Books and Edited Volumes

The featured publications of Georgetown’s Sociology faculty include a selection of significant books, articles, and working papers. We invite you to visit individual faculty profiles for more complete listings of publications.

Smart-Mix or Stupid Assurances? How Businesses Used Voluntary Initiatives to (De)Legitimize Supply Chain Regulation

Author: Tim Bartley
Date Published: September 2025

ABSTRACT: Mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) policies seem to represent a pathbreaking shift from voluntary measures to binding rules for global supply chains. Yet these policies endorse a “smart-mix” of voluntary and mandatory measures, and risk over-reliance on questionable private-sector assurances. In this paper, we ask how businesses framed these private/voluntary efforts in the face of looming regulation, focusing on the EU’s new Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). Through a systematic coding of policy positions, we find businesses (1) using voluntary initiatives to delegitimize mandatory measures, (2) seeking to institutionalize voluntary norms, (3) pushing for private assurances to signify legal compliance, or (4) endorsing mandatory measures to protect the competitive advantage of sustainability leaders. While frames (1) and (4) shaped the debate, we argue that frames (2) and (3) are more fully reflected in the final text of the Directive. We explore both theoretical and practical implications.

Smart-Mix or Stupid Assurances?

Moralized Global Markets and Contested Fields: Perceptions of Supply Chain Controversies in Germany

Author: Tim Bartley
Date Published: September 2025

ABSTRACT: How do people judge the moral boundaries of markets? While scholars have mostly addressed this question in local/national contexts, we ask about perceptions of environmental, labor, and human rights abuses in global supply chains. Extending theories of moralized markets as contested fields, we develop a framework centered on competing claims of corporations and NGOs. Using a conjoint survey experiment in Germany, we examine the conditions under which individuals want to ban products because of exploitation or environmental degradation in the production process. Consistent with a contested fields approach, strategic claims of both corporations and NGOs influence judgments about bans—in opposite directions—and anti-corporate critiques counteract the effects of corporate promises to some degree. Socio-political attitudes structure judgments about bans, though many corporate and advocacy messages resonate similarly across political divides. Open-ended responses further reveal the collective imagination of problems, products, and claims that animate this kind of moralized market.

Moralized Global Markets and Contested Fields

Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City

Author: Yuki Kato
Date Published: May 2025

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Yuki Kato highlights the impact urban gardens have on communities after disasters and the efforts of well-intended individuals envisioning alternative futures in the form of urban farming.

Drawing on repeated interviews with residents who began cultivation projects in New Orleans between 2005 and 2015, Kato explains how good intentions and grit were not enough to implement or sustain urban gardeners’ visions for the post-disaster city’s future. Coining the term “prefigurative urbanism,” Kato illustrates how individuals tried to realize alternative ways of living and working in the city through pragmatism and innovation. Gardens of Hope asks key questions about what inspires and enables individuals to pursue prefigurative urbanism and about the potential and limitations of this form of civic engagement to bring about short- and long-term changes in cities undergoing transformation, from gentrification, post-pandemic recovery, to climate change.

Gardens of Hope

The Extraordinary in the Mundane: Family and Forms of Community in China Book

Author: Becky Yang Hsu
Date Published: February 2025

How do individuals address serious challenges in a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control? This book brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the many ways people in China self-organize and create varied forms of coordination to solve important problems.

Through compelling, detail-rich case studies, The Extraordinary in the Mundane shows that family structures and networks deeply shape these modes of association. Because the public-private dichotomy does not resonate with many people in China, they rely on informal social ties, not formal organizations or state agencies, to confront personal challenges. Chapters present vivid ethnographic portraits that consider both positive and negative aspects of community formation. A woman with an autistic child creates an organization to advocate for inclusion of neurodivergent children in public schools. A trainee in a psychological counseling course finds mutual support among other participants. A boy is taken by his father to an internet addiction treatment camp that aims to restructure family interactions. A woman in her seventies shows off the burial clothes she prepared for herself, to the admiration of a group of friends. Offering a glimpse into the unofficial realities that often remain off the record, this book provides a wide-ranging and timely examination of the varieties of civic action in contemporary China.

