Areas of Research

USC sociologists have made discipline-shaping contributions to understanding the role of symbols, meanings and meaningful practices in institutional and informal settings. Faculty are interested in the enabling and constraining force of culture in social life as well as the ways that social structures and institutional processes shape and co-evolve with cultural forms. We study how culture shapes social life through vocabularies, styles of collective action, forms of collective memory, and linguistic forms and habits, among other means. Our culture program is distinctive for emphasis on how people use culture in everyday life and make shared imaginations of the future drive their current interaction. Faculty have advanced the discipline’s understanding of culture’s roles in politics and advocacy, making our program a center of research in this area and destination for a steady stream of international postdocs: we bring cultural analysis to the study of civic, political and economic associations; ethnic, racialized and religious advocacy groups; nonprofit organizations. We also study popular media and pitched public debates as well as the symbolic and moral categories that define racialized, ethnic and religious positions in relation to each other. In substantive terms, faculty research takes up research questions such as these: How do people discuss (or avoid) politics in different settings? Why do associations use some kinds of language rather than others to portray social problems and who is attracted by those different appeals? What are different ways advocacy groups orchestrate collective action to address the problems they publicize, and what are their strengths, dilemmas and trade-offs? How if at all does religious identity shape the work of advocacy and community service groups and their relations with state agencies? How do volunteer programs compare with widespread cultural stories about the virtues and contributions of volunteerism? How do social movements generate and change their cultural strategies, with what results? How do national figures become part of society’s collective memory and why do some storylines become popular while others become marginal?

Associated Faculty

• Eliasoph
• Friedman
• Gold
• Lichterman
• Sternheimer
• Yazdiha

USC Sociology faculty have significantly advanced sociological understanding of how economic systems and organizations are structured, governed, and embedded within broader social, political, and cultural systems. Our scholars examine how economic institutions are not only shaped by social structures but also actively reproduce—and sometimes challenge—patterns of inequality, stratification, and power. A distinctive strength of USC’s economic sociology cluster is its commitment to studying up, a sociological tradition that investigates elites, decision-makers, and the institutions that wield economic and political power. Faculty investigate the behaviors, networks, and cultural logics of those at the top of organizational, political, and economic hierarchies, as well as the consequences of elite action for communities and democratic governance. This includes research on philanthropists, corporate executives, think tanks, and entrepreneurs. By illuminating how elites shape markets, institutions, political regimes and public policy, our faculty reveal the upstream mechanisms that structure opportunity and constraint. Faculty in this cluster also examine a wide range of organizations—including nongovernmental and political organizations, financial and real estate institutions, religious institutions, cultural organizations, schools, and hospitals—to understand how they function internally and how they influence the social worlds around them. This work encompasses organizational culture, decision-making processes, accountability structures, and the relationship between institutional practices and inequality. Our faculty provide in-depth perspectives on key social sectors such as housing, financial structures, health care, education, and incarceration—mapping the flows of resources, capital, and decision-making that shape outcomes at the macro, meso, and micro levels. USC Sociology’s economic and organizational sociology cluster offers perspectives on how economic life is organized, how organizations operate, how elites exercise power, and how people navigate the economic structures and organizations that shape their everyday lives.

Associated Faculty

• Brewer
• Del Real
• Friedman
• Eliasoph
• Gold
• Gomory
• Gose
• Lainer-Vos
• Lichterman
• Pastor
• Schrage
• Vallejo

USC Sociology has made contributions to the sociology of gender and family, offering insights into how societal structures and expectations shape gendered experiences and family processes. Our faculty have studied how gender affects individuals’ experiences, with a particular interest in experiences at work and at home, including outcomes like mother’s employment, occupational sex segregation, the gender earnings gap, and household dynamics, including caregiving and the division of household labor. Faculty in this cluster have also studied how familial structures evolve over the life-course and have sought to understand the consequences they have for adults and children alike. Faculty have used the family as a microcosm for understanding how broader societal forces come into focus in people’s lives, exploring questions like how racial and ethnic inequalities in mortality shape access to kin ties and how educational credentials shape whom one marries. Faculty have also examined how race and gender shape experiences with informal and formal institutions of social control. Many researchers in this cluster approach their work from a demographic perspective, with a strong commitment to comparative and international work. In taking comparative perspectives, much of the research in this cluster considers how macrolevel forces—from technology change to work-family policies—shape individuals’ gendered life courses and experiences within the context of marriage and family.

