Citation Classics in Urban Sociology: Mapping the Intellectual Evolution of a Research Specialty

PurposeThis study aims to conduct a critical review of the research on the sharing economy to identify its key intellectual foundations and their evolution and offers thematic and methodological recommendations for future research to advance the domain.Design/methodology/approachA tri-method approach using bibliometric (co-citation) analysis, thematic content analysis and a quantitative systematic literature review was conducted on sharing economy research in hospitality and tourism journals, up to and including May 2020.FindingsThe findings from the three methods were coherent and provide a clear picture of the fact that while research on the sharing economy in hospitality and tourism has achieved significant depth, the breadth of the understanding of this area remains somewhat limited. Each of the three periods of research on the sharing economy identified in the study were marked by a focus on specific thematic areas, with largely Western-situated researchers demonstrating limited theoretical engagement and using a limited range of methods and perspectives (disciplinary, stakeholders and sectors) to examine these themes.Research limitations/implicationsRecommendations for future thematic research opportunities are provided using a multi-level perspective. The present review does not include research that incorporates the impacts of COVID-19, which has significantly disrupted the hospitality and tourism industry and is the focus of current research in the field. However, the review represents the largest and most comprehensive assessment of the state of research on the sharing economy prior to COVID-19, and, as such, can serve as a valuable baseline for future reviews of sharing economy research during and after the pandemic.Originality/valueIn contrast with previous literature reviews, the present review is comprehensive in its scope, methodology and temporal coverage of sharing economy research. It also examines the evolution of research on the topic, enabling a more nuanced identification of gaps and future thematic and methodological research opportunities.

Previous sociological research on the neighborhood context of youth educational attainment has focused almost exclusively on the effects of neighborhood compositional features. There is limited empirical information about the social processes that may explain why neighborhood disadvantage affects college enrollment decisions. Drawing on William Wilson’s (1987) framework and recent theorizing in urban sociology, we examine hypotheses about the explanatory role of neighborhood cultural heterogeneity in affecting college enrollment. We test three hypotheses derived from this literature using original data from a multilevel longitudinal sample of African American adolescents. Results revealed that cultural heterogeneity is an important neighborhood social process that affects adolescents’ decisions about college, particularly in disadvantaged neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of the findings with regard to future empirical and theoretical research on neighborhood effects and youth attainment.

This chapter outlines the context for investigating teacher knowledge by providing a brief overview of the teaching profession. First, we summarise some of the sociological literature on professions, including how professions have been conceptualised, what their main attributes are and how teaching is seen within these approaches. Second, we review the main factors that have exerted influence on the status of the teaching profession such as autonomy, governance, self-regulation and teacher education. These reflections prompt questions on teachers’ scientific knowledge base, their professional competence and how the two are related. Questions raised in this introduction provide the rationale for this publication: the need to derive evidence-informed suggestions for educational policy and future research by examining the current state of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and implications for the instructional process.

Research on Professional Service Firms (PSFs) has tended to treat them as homogeneous and to assume there are similarities in how they are organized and managed. This assumption has been challenged recently as scholars have drawn attention to organizational differences stemming from sources of heterogeneity. The authors argue that rigorous theorizing about the organization and management of PSFs requires an understanding of sources of both homogeneity and heterogeneity and their specific implications. They synthesize insights from the sociology of professions literature and the economics and organization theory literatures to distil key sources of homogeneity and heterogeneity. They also identify firm-level characteristics that drive heterogeneity within a particular professional service. The authors propose an overarching framework of sources of homogeneity and heterogeneity that helps interpret the generalizability of existing research and has the potential to better inform future empirical research on PSFs.

Collective efficacy-the capacity of communities to exert social control toward the realization of their shared goals-is a foundational concept in the urban sociology and neighborhood effects literature. Traditionally, empirical studies of collective efficacy use large sample surveys to estimate collective efficacy of different neighborhoods within an urban setting. Such studies have demonstrated an association between collective efficacy and local variation in community violence, educational achievement, and health. Unlike traditional collective efficacy measurement strategies, the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) Study implemented a new approach, obtaining spatially-referenced, place-based ratings of collective efficacy from a representative sample of individuals residing in Columbus, OH. In this paper we introduce a novel nonstationary spatial model for interpolation of the AHDC collective efficacy ratings across the study area, which leverages administrative data on land use. Our constructive model specification strategy involves dimension expansion of a latent spatial process and the use of a filter defined by the land-use partition of the study region to connect the latent multivariate spatial process to the observed ordinal ratings of collective efficacy. Careful consideration is given to the issues of parameter identifiability, computational efficiency of an MCMC algorithm for model fitting, and fine-scale spatial prediction of collective efficacy.

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to integrate divergent discussions located within the marketing, economic geography and economic sociology literature about trade fairs and their functions, around an exchange-based view of trade fairs.Design/methodology/approach– Following an integrative review approach and drawing on thematic discussions found in social exchange theory, a large corpus of research articles on trade fairs was systematically reviewed and integrated.Findings– Trade fairs facilitate five major exchange functions: transactional, informational, social, symbolic and cultural. Each of these functions is characterized by a distinctive combination of exchange structures, exchange rules, exchange resources and organizational outcomes.Practical implications– The study offers practical guidelines regarding how exhibitors, visitors and organizers can develop and benefit from an exchange-based view of trade fairs.Originality/value– The current study integrates three divergent literature streams into an exchange-based view of trade fairs. In so doing, the study offers a common conceptual foundation upon which future trade fair research can intersect and cross-fertilize.

