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According to a recent study, in forty-eight countries around the world, more than a quarter of citizens pays bribes in exchange for service. In this article, the authors suggest that a key to a more effective and socially responsible fight against corruption lies in sequencing. Here, they explain how initiatives targeting high-level corruption in government and business must take priority, preceding the reforms of the public sector.

A fortiori it is unlikely that a mere repetition of the tricks which served us so well in physics will do for the social phenomena too. (John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern 1944, p. 6) I do not think the relationship between theory and measurement in the social sciences is much like what Kuhn describes for physics. Talcott Parsons was right about the lack of interaction between the two in sociology. If Kuhn is right about the preconditions for such interaction in physics, and if physics is the model for sociology, then it will be a long time before measurement makes an important contribution to sociology as a basic science …. But sociology is not like physics. Nothing but physics is like physics …. (Otis Dudley Duncan 1984, p. 169) ▪ Abstract  The standard for what passes as scientific sociology is derived from classical physics, a model of natural science that is totally inappropriate for sociology. As a consequence, we pursue goals and use criteria for success that are harmful and counterproductive. Even those dismissing such efforts use the standards of physics as grounds for their objection. Although recognizing that no natural science can serve as an automatic template for our work, we suggest that Darwin's work on evolution provides a far more applicable model for linking theory and research since he dealt with obstacles far more similar to our own. This includes drawing rigorous conclusions based on observational data rather than true experiments; an ability to absorb enormous amounts of diverse data into a relatively simple system that did not include a large number of what we think of as independent variables; the absence of prediction as a standard for evaluating the adequacy of a theory; and the ability to use a theory that is incomplete in both the evidence that supports it and in its development. Other sciences are briefly cited as well, but the main emphasis is on the lessons that Darwin provides for social sciences such as sociology that obtain their evidence primarily from non-experimental sources.

Despite the fact that key sociological theories of self and identity view the self as fundamentally rooted in networks of interpersonal relationships, empirical research investigating how personal network structure influences the self is conspicuously lacking. To address this gap, we examine links between network structure and role identity salience. We identify two features of personal networks that potentially affect how social ties shape identity salience: (1) proportion and strength of ties to role-based others (RBOs) and (2) embeddedness of RBOs, or the breadth of access that a role-based group has to the rest of an individual's network. Across three role identities (student, religious, and work), we find that our measure of embeddedness predicts role identity salience but that the proportion and strength of ties do not. Thus, our study does not support the proposition that identity salience is a product of an individual's social and emotional attachment to role-based groups. Rather, our findings suggest that a role identity becomes more salient as role-based others become more tightly woven into an individual's social fabric.

When a group shares a viewpoint on a status order, their consensus imparts legitimacy to their shared understanding of that order. Conversely, a group espousing multiple viewpoints undermines the notion that one "true" hierarchy exists. To build empirical knowledge about how social groups contribute to the construction of status orders, we take the occupational hierarchy as a case study and map the structure of agreement across intersectional groups. First, we quantify the extent to which groups (1) agree internally on their occupational rankings (within-group consensus) and (2) agree with other groups (intergroup consensus). Using General Social Survey data on occupational perceptions, we find a cluster of privileged groups—namely, highly educated White men and women—who agree internally and with each other on the occupational status order. Lesser advantaged groups exhibit less internal agreement and do not cohere around an alternative conceptualization of value, leaving unchallenged the consensus of privileged groups.

This article examines the relationship between young women's fertility expectations and educational expectations in late adolescence and at the outset of adulthood. Given progressive macro-level changes in the United States beginning in the 1960s, we compare the expectation patterns of youth from two cohorts using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys. We find that the relationship between education and fertility expectations is statistically negligible for those born in the height of the baby boom (1950s) and yet statistically positive for those born at the tail end of the baby boom (1960s). The crux of the change, however, is not driven by an increase in those who pair high educational expectations with normative or above-norm fertility expectations but rather an increase in young women who pair modest educational ambitions with low fertility expectations.

Status has become an increasingly influential concept in the fields of organizational and economic sociology during the past two decades. Research in this area has not only helped explain behavior within and between organizations, but has also contributed to our understanding of status processes more generally. In this review, we point to the contributions of this field in terms of the determinants of status, the effects of status, and the mechanisms by which these effects are produced. We next appraise the way in which a network approach has contributed to our formal understanding of status positions and status hierarchies. We then highlight recent studies that demonstrate the value of studying the structures of status hierarchies themselves rather than focusing solely on the actors within them. After suggesting potential directions for future research, we conclude by calling for renewed efforts to translate concepts and theories across levels of analysis and substantive commitment in order to build more general theories of status processes.

There is widespread agreement from many areas of status research that evaluators' judgments of performances can be distorted by the status of the performer. The question arises as to whether status distorts perceptions differently at different levels of performance quality. Using data from the Columbia Musiclab study, we conduct a large-scale test of whether the effect of popularity on private perceptions of likeability is contingent on songs' intrinsic appeal. We discover that choice status (i.e., popularity) can boost perceptions of a song's likeability but only for songs of lower quality. In effect, the likeability halo created by popularity is one mechanism for why it is that "bad" songs can sometimes become more successful than songs that are intrinsically more appealing. But this same mechanism does not explain why "good" songs sometimes turn into superstars. This study suggests that status theories be refined to consider heterogeneous effects.

Researchers have long noted that role expectations of a "good" mother conflict with those of a "good" worker, described as the "cultural contradiction" of motherhood. But given that work roles vary tremendously in terms of the cultural meanings the public assigns them, the authors examine variability in the perceived compatibility of mother-occupation and father-occupation combinations. Building on previous research, the authors hypothesize that (1) some parent-occupation pairings will be viewed as significantly less compatible because of incongruent expectations and meanings, and (2) incumbents of supposedly compatible parent-occupation pairings will be evaluated more favorably than incumbents of incompatible pairings. Both hypotheses are tested using original survey data on perceptions of mothers and fathers in 28 occupations merged with occupational characteristics from secondary data sources. The results strongly suggest that even though there are well-known prescriptive norms for both mothers and fathers, mothers' occupational choices are more actively policed compared with fathers'.