Sociology

This study examines the impact of social context and perception of weight on calories purchased by college students in a natural setting. Not only did women in mixed-gender groups purchase fewer calories than did women in same-gender groups, but significant interaction effects exist among the gender composition of groups, perception of being overweight, and gender of respondents. Men modified calories purchased across mixed-gender and same-gender groups, purchasing more when in mixed-gender groups. The study helps address theoretical and methodological gaps in prior research and frames the findings in terms of variation of gender salience across social relational contexts.

The study of sport spectatorship has an increasing focus on the importance of fandom beyond fan violence. Fundamental to understanding fan behavior are the meaningful rituals and emotions experienced by fans. In this paper, I use the theoretical work of Randall Collins to examine the ritualistic outcomes of collective effervescence, emotional energy, and group symbols and solidarity among sport fans. I illustrate these concepts using case study data from participant observation of fans of a U.S. football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and content analysis of news articles. I extend Collins’ interaction ritual (IR) theory by taking the group as the unit of analysis and analyzing group solidarity beyond situational interactions and typical sport settings, including the significant life events of weddings and funerals. While critiquing Collins’ (2004) a priori portrayal of sports fans, the analysis advances IR theory, improving its utility for understanding sports fan behavior.

Despite broader changes in the health care industry and gender dynamics in the United States, men continue to be a minority in the traditionally female occupation of nursing. As a caring profession, nursing emphasizes empathy, emotional engagement, and helping others—behaviors and skills characterized as antithetical to hegemonic notions of a tough, detached, and independent masculine self. The current study examines how nursing and related organizations “mobilize masculinities” in their efforts to recruit men to nursing. Analyzing recruitment materials, I assess the mobilization and construction of masculinities in the context of textual, spoken, and visual content. Results reveal how organizations simultaneously mobilize aspects of hegemonic and nonhegemonic masculinities through ideological gendering practices. I identify three distinct types of mediated mobilization: full hegemonic co-option, partial hegemonic co-option, and alternative construction of masculinities. Empirically, the study illustrates the content of nursing recruitment material aimed at men and the ongoing contradictions endemic to men’s entry into caring professions. Complementing existing structural and interactional approaches, the study advances theory on how the mobilization of masculinities operates as an ideological gendering practice at the organizational level.

While prior research has explored how gender frames emotion management processes, little work has specifically examined the links between men's emotion management in a caring profession and theory on masculine emotionality. Stereotyped as less sensitive to their own and others' emotions, male nurses confront unique challenges in navigating the profession's emotional demands. Drawing on men's diaries and interviews, I examine emergent emotion-based processes that characterize men's emotional labor—the strategies men use to manage their own and patient emotions on the job. In managing their own emotion, men's narratives reveal three distinct strategies: reframing the nurse role, distancing, and relinquishing situational control. In managing patient emotions, they frame control over their own emotions as a means for managing others and emphasize knowledge/education as a strategy for managing patient stress and anxiety. While both male and female nurses may engage these strategies, men's emotion management implicates the simultaneous reproduction and disruption of hegemonic masculinity and the reason/emotion dualisms that undergird the current gender system. Implications for masculinity and emotion management theory, as well as recruiting, training, and retaining male nurses are explored.

Hochschild (1983) coined the term status shield to theorize men’s status-based protection from the emotional abuses of working in a service job and hence their diminished need to manage emotions as compared to women. Extending this concept, the current study examines how gender operates not merely to shield men from emotional labor on the job but to also shape the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction. Using survey data collected from 730 registered nurses (667 women and 63 men) at a large Midwestern hospital system in the U.S., we show that in addition to engaging in less emotional labor than women, men benefit from their emotion management in ways that women do not. Gender moderates the relationship between two dimensions of emotional labor (i.e., surface acting – covering emotion and deep acting) and two outcome measures (i.e., job satisfaction and turnover intention). Results support theoretical claims that men’s privileged status shields them from having to perform emotional labor as frequently as women. Further, when male nurses do perform higher levels of emotional labor, they are shielded from the negative effects of covering emotion and their deep acting correlates with higher job satisfaction—a status bonus—compared to that of their female colleagues. Implications for gender theory, emotional labor, and nursing policy and practice are discussed.

