Theodore P. Gerber’s research while affiliated with University of Wisconsin–Madison and other places

While uncertainty has been a key explanation for very low fertility throughout Europe, few studies have analysed how macro-level uncertainty trickles down to shape how people think about having children. Most research focuses on economic uncertainty, not political or social uncertainty. We address these gaps with qualitative data from Ukraine, which has experienced extreme political uncertainty and, for the past decade, armed conflict. Ukraine also had exceptionally low fertility, with an estimated total fertility rate of 1.17 in 2021. In July 2021, we conducted 16 online focus groups on topics related to childbearing with informants living in urban and rural areas in Eastern Ukraine, including areas of Donetsk province that were outside Ukrainian government control. Half the groups consisted of persons displaced by the 2014 Donbas war. The discussions revealed distinct patterns whereby experiences of displacement, the simmering armed conflict, and economic problems combined to produce and intensify uncertainties that discouraged couples from having more than one child. Some blamed the government or delved into conspiracy theories. Armed conflict generates its own forms of uncertainty that interact with persistent economic challenges, dampening fertility.

The collapse of the USSR in late 1991 inspired social science research on levels, patterns, and trends in inequality within Russia, due to theoretical interest in how market transition affects social stratification. The start of the Putin regime in 2000 marked a new era in Russia's post‐Soviet political economic trajectory: in contrast to the 1990s, the economy first took off, then stagnated, while the state rolled back institutions of democracy and civic freedoms. In short, Russia became a consolidated market economy under authoritarian rule. In this context research has continued to produce insights into social stratification. The labor market featured high levels of employment but with downward wage flexibility, modest decreases in earnings inequality, and persistent returns to education, gender wage gaps, and locality‐based differences. Waves of labor migration to Russia, resurgent traditional gender norms, shrinking population, housing inequality, health disparities, and a small contingent of ultra‐rich represent additional noteworthy developments. Although market transition is no longer an intriguing theoretical lens through which to view social stratification in Russia, the topic nonetheless holds broader theoretical interest because inequality became closely intertwined with Russia's political economy, social policies, and geopolitical actions, including those that culminated in Putin's decision to invade Ukraine.

Nonstandard employment (NSE) is a disadvantage for entry into homeownership because it is associated with both lower average income and greater uncertainty of future income. These features of NSE make formal mortgage loans from banks riskier to take on and harder to obtain. This mechanism implies that the relative disadvantage of NSE for homeownership entry is greater in societies where, due to institutional and macro-economic factors, mortgages are a more prevalent means to acquire homes. We test these theoretical expectations by analyzing entry to homeownership using panel surveys from Russia and urban China, two former state socialist countries with comparable labor market regulations, housing regimes, and welfare protections, but different mortgage prevalence. NSE is associated with lowers rates of entering homeownership in urban China, where mortgages are far more common, but not in Russia. Moreover, this negative effect in urban China pertains only to home acquisitions via mortgages, not to homeownership entry via other paths. Our findings broaden sociological understanding of how NSE contributes to inequality by highlighting the role of income uncertainty. They also suggest that cross-national differences in financial institutions may moderate the disadvantages of NSE and thus shape the consequences of market transition for stratification.

While kinship ties support private sector development, they can also lead to economic inefficiencies. The paper examines the impact of kinship networks on firm performance and growth based on our original survey of 1000 firm owners in the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan. We obtained detailed information on respondents’ business networks, resources they both receive from (in-networks) and provide to their kin and other contacts (out-networks) and their firm's performance. Our results indicate that in-networks raise profitability, out-networks reduce it, and these two forms of network usage are positively, but far from perfectly, correlated. We also show that kin-reliant firms grow slower than firms with access to non-kin assistance but faster than firms that do not have access to any business networks at all. We find evidence that one mechanism of slower growth is lower levels of reinvestment. We conclude that accounting for in- and out-networks helps to resolve the ambiguous message from the broader empirical literature regarding the effect of kin networks on firm performance: the two forms of network use are positively correlated, most likely due to generalized reciprocity within kin networks, yet have opposite effects.

