Tag Archives: Transnational

White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Turkish Middle Class

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Yavaş, Mustafa. 2025. White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Turkish Middle Class: Columbia University Press. 

Consider the lucky few. They studied hard and aced high-stakes tests, survived demanding schooling and extracurriculars, graduated from top colleges and immediately landed high-pay, high-status corporate positions in tall buildings. What happens after this middle-class dream of fast-track careers comes true?

White-Collar Blues follows the Turkish members of the global elite workforce as they are selected into, survive within, and opt out of coveted employment at transnational corporations. State-employed doctors, lawyers, and engineers were long seen as role models until Turkey followed the global tide of neoliberalism and began to embrace freer circulation of capital. As world-renowned corporations transformed Istanbul into a global city, Turkey’s best and brightest have increasingly sought employment at brand-name firms. Despite achieving upward mobility within and beyond Turkey, however, many Turkish professionals end up feeling disappointed, burned out, and trapped in their corporate careers.

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One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Contrasting Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China

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Zhang, Yinxian, and Di Zhou. 2025. “One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Contrasting Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China” Sociological Science 12: 511-536. https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12-22-511/

This study contrasts official and popular expressions of anti-Americanism in China by comparing narratives from People’s Daily and Zhihu between 2011 and 2022. Using computational and qualitative methods, we examined sentiment trends, topics, and opinions in official and popular discourses. We find that although both discourses have become increasingly negative toward the United States, they diverge significantly in specific expressions: official discourse mirrors Western liberal critiques of American social problems but attributes these issues to American democracy, whereas popular discourse blends left- and right-wing populism and blames liberal elites and capitalism for the American decline. These findings highlight both the limits of state control over public opinion and the pluralistic nature of nationalist expressions. The study also situates Chinese anti-Americanism within a global zeitgeist, discussing how populism transcends borders and shapes local political discourse in unexpected contexts.

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The global rise in children’s attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder prevalence: a macro-sociological explanation

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Irem Tuncer-Ebetürk, Jessica Kim, Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, The global rise in children’s attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder prevalence: a macro-sociological explanation, Social Forces, 2025;, soaf153, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf153

In the past three decades, the global diagnosis rate of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has grown drastically. While existing sociological studies demonstrate the complexity of ADHD diagnoses and treatment in specific national contexts, their ability to explain ADHD’s global growth is limited. In this article, starting from a macro-sociological perspective and drawing on world society theory, we empirically investigate the prevalence of ADHD diagnosis rates across 135 countries from 1996 to 2019. We find that the increasing rates of ADHD diagnosis worldwide since the 1990s are linked to two interconnected global cultural processes: (1) the global rise and institutionalization of child-centered cultural perspectives and (2) the global diffusion of narratives that define ADHD as a health condition impairing children’s well-being and development. Our findings do not support alternative explanations such as a nation’s level of development (measured by GDP, poverty, democracy, and tertiary enrollment rates) or healthcare quality and universal access. These findings highlight the substantial influence of global conceptions of childhood and health on ADHD prevalence rates worldwide, while downplaying the importance of national conditions. We contribute to the existing sociological literature on ADHD in two key ways. First, by conducting the first cross-national, longitudinal study of ADHD worldwide we provide novel insights about ADHD prevalence at the world level while identifying the key global factors driving this trend. Second, in merging the existing ADHD literature with the analytical frameworks advanced by world society theory, we introduce a new conceptualization of ADHD as not only a medical disability but also a global cultural phenomenon and institutional priority.

Art as a Channel and Embodiment of Symbolic Interaction Between Migrants and Non-Migrants

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Thomas, J. (2025), Art as a Channel and Embodiment of Symbolic Interaction Between Migrants and Non-Migrants. Symbolic Interaction, 48: 410-440. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.1219

Many non-migrant politicians, journalists, and scholars in migrant-destination societies often represent migrants with self-interested objectives and in specific instrumental ways based on stereotypes. Yet research on symbolic interaction reveals migrants are not passive victims. They actively and strategically shape their interactions with non-migrants. The artwork produced by Chinese migrant artists becomes a non-verbal channel through which the migrant can convey such challenges to non-migrants who can more empathetically appreciate these challenges. By analyzing the artwork and narratives of first-generation migrant artists, I show how art highlights various challenges that migrants confront in their process of immigration, like enduring physical pain, conforming to the institutions of the host society, navigating language barriers, confronting regular cultural clashes, accepting social estrangement, and coping with double consciousness. This paper shows how migrant art can serve as a semiotic object that reveals important features of past symbolic interactions between migrants and non-migrants and offers a channel through which non-migrants can potentially empathize more with migrants’ experiences.

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.