Modern children start using digital media at an early age. As a result, today’s parents encounter new challenges that parents of previous generations didn’t have to deal with. Prior research considers how parents adapt their parenting strategies to the realities of the digital age, seeking to minimize harm and maximize the value of children’s digital experiences. However, sometimes parents aren’t managing these challenges alone. In countries like Sweden, where there is strong state involvement in children’s education and upbringing, the state is responsible for children’s experience with media. In this article, we examine what parental strategies parents in Sweden use and the reasoning behind these choices. We also look at the ways the Swedish state supports families in this process and at the same time protect children’s right to digital technology usage due to the unique role of children in the society. We claim that it’s important to take into consideration local context while researching parental mediation. In welfare states like Sweden parents’ beliefs about digital media have less impact.

Debates about generative artificial intelligence (AI) have produced claims that such tools should be excluded from qualitative, and especially reflexive, research. This note challenges that conclusion. We argue that generative AI is not a single method but a heterogeneous set of transformer-based models, many open and configurable for scholarly use. Situating large language models within a longer lineage of computational text analysis, we suggest decoder-only models offer affordances aligned with qualitative epistemologies, including attention to context and holism. We outline how these models can support reflexive analysis without replacing judgment. We propose technological reflexivity to guide responsible, ethical use.

In this article, we examine recognition gaps exposed by the coronavirus pandemic. We apply Lamont’s cultural processes of inequality framework to the critical case of COVID inequality during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden – a period in which COVID-19 cases were concentrated among immigrants. We identify recognition gaps associated with five key cultural processes of inequality. Counter to the dominant narrative of Sweden as an open and equal society, our analysis uncovers cultural processes of inequality theorists have identified in other contexts: the racialization of immigrants; and the stigmatization and evaluation of immigrant spaces. We identify two additional cultural processes: resignification in which the State’s coronavirus response was directed toward ethnic Swedish people; and inversion, in which higher death rates among immigrants were relabeled as a natural and acceptable cause of COVID deaths. In addition to applying and extending the theory, we demonstrate the value of a focus on recognition for studies of health inequality. The recognition gaps we identify in this article are practical and solvable problems. In comparison with the challenges of managing large-scale economic redistribution or abolishing prejudice and stigmatization by addressing bias on a person-by-person basis, anticipating and counteracting the cultural processes of inequality is an actionable pathway to pursuing more just and equal societies.

In this chapter, I examine the case of elite integration through parental involvement in a paradigmatic civil society organisation, namely the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) of a New York City Public Elementary School. On the one hand, PTAs are seen as a classic example of US civic engagement and community-building. On the other hand, research suggests that volunteerism can be a source of social inequality. These two different views demonstrate the issues associated with the integration of civil society elites via PTAs. Through the case of a New York City PTA and its parent volunteers, I show that elite integration through the PTA is enabled by the increased influence of the organisation resulting from policy decisions and economic realities that make PTAs central to school funding and status. These developments centralise the power and influence of parents from the economic and cultural elite and supplant the PTAs’ stated democratic civic goals.

Cultural sociology can be useful for uncovering factors facilitating and hindering immigrant incorporation. The process of incorporation blends different logics and pressures, where the work of incorporation is divided between immigrants who pursue incorporation, and social groups (from nations, to communities, and from classrooms to corporations) that facilitate, hinder, and shape trajectories of inclusion. Cultural sociology has much to contribute to our understanding of the relation between immigrants and the role of others in the process of incorporation. In this essay, I first summarize underlying ideas in the cultural sociology of immigration and immigrant incorporation. I argue that incorporation entails two types of agency on the part of immigrants: mastery and change-making. I then bring three books, Elizabeth Becker’s (Mosques in the metropolis: incivility, caste, and contention in Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), Nancy Foner’s (One quarter of the nation: immigration and the transformation of America. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2022), and Heba Gowayed’s (Refuge: how the state shapes human potential. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2022), into conversation with cultural theory, reflecting on how the theory challenges the books, and also how the books challenge the theory. I conclude with a proposal for a new approach to thinking about processes of incorporation as consisting of emplacement and acceptance. Adopting this approach contributes to cultural theory by eliminating the need for an outgroup in the construction of the social solidarity.

In this essay on new directions in symbolic interaction, the authors have two related goals. First, the authors argue for the relevance of collective intentionality for overcoming the critical divide in symbolic interaction theory between self and society. In focusing on the way in which collective intentionality allows for understanding how intersubjectivity is made part of the interaction order by group members and local communities, the mesolevel of analysis should be integrated into the interactionist perspective. In making this argument, the second goal is to uncover the important social phenomenology of the early 20th German philosopher, Gerda Walther, which raised similar issues. Perhaps because of her gender, the lack of a secure university position, the financial reserves of her family, or a personal turn to mysticism, her early work has largely been erased. Today her significance and her important 1922 work, A Contribution to the Ontology of Social Communities, is being recovered, published last year (Walther, 2023). Here we highlight her relevance for the interactionist tradition and its approach to intersubjectivity.

This mixed-methods study examines how political leaders mobilize collective intentionality during the COVID-19 pandemic in nine US States, and how collective intentionality differs across republican and democratic administrations. The results of our computational and qualitative analyses show that i) political leaders establish collective intentionality by emphasizing unity, vulnerability, action, and community boundaries; ii) political leaders’ call to collective action clashes with the inaction required by health guidelines; iii) social inequalities received little attention across all states compared to other themes; and iv) collective intentionality in democratic administrations is linked to individuals’ agency and actions, suggesting a bottom-up approach. Conversely, in republican administrations individuals’ contributions are downplayed compared to work and state-level action, indicating a top-down approach. This study demonstrates the theoretical and empirical value of collective intentionality in sociological research, and contributes to a better understanding of leadership and prosociality in times of crisis.

This article presents a computational approach to examining immigrant incorporation through shifts in the social “mainstream.” Analyzing a historical corpus of American etiquette books, texts from 1922–2017 describing social norms, we identify mainstream shifts related to long-standing groups which once were and may currently still be seen as immigrant outsiders in the United States: Catholic, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mexican, and Muslim groups. The analysis takes a computational grounded theory approach, combining qualitative readings and computational text analyses. Using word embeddings, we operationalize the chosen groups as focal group concepts. We extract sections of text that are salient to the focal group concepts to create group-specific text corpora. Two computational approaches make it possible to examine mainstream shifts in these corpora. First, we use sentiment analysis to observe the positive sentiment in each corpus and its change over time. Second, we observe changes in each corpus's position on a semantic dimension represented by the poles of “strange” and “normal.” The results indicate mainstream shifts through increases in positive sentiment and movement from strange to normal over time for most of the group-specific corpora. These research techniques can be adapted to other studies of social sentiment and symbolic inclusion.