Nonstandard employment (NSE) is a disadvantage for entry into homeownership because it is associated with both lower average income and greater uncertainty of future income. These features of NSE make formal mortgage loans from banks riskier to take on and harder to obtain. This mechanism implies that the relative disadvantage of NSE for homeownership entry is greater in societies where, due to institutional and macroeconomic factors, mortgages are a more prevalent means to acquire homes. We test these theoretical expectations by analyzing entry to homeownership using panel surveys from Russia and urban China, two former state socialist countries with comparable labor market regulations, housing regimes, and welfare protections, but different mortgage prevalence. NSE is associated with lowers rates of entering homeownership in urban China, where mortgages are far more common, but not in Russia. Moreover, this negative effect in urban China pertains only to home acquisitions via mortgages, not to homeownership entry via other paths. Our findings broaden sociological understanding of how NSE contributes to inequality by highlighting the role of income uncertainty. They also suggest that cross-national differences in financial institutions may moderate the disadvantages of NSE and thus shape the consequences of market transition for stratification.

An extensive literature in sociology has argued that cultural capital plays a pivotal role in perpetuating social inequalities. However, empirical tests of this proposition have primarily examined its influences on educational outcomes, not earnings, and they tend to define cultural differences in class-based terms, with the few analyses of labor market rewards limited to studies of hiring decisions, performance assessments, and job dismissals for elite jobs. We propose testing whether cultural capital yields economic returns in labor markets by evaluating the influence of the cultural distance between immigrants’ origin countries and the United States on their earnings. We consistently find earnings penalties for origin–U.S. cultural distance using the American Community Survey and the National Survey of College Graduates. Earnings penalties associated with cultural distance vary by immigrants’ level of education, type of highest educational qualification, and age at migration to the U.S. Apart from establishing that cultural capital renders monetary returns in labor markets, our findings help illuminate the uneven earnings penalties for immigrants, especially those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

This article reviews social science research on women's rights, corruption, and immigration in Russia. Intentionally diverse, our selection of topics illustrates how the same three analytical lenses have been applied across a broad range of scholarship on the postcommunist world. Each lens is bifocal and entails a tension between two extremes. The victims versus agents lens refers to a tendency of scholars to portray their subjects either as passive victims of macrostructural and cultural conditions or as agents who adapt to survive, or even thrive, despite significant challenges. The similar versus exotic lens pits the assumption that Russia is a modern European country against the view that it is too distinctive to be meaningfully compared with the West or analyzed with Western theories. Finally, the old versus new lens represents competing views on the extent to which the institutional, cultural, and structural legacies of the Soviet Union, perestroika, and the 1990s continue to shape Russian society. The broad goal of our review is to highlight the intellectual promise of studying Russia sociologically. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Building on ideas of Halbwachs and others regarding how families shape collective memory, we argue that known family connections to past events serve as salience cues. Due to kin preference (humans’ tendency to empathize with family members more than strangers), awareness that a relative participated in a specific past event increases its visibility, moral relevance, and emotional resonance, compared to that of the vast number of other historical occurrences, with intuitive consequences for whether and how the event is remembered in the present. We illustrate this effect of known family connections to the past by analyzing whether and how contemporary Russians recall a controversial episode from the Soviet period: Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. We use qualitative data from focus groups and unusually detailed survey data, collected in 2010, to illustrate this property of recognized family connections to a past mass trauma. We also propose four distinct components of perceptions of past events: awareness, knowledge, importance, and moral valence. Our findings confirm the strong influence of known family ties to victims, which exhibit more consistent connections to memories of the repressions than do other factors, although family socialization through childhood discussions, cohort differences, education, and exposure to official narratives also matter.

Sino-phobia, which has reportedly grown internationally during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a potential obstacle to China’s economic and foreign policy initiatives involving Russia and Central Asia. After providing historical and theoretical context, the authors analyse publicly reported time-series data from Russia and original survey data from Russia and Kyrgyzstan to assess the extent of Sino-phobic attitudes and their associations with demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic variables. By also considering attitudes toward Americans and other national groups, the authors show that anti-Chinese sentiment, while high, does not exhibit especially pronounced tendencies. In Russia, nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment are key correlates of Sino-phobia. Additional survey research is necessary to assess the impact of COVID-19 on Sino-phobia and determine whether it hinders China-friendly policies, as some observers have suggested.