discourse in which students’ particular beliefs about the roles and functions of paying tuition got them to embrace a highly unequal elitist society based on extraction. Rather than the neoliberal ideology of competition enhancing quality, students embraced having their wealth extracted through tuition because they believed the paywall of tuition both protected them from competition and made degrees scarce and thus valuable. That is, they saw college not as learning or acquiring skills but as gaining a rentier asset – their fetishized credential – that entitled them to excess wages, that enabled them to capture rents. Students thereby acquire a rentier sensibility in which they valued the processes of extraction and the highly unequal social order upon which such accumulation rests.

Copas, Katherine

doi: 10.1177/08969205261417164pmid: N/A

Despite their role in triggering economic crises, banks remain powerful, influential, and profitable. This study examines how large US banks responded to reputational threats following the 2008 financial crisis. Analyzing shareholder letters from 2000 to 2019, I find that while all banks initially followed traditional impression management tactics, large successful firms like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo shifted strategies during the crisis. They began to use patriotic rhetoric to defend the financial sector as a whole, and they attempted to link patriotism, democracy, and capitalism. The analysis shows how firms use cultural appeals to maintain legitimacy and navigate public backlash during periods of heightened regulatory and societal pressure. More importantly, the findings speak to the current US economic and political environment where we are witnessing tightening linkages between nationalism and capitalism.

Rojas, Gustavo

doi: 10.1177/08969205261431341pmid: N/A

Iio, Makiko

doi: 10.1177/08969205261457823pmid: N/A

Mexico, long regarded as a “transit country” for migrants and refugees, has expanded its asylum system alongside intensified migration enforcement under the externalization of US border control. This paper examines how migrants and refugees are incorporated into Mexican society under a multilayered migration regime characterized by uncertainty. Focusing on those who refrain from regularization through the asylum system and remain in irregular status, the study explores how differentiated forms of inclusion are produced under such conditions. The findings show that migrants make decisions regarding legal status while considering possible effects on future mobility, including asylum claims in the US and return to their countries of origin. Under these conditions, undocumented status may become a conditionally rational “choice,” as migrants project imagined future mobility onto an uncertain present. While some gain access to more stable employment and welfare through refugee recognition, others become increasingly exposed to exploitation and marginalization.

Pride, Theo

doi: 10.1177/08969205261465786pmid: N/A

Bugg, Laura Beth

doi: 10.1177/08969205251413491pmid: N/A

This article examines employer-endorsed chaplaincy as a technology of labor control within the U.S. H-2A agricultural visa regime. Drawing on 38 Facebook Live pastoral talks (2021–2025) and interviews with corporate chaplains, it shows how structural vulnerability is converted into moral obligation. Chaplains frame the visa as a blessing tethered to responsibility at work and in employer housing; inculcate discipline and foresight as inner virtues of savings, bodily restraint, and plan-keeping; and recast precarity as a matter of individual prudence rather than program design. Situating these practices within political economy, the article traces how moral vocabularies align with employer command over recruitment, housing, and return, thereby lowering monitoring costs and stabilizing output in a replaceable labor regime. Digital delivery extends this governance across camps and seasons. Conceptually, the article specifies how religious care does organizational work: it normalizes insecurity, privatizes risk onto workers and households, and narrows the horizon of remedy to personal thrift and family stewardship. It concludes by identifying points of leverage to shift risk back onto firms and the state, including inter-employer portability, caps and enforcement on recruitment fees and debt, enforceable housing standards, paid travel and rest days, and protections for refusing unsafe work.

Coughlin, Richard W.

doi: 10.1177/08969205261427027pmid: N/A

This paper examines the relationship between violence and the war on drugs in Mexico through the dual lenses of Weberian and Marxist theory. While Weberian frameworks diagnose Mexico in terms of institutional failure, legitimacy deficits, and the absence of rational-legal order, Marxist accounts reveal how violence functions as a mechanism of capital accumulation under neoliberalism. Recent scholarship within both traditions, however, reaches a conceptual impasse in which Mexico appears either as a failed state defined by a dysfunctional political order or as a regime of accumulation in which state-criminal relations sustain neoliberal growth. This impasse obscures the mediated relationship between order and accumulation. This relationship is not structurally closed, but remains contingent, historically specific, and subject to mediation. What emerges is not a resolution of violence, order, and accumulation, but a historically specific mediation between them.

Means, Alexander J.

doi: 10.1177/08969205261444399pmid: N/A

This article examines the rise of the global far right as a cross-national networked political project. While education is central to the far-right’s international authoritarian projects and ambitions, sociologists have been slow to examine the centrality of education to the global far right. Drawing on the so-called “international turn” in far-right studies, this article outlines four pillars of a global far-right educational architecture and then proposes elements to a critical sociology to map, analyze, counter, and resist it. The article argues that liberal defenses of pluralistic education and academic freedom are necessary but insufficient, and that countering far-right educational sociologies and politics requires historically-grounded analyses of crises of capitalism, class, racialization, state violence, and imperial power. Ultimately, the article calls for an international critical sociology committed not only to mapping and diagnosing far-right educational infrastructures, but also to defending, democratizing, and reimagining education as a public and radical democratic good.