Craig Michael Rawlings CV

Journal article American Journal of Sociology · September 1, 2025 Why do students in higher education tend to become more liberal? The authors outline a model of belief change wherein cognitive motivations for ideological consistency interact with social factors in peer networks to influence how students in higher educat ... Full text Cite

Cultural Polarization and Social Groups: The Case of Book Banning

Journal article International Journal of Politics Culture and Society · January 1, 2025 Research on cultural polarization often presumes a direct link between rising affective animus and contestation over everyday items of popular culture. Yet the degree to which affective polarization is driving cultural polarization is unknown. We propose t ... Full text Cite

The Polarization of Popular Culture: Tracing the Size, Shape, and Depth of the "oil Spill"

Journal article Social Forces · June 1, 2024 Recent research suggests that political polarization has spilled over into otherwise mundane areas of social life. And yet, the size, shape, and depth of that spillage into popular culture are generally unknown. Relying on a sample of 135 widely known movi ... Full text Cite

Becoming an Ideologue: Social Sorting and the Microfoundations of Polarization

Journal article Sociological Science · January 1, 2022 This article elaborates and tests the hypothesis that the sociopolitical segregation of interpersonal networks (i.e., social sorting) is at the root of recent polarization trends in the United States. After reviewing recent trends, the article outlines the ... Full text Cite

Schemas, Interactions, and Objects in Meaning-Making1

Journal article Sociological Forum · December 1, 2021 Sociologists agree that there is something cultural that exists within individuals, in interactions, and in objects. And yet the process through which the culture inside individuals interacts with the culture outside of them is only partially understood an ... Full text Cite

Measure Mohr culture

Journal article Poetics · October 1, 2021 Full text Cite

The social positions of taste between and within music genres: From omnivore to snob

Journal article European Journal of Cultural Studies · June 1, 2021 Are higher status cultural tastes in the modern United States better described as being inclusive and broad or exclusive and narrow? We construct an original dataset in response to conflicting answers to this question. We fill a major gap in the literature ... Full text Cite

Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes

Journal article Sociological Science · January 1, 2021 Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We res ... Full text Cite

Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups

Journal article American Sociological Review · December 1, 2020 Are individuals’ attitudes constrained such that it is difficult to change one attitude without also changing other attitudes? Given a lack of longitudinal studies in real-world settings, it remains unclear if individuals have coherent attitude systems at ... Full text Cite

Emergent meanings: Reconciling dispositional and situational accounts of meaning-making from cultural objects

Journal article American Journal of Sociology · May 1, 2019 Across a wide variety of topics and methodological approaches, researchers find that meaning is segregated along sociodemographic lines. Using real-world data, this article evaluates and helps reconcile the often-theorized but rarely tested mechanisms that ... Full text Cite

The structural balance theory of sentiment networks: Elaboration and test

Journal article American Journal of Sociology · September 1, 2017 Structural balance theory attends to a group’s network of sentiments and posits that this network alters over time toward particular structural forms. Current work on the theory is focused on understanding the mechanisms that alter sentiments as a function ... Full text Cite

Publishers, authors, and texts: The process of cultural consecration in prize evaluation

Journal article Poetics · February 1, 2017 As cultural objects are of subjective quality, the determinants of their consecration as being of lasting value is a common focus of research. Most typically, scholars look to three constituent features of cultural objects: 1) the characteristics of their ... Full text Cite

Streams of thought: Knowledge flows and intellectual cohesion in a multidisciplinary era

Journal article Social Forces · June 1, 2015 How has the recent shift toward multidisciplinary research affected intellectual cohesion in academia? We answer this question through an examination of collaborations and knowledge flows among researchers. We examine the relevant case of Stanford Universi ... Full text Cite

Making the connection: Social bonding in courtship situations

Journal article American Journal of Sociology · May 1, 2013 Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry.The authors explore the process of r ... Full text Cite

Influence flows in the academy: Using affiliation networks to assess peer effects among researchers

Journal article Social Science Research · May 1, 2011 Little is known about how influence flows in the academy, because of inherent difficulties in collecting data on large samples of friendship and advice-seeking networks over time. We propose taking advantage of the relative abundance of "affiliation networ ... Full text Cite

The complexity of institutional niches: Credentials and organizational differentiation in a field of U.S. higher education

Journal article Poetics · January 1, 2004 This paper examines the emergence and differentiation of institutional categories - distinctions of kind that are salient to specific arenas of social life - as an organizationally and historically embedded process. We employ the concept of the institution ... Full text Cite

'Making names': The cutting edge renewal of African art in New York City, 1985-1996

Journal article Poetics · January 1, 2001 This paper reconstructs a turning point in the symbolic production of African art as a fine art genre, when a 'new' variant was filtered into the market. This process is seen as part of the overall struggle of 'making names' - enacted by critics, curators, ... Full text Cite

Are Victims Virtuous or Vilified? The Stories We Tell Ourselves (and Each Other).

Journal article American Review of Sociology Derogation of the victim refers to the tendency of an observer to negatively evaluate someone hurt by the action of another. Victim derogation has been a core feature of social psychology for decades, but evidence suggests this phenomenon is weakening. It ... Link to item Cite