Associated Faculty

• Brewer
• Biblarz
• Casper
• Friedman
• Hook
• McGene
• Smith-Greenaway
• Urbina

Faculty in this cluster have expanded understanding of how societal factors shape individual and population health and wellbeing, as well as the organizations and policies that inform our medical and public health systems. Some research in this cluster focuses on questions of the social and genetic forces that shape population health and wellbeing, identifying the social structures and experiences that affect childhood health, aging processes, mental health, and mortality, with a particular focus on inequality. Another hallmark of research in this cluster is a commitment to understanding how the social and physical environment impact human wellbeing. Other research in this cluster focuses on the medical and public health systems charged with protecting and advancing societal health. Research on the U.S. healthcare system has asked questions around  hospital care, corporatization, the diffusion of neoliberal business-like practices into medical care while work on public health has explored questions of pandemic preparedness. Researchers within this cluster analyze primary and secondary data using a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Associated Faculty

• Brewer
• Casper
• Del Real
• Finch
• Lakoff
• McGene
• Smith-Greenaway
• Urbina
• Wilson

USC sociology faculty lead the study of migration, immigrant integration, and processes of racial and ethnic stratification in the United States and abroad. Our faculty’s work in this area is expansive and methodologically diverse. Research in this cluster has taken a variety of forms, with some work focusing on the experiential, asking questions of immigrants’ wellbeing and identity, and studying experiences of stigma and adaptation. In addition to interrogating the hardships immigrant populations face, our faculty have elevated mechanisms of immigrant success, charting the economic ascent of immigrant populations within and across generations. Research in this cluster also investigates the broader forces that shape attitudes toward immigration, analyzing how labor markets, geopolitical dynamics, and economic conditions influence public attitudes, voting behaviors, support for immigrant rights, and the rise of anti-immigrant political movements.  Our faculty have also studied the creation of migration policies in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and the political actors that determine the socio-legal boundaries that dictate immigrant exclusion and inclusion. Through studying state legal structures and bureaucracy, research in this cluster speaks to questions of legal violence, legal rights and protections, mobility and integration, and benefits among documented and undocumented people, contributing to broader debates around legality, human rights, integration, and governance. Our faculty study migration across various contexts and among various national-origin groups, using archival, ethnographic, legislative, and survey-based approaches. Faculty have also studied race and ethnicity more broadly, examining how it affects all aspects of individuals’ lives, from their experiences in the workplace to where they reside. USC sociologists also examine the historical and contemporary forces that create and sustain racial hierarchies, tracing how these structures evolve across political regimes, economic systems, and social institutions and organizations. Faculty analyze how racial meaning is constructed, remembered, given political and moral significance, and contested, how racial identities are navigated in everyday life, and how racialized boundaries shift across time and place. Together, these strengths make USC Sociology a dynamic and impactful center for the study of immigration and race/ethnicity in the country.