In spite of a growing literature on pharmaceuticalization, little is known about the pharmaceutical industry's investments in research and development (R&D). Information about the drugs being developed can provide important context for existing case studies detailing the expanding – and often problematic – role of pharmaceuticals in society. To access the pharmaceutical industry's pipeline, we constructed a database of drugs for which pharmaceutical companies reported initiating clinical trials over a five-year period (July 2006–June 2011), capturing 2477 different drugs in 4182 clinical trials. Comparing drugs in the pipeline that target diseases in high-income and low-income countries, we found that the number of drugs for diseases prevalent in high-income countries was 3.46 times higher than drugs for diseases prevalent in low-income countries. We also found that the plurality of drugs in the pipeline was being developed to treat cancers (26.2%). Interpreting our findings through the lens of pharmaceuticalization, we illustrate how investigating the entire drug development pipeline provides important information about patterns of pharmaceuticalization that are invisible when only marketed drugs are considered.

The process of informed consent is fundamental to basic scientific research with human subjects. As one aspect of the scientific enterprise, clinical drug trials rely on informed consent documents to safeguard the ethical treatment of trial participants. This paper explores the role of heteronormative assumptions within this process, postulating the ways in which the biomedical texts that make up the informed consent process may render gay, lesbian, and non-binary gender-identifying participants discursively invisible. We argue that trial criteria and informed consent practices may reproduce a binary sex and gender system in which ‘male’ and ‘female’ subjects are presumed to identify as heterosexual and engage in procreative sex. This binary is not one of equivalence as female subjects who are able to have children may be wholly excluded or excessively controlled in studies while male subjects are merely admonished to use medically sanctioned birth control methods. Furthermore, we claim that the assumption of procreative heterosexual behaviors may pervade the informed consent process and the mundane practices of biomedical research more broadly. Given that these assumptions have important implications for risk and inclusivity in clinical trials, in the last part of this paper we outline directions for future research on the reproduction of heteronormativity in scientific discourse and practice.

Keywords: heteronormativity, biomedical research, clinical trials, gender binary, scientific discourse.

The sociological study of religion stretches back to the discipline’s foundation in the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim (Borowik 2011). Durkheim’s (1915) broad conception of collective consciousness and the increasing number of those who do not identify with organized religion in America (Pew Research Center 2008) suggest a re-conceptualization of religion beyond formal, institutional definitions. In expanding definitions of religion, leading sociologists of religion have called for increased consideration of the role of quasi-religious phenomena in order to better understand social meaning and group behavior (Ammerman 2007; Luckmann 1967; McGuire 2008). The lack of attention to quasi-religions is particularly problematic given religion’s proposed importance for sociology, as “religion is inscribed into the entirety of the reflection on the essence of society” (Borowik 2011:177). Understanding religion, as a crystallization of that which a group finds deeply meaningful in all of its forms, including quasi-religions, is fundamental for understanding social life.
To advance our understanding of contemporary quasi-religious phenomena, the current study explores the role of the sacred, ritual, belief, and group meaning among fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers, a U.S. team within the National Football League (NFL). Participant observation data are used to assess the types of sacred symbols, rituals, beliefs, and overall group meaning implicated in the fan identity. Rituals and their emotional outcomes, necessary components of a quasi-religion, are framed using the microsociological approach of Interaction Ritual (IR) theory (Collins 2004; see also Cottingham 2012).  I also examine the beliefs, emotions, and meanings that Steelers fans hold in an effort to better understand sports fandom as an increasingly popular facet of society. Doing so, this study advances our understanding of religion outside of narrow, “official” definitions and illuminates the contours of a specific fan base.