The organization dimensions of global change represent afresh arena of organizational scholarship demanded by the global exigencies of our moment in history, a moment where, for the first time, the scale and character of human action has measurable impacts on the natural environment, as well as societal transformations and our collective consciousness. This article lays an intellectual foundation for such work, first by reviewing three extant domains of global-change research in environmental change, social change, and the transformation of consciousness, then by articulating the call for the organizational sciences to extend existing knowledge and future research streams into these vital areas. The authors stipulate that the scope of global challenges will demand untold amounts of human cooperation, inquiry into the potential of which has only begun, especially at the global and interorganizational levels. They offer the proposition that there are no necessary limits to cooperation but suggest that the realization of this potential may require opening our epistemic stance to more expansive forms of knowing than Western science has traditionally embraced. The authors conclude by advancing a preliminary set of thematic topics, questions, and normative assertions that suggest fruitful avenues of research into the organization dimensions of global change, which themselves are seeds for a special Academy of Management Conference on "The Organization Dimensions of Global Change: No Limits to Cooperation" to be held in May 1995.

Status and Stratification Processes in Organizational Life

This article investigates the embodied experiences of a group of professional sports labour migrants whose experiences have largely been ignored by sociological literature: southern hemisphere rugby players playing professional rugby league in the United Kingdom. The migrant pathway from Australasia to the UK is well established. Moreover, rugby league is a sport in which debate concerning the merits of employing labour migrants from Australasia is prevalent and ongoing. The study used interview and questionnaire data to investigate the embodied experiences facing this group of migrant professionals. Migrant experiences prior to migrating were contoured by access to resources and by the formal and informal relationships developed through professional and personal careers. The embodied and complex nature of contractual negotiations is highlighted. The centrality of embodied migrant identity and habitus is noted in relation to acculturation strategies adopted over time and space, both prior to and during a foreign sojourn, in terms of established and outsider groups. The paper also highlights how subgroups within a more general group of labour migrants can emerge. Furthermore, the complex influence of personal and professional relationships was found to be both enabling and constraining. These differences between subgroups are considered in light of previous work on acculturation strategies and the existential nature of migration. Future research requirements in the sports labour migration field are suggested.

Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences—cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy—significantly reshaping sociologists’ approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece—research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.

This paper considers the literature that may inform our understanding of parent–teacher–pupil interactions in instrumental music. It draws on research directly concerned with instrumental music learning and that from the wider psychological, sociological and educational literature concerned with conceptions of effective learning and teaching; conceptions of effective parenting; and dimensions of interpersonal relationships. Finally, a systemic, dynamic model is proposed which may serve to guide future research in the field.

The notion of a hierarchy among cities has long been part of the theoretical tool kit of urban sociologists, geographers, and economists. Reviewing the evolution of the urban hierarchy concept, this paper empirically demonstrates a hypothesized transition in the U.S. urban hierarchy during the twentieth century, from size based to network based. Three urban types, following distinct trajectories during this shift, are explored: the primate city, the offline metropolis, and the wired town. Data on the economic structure, population size, and airline passenger traffic of 64 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1900 to 2000 are used to test the hypothesis of a hierarchical transition. Results suggest that a size–based hierarchy dominated in the early twentieth century but was replaced or augmented in the mid–1940s with a network–based hierarchy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study's limitations and directions for future research.

Over the past ten years or so, social scientists have started to pay an increasing amount of interest in the role that computer software is playing in contemporary urban environments. So far, approaches that treat information technologies as increasingly constitutive of the social world have been missing in Finnish Sociology. On the other hand, after an initial period of activity around sociological analysis of various information technologies in the UK, there has been something of a lull. This paper takes one example of influential information technology, geodemographic neighbourhood segmentation software, and analyses it in the context of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The analysis consists of three parts. First, based on existing literature, a brief history of Helsinki is provided. Secondly, commercial geodemographics of Helsinki are analysed in detail from the perspective of Finnish Urban Sociology. The analysis pays specific attention to the problems that arise when a classification scheme developed in the UK is translated in to the historical and cultural context of a Nordic welfare State. Finally, the paper looks at the theoretical debates around geodemographics, and considers directions for future research in the area. After all, the inundation of digital data in our culture has not only been seen as a new subject of inquiry for social science, but as an intensifying methodological challenge for the entire discipline.

China's economic transition and its integration into the global economy have been widely recognized as among the most important social changes in the past three decades. This transformation has attracted scholarly attention from multiple disciplines, and sociologists have made particularly important contributions to literature emphasizing theories of organizations, organizational change, and management practice. In this article, we present a critical review of the state of sociological literature on organization and management issues in the transition process. We focus on studies that explore how organizations shaped the trajectory of China's economic transition, how organizations affect important social and economic outcomes during transition, and the unique challenges that managers face in China's transition context. We conclude with suggestions for resolving central debates and future research directions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the social, economic, and political fabric of urban life. As cities adopt AI technologies for governance, planning, and service delivery, urban sociologists face new challenges in understanding how these systems reshape power relations, access to resources, and civic participation. This paper critically examines the sociological impacts of AI in urban contexts, focusing on seven key domains: predictive governance, labor and economic restructuring, smart city planning, housing and gentrification, the digital divide, civic engagement, and environmental justice. Drawing on recent scholarship, we explore how AI-driven systems both reflect and reinforce existing urban inequalities, particularly along racial, class, and geographic lines. We argue that while AI offers potential for more efficient and responsive urban management, it also risks deepening exclusion, eroding privacy, and marginalizing vulnerable populations. Through a sociotechnical lens, we highlight the need for equity-centered approaches to AI deployment in cities, emphasizing transparency, accountability, and inclusive design. Ultimately, this paper contributes to a growing body of urban sociology literature that interrogates the algorithmic turn in city life and calls for a reimagining of urban futures grounded in justice and democratic participation.