Associated Faculty

• Argote
• Brewer
• Del Real
• Eger
• Friedman
• Finch
• Gomory
• Lichterman
• Pastor
• Schrage
• Vallejo
• Yazdiha

Law is increasingly recognized as integral to understanding society, and USC is emerging as a leading department in this area. Faculty in this cluster explore how legal regulations and practices generate structures of exclusion, dictate intergroup boundaries, and reproduce social inequalities, working primarily along two lines of inquiry. One area of inquiry focuses on understanding social and legal control and punishment. Faculty have offered advancements in the study of parole, criminal surveillance and supervision, legal regulations around criminal proceedings, policing and incarceration. Research on incarceration has advanced understanding of the economics of the carceral state, including carceral debt and financial extraction. Some work has explored how penal personnel utilize and integrate different sources of knowledge when evaluating, judging and making decisions about the individuals they govern. Research on police has advanced understanding of police behaviors, including police-related shootings. A second area of inquiry asks broader questions of how law comes into existence, with a particular but not exclusive focus on immigration law. In studying legal formulation, persuasion, and implementation, faculty have touched on topics as diverse as how mid-level bureaucrats shape immigration law to how moral panic dictates what is legislated and how laws affect organizations, group dynamics, and individual livelihoods. This research cluster is not constrained to a specific context, but instead studies societies across the Global North and South, and has made use of a wide repertoire of methodologies, including interviews, observations, primary archival documents, and legal cases.

Associated Faculty

• Del Real
• Friedman
• Finch
• Gomory
• Vallejo
• Werth
• Yazdiha

USC Sociology faculty have shaped how other sociologists approach their research through contributions to various quantitative and qualitative methodologies. In terms of qualitative contributions, faculty have advanced comparative-historical analysis, including paired process-tracing designs and abductive comparative-historical inference. Faculty in this cluster have contributed to how ethnographic researchers can use theory and carefully designed comparisons to identify causal mechanisms in everyday interaction. This departure from older understandings of ethnographic work uses pragmatist insights to expand the capacities for interpretation and causal claims-making in ethnographic and historical research. As for quantitative contributions, faculty within this cluster have advanced the collection and measurement of social and demographic metrics as well as the application of advanced methodologies. Faculty have contributed to the creation of new data through population-representative survey data, web-based survey data, experiments, and web scrapping. Faculty have also made foundational contributions to methods for estimating size and dynamics of uncertain, hard-to-reach populations, and to the creation of new demographic metrics for tracking bereavement. Scholars have advanced the use and application of methods in a multitude of areas including spatial tools and approaches, causal inference methods, mixed models for the analysis of multilevel and longitudinal data, Bayesian methods, machine learning, survival analysis, and growth curve modeling.

 Associated Faculty

• Argote
• Biblarz
• Brewer
• Eliasoph
• Eger
• Finch
• Gold
• Gose
• Hook
• Lichterman
• McGene
• Schrage
• Smith-Greenaway
• Urbina
• Vallejo

Research in this cluster constitutes a fast-developing strength of our department. We study a wide range of political relationships, from international economic and diasporic alliances to nationwide social movements and associations, to regional urban development networks, and face-to-face and virtual interactions in local associations. We study institutionalized and informal processes, including national and regional policymaking, social movement-building, politicization and depoliticization through interaction in everyday settings. Faculty research in social movements examines how collective actors build alliances across fraught social differences and inequalities, how they sustain or fragment solidarities and “social capital,” how memory work shapes knowledge production, governance, and civic engagement, and how civic actors imagine pasts and futures. We study contentious and non-contentious advocacy on issues from racial recognition and inclusion to equitable urban development, affordable housing and carceral abolition. Faculty research in political sociology examines diverse political regimes—autocracies, democracies, and populist alliances and a host of actors from mid-level bureaucrats to autocrats. Our political sociologists also study civic and political participation, examining how ordinary citizens and organizational leaders build or shrink network ties with other public groups and state agencies, and pressure legislators. We study how governmental officials work with nonprofit and other citizen groups to offer services, with what results for service populations and participating staff and volunteers. Faculty have also studied the tools and processes of political socialization, and a wide range of political outcomes, including political behaviors, attitudes, values, ideologies, and identities. 

Associated Faculty

• Argote
• Del Real
• Cueto
• Gold
• Gose
• Friedman
• Eger
• Eliasoph
• Lainer-Vos
• Lichterman
• Pastor
• Yazdiha