Fictional television shows and films convey cultural assumptions about scientists and the research enterprise. But how do these forms of entertainment portray medical research participants? We sampled 65 television shows and films released between 2004 and 2014 to determine the ways in which medical research and human participants are represented in popular media. We found that research participants are largely represented as White, male, and lower or working class and that 40% of the participants depicted in these fictional accounts were seeking financial compensation, 34% were hoping for a therapeutic benefit, and 15% were coerced into participation. Regardless of participant motivation, media representations tended to portray a negative outcome of medical research. Interpreting the themes in these media, we argue that these fictional portrayals might provide the public with valuable representations of medical research, especially in terms of risks to research participants, scientific failure, and researchers’ conflicts of interest.

Theorized as objective or constructed, risk is recognized as unequally distributed across social hierarchies. Yet the process by which social forces shape risk and risk emotions remains unknown. The pharmaceutical industry depends on healthy individuals to voluntarily test early-stage, investigational drugs in exchange for financial compensation. Emblematic of risk in late modernity, Phase I testing is a rich site for examining how class and race shape configurations of emotion and risk. Using interview data from 178 healthy trial participants, this article examines emotion and risk as mutually constituting processes linked to biographical context and social structure. Biographical events like economic insecurity and incarcera-tion influence how risk is felt by providing comparative experiences of felt risk and felt benefits. Such events, in turn, are structured by class-based and racial inequalities, linking class and race positions to primary emotional experiences of risk.

Theorizing a sociology of emotion that links micro-level resources to macro-level forces, this article extends previous work on emotional capital in relation to emotional experiences and management. Emerging from Bourdieu's theory of social practice, emotional capital is a form of cultural capital that includes the emotion-specific, trans-situational resources that individuals activate and embody in distinct fields. Contrary to prior conceptualizations, I argue that emotional capital is neither wholly gender-neutral nor exclusively feminine. Men may lay claim to emotional capital as a valued resource within particular fields. The concept of emotional capital should be seen as distinct from emotion management and felt emotional experience and distinctions between primary and secondary sources of capital clarify the simultaneously durable and evolving nature of capital and the habitus. To illustrate these conceptual refinements, I use interview and diary data from male nurses. Men bring primary emotional capital, developed during primary socialization, to the nursing profession while also developing secondary capital through occupational socialization centered on empathy and compassion. The construct of emotional capital is refined as a structured yet dynamic resource developed through primary and secondary socialization and activated and embodied in everyday emotion practice.

ABSTRACT
Theory on men and masculinities has emphasized practice—
situated action—as the key site to analyze masculinity. Individual
and organizational practices as well as cultural resources are sites
to investigate gender dominance. Similarly, though more recently,
theory on emotion has called for a shift toward an emotion-as-practice
approach in which emotion is seen as both an outcome
and resource situationally activated and embodied by constrained
actors. Using empirical work on men in nursing, this article
develops a synthesis of masculine and emotion practice.
Bourdieu’s [(1990). The logic of practice. (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press] broader notion of social practice
provides a link between the two fields. Reflections from men in
nursing suggest a new masculine ideal centered on the
emotionally adept man. Rather than signal an alternative form of
masculinity that challenges gender dominance, these changes
might signal a new hegemony—a reconfiguration of practices
better suited to an era of post-industrialization. Economic shifts,
including an increase in both the number of middle-class women
in the labor force and the number of emotionally demanding,
service-based jobs, may be the catalyst for a new ideal,
particularly for white, middle-class men.

In this article, we explore the role that fictional media (film and television) play
in evoking and managing collective and individual anxieties towards biomedical
research. We draw on two data sets: fictional media depictions of human research
subjects and interviews with Phase I clinical trial participants conducted in the
USA in 2013. We show how fictional media provide an outlet for collective
uncertainties surrounding biomedical research through depictions that mock and
dehumanise research participants, using such emotions of shock, disgust, pity,
amusement and humour. We analyse how themes from fictional media are also
used to manage actual clinical trial participants’ own anxiety concerning the
unknown risks of research participation. By contrasting the reality of their
research experience with fantasy derived from entertainment media, clinical trial
participants minimise the seriousness of the side effects they have or may
experience in actual Phase I clinical trials. We conclude that fictional media
serve an important role in the collective and individual management of risk
emotion.
Keywords: risk; fictional media; emotion management; risk emotions; clinical trials;
healthy volunteers