Category Archives: Recent Publications

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The Way of Migrant Brokers: Power, Competition, and the Misconversion Capital

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Andrew Nova Le, The Way of Migrant Brokers: Power, Competition, and the Misconversion Capital, Social Problems, 2025;, spaf031, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaf031

Social scientists have recently written much concerning the role of migrant brokers in both facilitating and impeding international migration. A crucial missing piece in the literature is a discussion of the operational logic behind the brokers’ behaviors. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic observations and 224 interviews with state officials, brokers, and contract labor migrants across Vietnam, this article examines the micro-processes of migrant brokers’ behavioral response to the structural conditions they experience, and how their various behaviors adversely affect migrants. This paper analyzes how the unequal power relations between the state, brokers, and migrants lead to a competitive brokerage ecology comprising three structural conditions: brokers competing against one another in obtaining, fulfilling, and sustaining workorders from labor export companies. These structural conditions shape distinct forms of capital misconversion, which includes bundling money, delaying time, and distorting skills. This paper contributes to international migration, brokerage, and organization studies scholarship.

Contesting the State: Embodied Threat and the Emergence of Prisoner Mobilization

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Knight, D. J. (2025). Contesting the State: Embodied Threat and the Emergence of Prisoner Mobilization. American Sociological Review, 90(4), 658-689. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251340401 (Original work published 2025)

Prior studies cast U.S. imprisonment as politically demobilizing. This article complicates that proposition by exploring when, and how, threat under penal confinement leads people to mobilize. Using interviews with currently incarcerated and recently released men across three states, I show that although imprisonment generally fosters political inaction, collective mobilization does arise under certain conditions. First, people in prison mobilize in response to embodied threats—fundamental threats eliciting visceral reactions that signal future harm (i.e., premature death or permanent incapacitation). Second, to collectively mobilize, a subpopulation of similarly threatened prisoners must be present and see the threats as a shared problem. Collective prisoner mobilization is more likely when both conditions are present; mobilization is unlikely when neither condition is present; and individual political contention is more likely when conditions are partially present. This range of political responses among incarcerated people is more dynamic than previously reported. Imprisonment has selective political effects, mobilizing the most repressed individuals within prison to devise new strategies to contest their repression.

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About the Patient Named Taiwan: The Rise of Doctors in Party Politics

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Kim, J., & Liu, S. (2025). About the Patient Named Taiwan: The Rise of Doctors in Party Politics. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2025.2488904

Doctors are not typically known for engaging in party politics. However, in Taiwan, many doctors have assumed prominent roles within the Democratic Progressive Party, including Dr Lai Ching-te who became president in May 2024. This article examines the factors contributing to the rise of doctors in Taiwan’s party politics since democratisation, particularly in the Democratic Progressive Party. Although the existing literature focuses on regime transitions and capital convertibility in elite circulation, this study proposes an alternative explanation: the symbiotic relationship between the Medical Professionals Alliance in Taiwan and the Democratic Progressive Party. Utilising extensive archival data from Taiwan, the article argues that this alliance, which combined an influential medical association with a weak political party, facilitated the emergence of doctor-politicians during Taiwan’s democratisation. The findings suggest that professional associations can serve as political vehicles, transforming individual efforts into collective action by participating in policymaking and mobilising resources for social movements and electoral politics. Furthermore, the case of doctor-politicians in Taiwan offers valuable insights into professional mobilisation, demonstrating how scientific expertise can be harnessed to wield moral authority and establish political coalitions within and beyond professional boundaries.

Globalization, populism, and climate skepticism: untangling varieties and pathways

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Kim, J., Henry, E. A., Carter, J., & Soysal, Y. N. (2025). Globalization, populism, and climate skepticism: untangling varieties and pathways. Environmental Sociology, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2025.2536342

Drawing upon cross-national data collected by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) across 26 nations and over 28,000 individuals, this study explores the association between climate skepticism and populism, both in general, and amidst varying degrees of neoliberal globalization. Distinguishing between populism’s ideological varieties and pathways of influence, we find that right-wing and valence forms of populism are linked to greater skepticism, and left-wing populism to lower skepticism. Crucially, the impact of populism occurs both at the country level and at the individual level, indicating support for theories anticipating both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of populist influence. We also find that the link between populism and climate skepticism depends on the level of globalization – albeit in diverse and sometimes unexpected ways, reflecting the pathway and ideology in question. These insights advance ongoing debates arguing that populism is neither inherently exclusionary or right-wing, and its diverse forms warrant further exploration. Future research can expand data collection on populism’s ideological variations and investigate how populist dynamics intersect with globalization, particularly its neoliberal variant, to shape climate attitudes.

Book Review: In Our Interest

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Jiang, A. (2025). Book Review: In Our Interest. International Migration Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183251370704

This book is an empirical milestone and an optimistic roadmap. The core contribution is showing public opinion as malleable rather than fatally fixed. Kustov shifts the idea of immigration attitudes from an “on-or-off” stance into a register of activation and context (e.g., Sana 2021). That challenges both liberal idealists (Kymlicka 2007) and cynical restrictionists (Goodhart 2017). The public, it turns out, does not categorically reject immigration; they support it conditionally, since institutional signals can shape public preference. By shifting from diagnosis to remedy, he models a pragmatic path through this political deadlock.

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