Fuzzy Boundaries: A Mechanism for Group Accumulation of Advantage

Posted on by

Alex, H. (2025). Fuzzy Boundaries: A Mechanism for Group Accumulation of Advantage. Sociological Theory, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751251378516

This article describes a strategic mechanism, fuzzy boundaries, that groups use to accumulate advantage. In contrast to the dominant view that rigid, well-defined boundaries maximize group rewards, I argue that ambiguity in membership criteria can, under certain conditions, more effectively secure and promote group benefits. Fuzzy boundaries are defined by two features: an intentionally ambiguous criterion for inclusion and the selective, inconsistent application of that criterion to adjust the insider-outsider line as needed. I illustrate the operation of fuzzy boundaries through a historical analysis of occupational boundary drawing in the nineteenth-century United States. Ultimately, the study offers a generalizable framework for understanding how strategic ambiguity in group boundaries can serve actors seeking to preserve privilege across domains, such as education, hiring, and professional accreditation. Unlike well-defined qualifications, the malleability of fuzzy boundaries often insulates them from legal challenge, making them an effective mechanism for maintaining social and institutional advantage.

Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War

Posted on by

Acosta, L. (2025). Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War. American Sociological Review, 90(6), 947-984. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251371066 (Original work published 2025)

Contrary to the classical sociological view that social conflict reinforces preexisting political divisions, this article argues that civil war can reinvent them. I examine this phenomenon through the evolution of civil wars in Colombia in the mid-twentieth century, a period initially marked by a Liberal–Conservative conflict that developed into a civil war between the state and communist guerrillas. Drawing on archival records, oral histories of civilians and combatants, and newspapers, I demonstrate that when one party invents an “imagined third”—an actor, external to the original conflict dyad, who lacks any connection to an actual military or political threat—to blame for the violence in civil war, a self-fulfilling logic turns the imagined third into a tangible enemy of the nation, thereby creating a new fault line. In Colombia, politicians’ baseless accusations and preemptive actions against Communists activated three mechanisms of fault line formation—enemy legitimation, boundary demarcation, and identity shift—that materialized the very revolutionary threats they claimed to prevent. This analytic framework of fault line formation in civil war opens new avenues for examining how political discourse can become self-fulfilling, how international threats are transformed into local enemies, and how wartime actors’ opportunities for action evolve—including the conditions necessary for sustained peace.

Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization among New Americans

Posted on by

Kurien, Prema A. 2025. Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization among New Americans. Oxford University Press.

claiming citizenship

Claiming Citizenship focuses on Indian American civic and political activism in the U.S. public sphere around U.S.-based and India-based issues. Indian Americans are a rising political force whose patterns of activism do not follow the unified model of mobilization of other powerful American ethnic groups. They have multiple types of advocacy organizations: those mobilizing around an Indian American identity; a South Asian American identity; organizations for Indian Americans of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist backgrounds; organizations representing Indian American Democrats and Republicans; and even combinations of these such as the Republican Hindu Coalition that mobilized around Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016. There are also generational differences between second-generation members and the immigrant generation. Unified ethnic mobilization is rare and does not take place through a single professional advocacy organization, or even through well-coordinated campaigns.
The book examines the dialectical process through which immigrants conform to the structures and cultures of the society they have immigrated to, but also work to transform it to accommodate their unique needs. It shows the relative roles played by domestic and international influences on the political mobilization of immigrant groups in the United States as well as the importance of social media in shaping these mobilizations. Claiming Citizenship presents an excellent template to understand how religion, national identity, race, and pan-ethnicity interact in ethnic politics, in addition to examining the role that generational status plays in determining some of these patterns.

The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity

Posted on by

Swartz, David L. 2025. The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity. Routledge Press.

academic trumpsists

There has been an outpouring of research on populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and extreme right movements in Europe. Much less studied, however, is the growing political conservatism in the American academy and how it relates to populist sentiment. The Academic Trumpists addresses a gap in the research literature by looking at the impact of Trumpism on conservative faculty. It compares 109 professors who publicly support Trump to 89 conservative professors who oppose Trump. All 198 function as public intellectuals who advocated publicly their views.

Pages: 1 2 3

Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized

Posted on by

Noy, Shiri 2024. Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized. University of Michigan Press.

project management for researchers

Learning how to organize and manage research is important for both the researcher and for advancing research. However, graduate students are often trained in theories, methods, and disciplines, but rarely in the organizational, administrative, and metacognitive skills required to manage research projects. Moreover, several disciplines are decrying a reproducibility crisis, with a concerted academic push toward open-access approaches. By clearly organizing research, graduate students and researchers can ensure that they are able to account for their methodological, theoretical,  and other research decisions: to reviewers, to funding agencies, and to support the development of new ideas and exciting offshoots of projects. 

Pages: 1 2