The Extraordinary in the Mundane

A Recipe for Gentrification

Authors: Yuki Kato, Alison H. Alkon, and Joshua Sbicca
Date Published: July 2020

From hipster coffee shops to upscale restaurants, a bustling local food scene is perhaps the most commonly recognized harbinger of gentrification. A Recipe for Gentrification explores this widespread phenomenon, showing the ways in which food and gentrification are deeply—and, at times, controversially—intertwined.

Contributors provide an inside look at gentrification in different cities, from major hubs like New York and Los Angeles to smaller cities like Cleveland and Durham. They examine a wide range of food enterprises—including grocery stores, restaurants, community gardens, and farmers’ markets—to provide up-to-date perspectives on why gentrification takes place, and how communities use food to push back against displacement.

Ultimately, they unpack the consequences for vulnerable people and neighborhoods. A Recipe for Gentrification highlights how the everyday practices of growing, purchasing and eating food reflect the rapid—and contentious—changes taking place in American cities in the twenty-first century.

A Recipe for Gentrification

Refugee and Immigrant Integration: Unpacking the Research, Translating It into Policy

Authors: Katharine M. Donato and Elizabeth Ferris
Date Published: August 2020

As the number of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers across the globe has grown, intense debate has emerged about how long and how well these groups integrate into host countries. This integration is complex, and most prior studies have captured only parts of the process.

This volume of The ANNALS sheds light on this complexity, collating studies on different forms of integration and highlighting the ways in which local policies and institutions can enhance integration outcomes. Considering the varied integration timelines of refugee and immigrant groups, this volume bolsters our understanding of the lived experiences of those seeking refuge and illuminates the role that local action can play in successful integration.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

The Voucher Promise: “Section 8” and the Fate of an American Neighborhood

Author: Eva Rosen
Date Published: July 2020

The Voucher Promise examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as “Section 8,” and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing. While vouchers are a powerful tool with great promise, she demonstrates how the housing policy can replicate the very inequalities it has the power to solve.

Delving into the connections between safe, affordable housing and social mobility, The Voucher Promise investigates the profound benefits and formidable obstacles involved in housing America’s poor.

The Voucher Promise: “Section 8” and the Fate of an American Neighborhood

The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness

Author: Becky Hsu
Date Published: September 2019

What defines “happiness,” and how can we attain it? The ways in which people in China ask and answer this universal question tell a lot about the tensions and challenges they face during periods of remarkable political and economic change.

Based on a five-year original study conducted by a select team of China experts, The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness begins by asking if Chinese citizens’ assessment of their life is primarily a judgment of their social relationships. The book shows how different dimensions of happiness are manifest in the moral and ethical understandings that embed individuals in specific communities. Vividly describing the moral dilemmas experienced in contemporary Chinese society, the rituals of happiness performed in modern weddings, the practices of conviviality carried out in shared meals, the professional tensions confronted by social workers, and the hopes and frustrations shared by political reformers, the contributors to this important study illuminate the causes of anxiety and reasons for hope in China today.

The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness

Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts

Author: Katharine M. Donato
Date Published: July 2019

As debates about migrants and refugees reverberate around the world, this book offers an important first-hand account of how migration is being approached at the highest levels of international governance.

Whereas refugees have long been protected by international law, migrants have been treated differently, with no international consensus definition and no one international migration system. This all changed in September 2016, when the 193 members of the United Nations unanimously adopted the New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants, laying the groundwork for the creation of governance frameworks for migrants and refugees worldwide. This book provides a fly on the wall analysis of the opportunities and challenges of the two new Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration as governments, international NGOs, multilateral institutions and other actors develop and negotiate them.

Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts

The Criminal Victimization of Immigrants

Author: William McDonald
Date Published: February 2018

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the many forms of victimization of immigrants, including trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation and forced labor; assaulting, robbing and raping; refusing to pay wages; renting illegal living space that violates health codes; and domestic abuse both in general, and in particular, of mail-order brides.

McDonald examines a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data from historical and international sources including the USA, Canada, Mexico, Britain, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and Spain. He writes with a view to correcting myths about the relationship between immigrants and crime, noting that immigrants are more likely to become victims than offenders.

The book outlines the multiple forms and contexts in which immigrants are victimized, exploited, and harmed. Reviewing micro- and macro-level victimological and sociological theories as they apply to patterns and forms of immigrants’ victimization, this study ultimately seeks to understand reasons for which immigrants are victimized by their own kind, and by persons outside their community.

The Criminal Victimization of Immigrants

Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties

Author: Becky Hsu
Date Published: November 2017

In Borrowing Together, Becky Hsu examines the social aspects of the most intriguing element of group-lending microfinance: social collateral. She investigates the details of the social relationships among fellow borrowers and between borrowers and lenders, finding that these relationships are the key that explains the outcomes in rural China. People access money through their social networks, but they also do the opposite: cultivate their social relationships by moving money. Hsu not only looks closely at what transpired in the course of a microfinance intervention, but also reverses the gaze to examine the expectations that brought the program to the site in the first place. Hsu explains why microfinance’s ‘articles of faith’ failed to comprehend the influence of longstanding relationships and the component of morality, and how they raise doubts – not only about microfinance – but also about the larger goals of development research.

Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Tie

Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans

Author: Corey Fields
Date Published: October 2016

What do you think of when you hear about an African American Republican? Are they heroes fighting against the expectation that all blacks must vote democratic? Are they Uncle Toms or sellouts, serving as traitors to their race? What is it really like to be a black person in the Republican Party?

Black Elephants in the Room considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans’ membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, we begin to see the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles. And at the end, we learn the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed.

Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans

No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership

Author: Brian J. McCabe
Date Published: April 2016

In the decade following the housing crisis, Americans remain enthusiastic about the prospect of owning a home. Homeownership is a symbol of status attainment in the United States, and for many Americans, buying a home is the most important financial investment they will ever make. We are deeply committed to an ideology of homeownership that presents homeownership as a tool for building stronger communities and crafting better citizens.

However, in No Place Like Home, Brian McCabe argues that such beliefs about the public benefits of homeownership are deeply mischaracterized. As owning a home has emerged as the most important way to build wealth in the United States, it has also reshaped the way citizens become involved in their communities. Rather than engaging as public-spirited stewards of civic life, McCabe demonstrates that homeowners often engage in their communities as a way to protect their property values. This involvement contributes to the politics of exclusion, and prevents particular citizens from gaining access to high-opportunity neighborhoods, thereby reinforcing patterns of residential segregation.

A thorough analysis of the politics of homeownership, No Place Like Home prompts readers to reconsider the power of homeownership to strengthen citizenship and build better communities.

No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership

Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age

Author: Katharine M. Donato
Date Published: March 2015

Donato and Gabaccia show how the changing immigration policies of receiving countries affect the gender composition of global migration. Nineteenth-century immigration restrictions based on race, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, limited male labor migration. But as these policies were replaced by regulated migration based on categories such as employment and marriage, the balance of men and women became more equal—both in large immigrant-receiving nations such as the United States, Canada, and Israel, and in nations with small immigrant populations such as South Africa, the Philippines, and Argentina. The gender composition of today’s migrants reflects a much stronger demand for female labor than in the past. The authors conclude that gender imbalance in migration is most likely to occur when coercive systems of labor recruitment exist, whether in the slave trade of the early modern era or in recent guest-worker programs.

Using methods and insights from history, gender studies, demography, and other social sciences, Gender and International Migration shows that feminization is better characterized as a gradual and ongoing shift toward gender balance in migrant populations worldwide. This groundbreaking demographic and historical analysis provides an important foundation for future migration research.

Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age