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Overwork Without Premium: The Persistent Class Gradient of Long Hours in China, 2006–2023

By on August 31, 2026 in Articles

Chen Ouyang

Sociological Science August 31, 2026
10.15195/v13.a41

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In the United States, overwork migrated up the class structure, and its hourly wage association turned from penalty to premium in aggregate estimates. The “996” controversy suggests China is replaying this elitization. I test both with 11 waves of the Chinese General Social Survey (2006–2023; 36,282 nonfarm workers), using wave-specific, subperiod, and full-period estimates. Neither is supported as a broad, durable pattern. Overwork stays concentrated among manual, service, and self-employed workers; a post-2015 rebound was not disproportionately professional—manual workers rose at least as much—and was not detectably sustained in 2023. Overwork does not pay: overworkers log two-thirds more hours than comparable workers yet earn no more annually, and the hourly penalty—deepest for blue-collar employees—narrowed partially after 2010 and remained negative in every wave. State-sector employment is associated with lower overwork throughout. Elitized overwork appears institution-dependent; the sample instead shows a non-elite overwork configuration.

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Chen Ouyang: School of Marxism, Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
E-mail: m202475410@hust.edu.cn.

Acknowledgments: The author sincerely thanks Editor-in-Chief Ari Adut, the Deputy Editor, and the anonymous external reviewers for their careful reading and constructive suggestions. The author also thanks the Sociological Science editorial and production team for their meticulous work; the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) team at the National Survey Research Center, Renmin University of China, for making the data used in this study available; and Professor Hongshan Lü for his invaluable guidance throughout the research.

Funding: This research received no external funding.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All analysis code, the cross-wave harmonization pipeline, archived numeric outputs, and documentation needed to reproduce every empirical result in this article are deposited at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21709718. The CGSS microdata cannot be redistributed under the CNSDA data-use agreement; the package documents, wave by wave, how registered researchers can obtain each file free of charge from the Chinese National Survey Data Archive (cnsda.org).


  • Citation: Ouyang, Chen. 2026. “Overwork Without Premium: The Persistent Class Gradient of Long Hours in China, 2006–2023” Sociological Science 13: 1079-1106.
  • Received: July 12, 2026
  • Accepted: August 8, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Wei-hsin Yu
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a41


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Social Class Differences in Parenting? Revisiting Classed Childrearing through a Video-Ethnography of Mealtime

By on August 25, 2026 in Articles

Joanne W. Golann, Karen Phelan Kozlowski, Kara Mitchell Brennan

Sociological Science August 25, 2026
10.15195/v13.a40

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Sociological research has long established social class differences in childrearing strategies. However, recent studies suggest more heterogeneity by social class in parenting practices than previously recognized. In this article, we revisit families’ classed socialization processes by drawing from the New Jersey Families Study, a two-week, in-home video study of 21 families with young children, to examine how working-class and middle-class families interact with their children during mealtimes. Contrary to expectations, we found that social class did not neatly correspond to parenting styles, with half of families blending middle-class and working-class styles. This is one of the first sociological studies to closely observe the socialization of young children across different social classes. It is also one of few studies in sociology to use video-ethnographic data. Finally, this study challenges long-standing assumptions about class-based socialization, suggesting that in contemporary families, social class boundaries are much blurrier than previously believed when it comes to childrearing.

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Joanne W. Golann: Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, Vanderbilt University.
E-mail: j.golann@vanderbilt.edu.

Karen Phelan Kozlowski: School of Social Science and Global Studies, University of Southern Mississippi.
E-mail: karen.kozlowski@usm.edu.

Kara Mitchell Brennan: Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, Vanderbilt University.
E-mail: kara.p.mitchell@vanderbilt.edu.

Acknowledgments: We thank Kanoe Bonilla, Emma Bufkin, Maria Maria Castillo, Sheila Chau, Ana Delgado, Catherine Duggan, Richard Hall, Susanna Harpold, Shihe Luan, Angelina Ma, Audrey Morris, Ben Rubin, Monica Shen, Erin Smith, and Grace Xu for research assistance on the New Jersey Families Study. We are grateful to Thomas Espenshade, Boriana Pratt, and Pamela Klebanov for data access and support. Corresponding author: j.golann@vanderbilt.edu.

Other Statements and Declarations: This research has been approved by the Princeton University Institutional Research Board. Informed consent to participate in the study was obtained for all families.

The authors have no financial or non-financial interests directly or indirectly related to the work to disclose.

The authors give consent to publish this manuscript.

Partial support for this work comes from the National Science Foundation–Sociology Grant #2214309, American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, Vanderbilt University Discovery Funds and Seeding Success grants, and the Peabody College Small Grants for Research.

The authors report no financial or non-financial interests directly or indirectly related to the work.



Reproducibility Package: Data are not publicly available due to informed consent agreements. For researchers interested in using the New Jersey Families Study data, please contact Joanne Golann for more information.


  • Citation: W. Golann, Joanne, Karen Phelan Kozlowski, Kara Mitchell Brennan. 2026. “Social Class Differences in Parenting? Revisiting Classed Childrearing through a Video-Ethnography of Mealtime” Sociological Science 13: 1046-1078.
  • Received: March 5, 2026
  • Accepted: July 16, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Elizabeth Bruch
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a40


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Classed Burdens: Habitus and Administrative Burden during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By on March 7, 2024 in Articles

Taylor Laemmli

Sociological Science March 7, 2024
10.15195/v11.a5

Abstract

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This paper shows how class shaped service workers’ experiences of administrative burdens during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use the pandemic and pandemic-related shutdowns as a pseudo natural experiment in which job loss was applied to a set of workers from different class backgrounds and with different class locations, workers who then turned to the state for assistance. Drawing on 46 interviews I conducted with service workers across the United States from May to October of 2020, I use Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus to show how class background shaped the administrative burdens workers encountered. Workers’ class origins left them with distinct approaches to bureaucracy that translated into disparate experiences of administrative burdens when workers sought unemployment insurance benefits. As a result, compared to workers from middle-class backgrounds, workers from working-class backgrounds more often experienced housing difficulties, dangerous work, and challenges to their sense of integrity.
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Taylor Laemmli: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: laemmli@wisc.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Chloe Haimson, Mustafa Emirbayer, and Ryan Ellis for valuable feedback. For helpful research assistance, I thank Morgan Barlin, Alexis Bernhardt, Novak He, Clara McKinney, Julia Mann, Siying Qu, and Damini Rao. The paper benefited from participants’ comments at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Laemmli, Taylor. 2024. “Classed Burdens: Habitus and Administrative Burden during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Sociological Science 11: 114-137.
  • Received: August 24, 2023
  • Accepted: October 13, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a5


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Racially Distinctive Names Signal Both Race/Ethnicity and Social Class

By on December 12, 2022 in Articles

Charles Crabtree, S. Michael Gaddis, John B. Holbein, Edvard Nergård Larsen

Sociological Science December 12, 2022
10.15195/v9.a18

Abstract

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Researchers studying discrimination and bias frequently conduct experiments that use racially distinctive names to signal race or ethnicity. The evidence that these studies provide about racial discrimination depends on the assumption that the names researchers use differ only based on perceived race and not some other factor. In this article, we assess this common assumption using data from five different studies (n = 1,004; 2,002; 1,035; 5,631; 1,858) conducted at different times across four separate survey platforms (Lucid Marketplace, Lucid Theorem, MTurk, and Prolific). We find evidence that names commonly used to signal race/ethnicity also influence perceptions about socioeconomic status and social class. Specifically, we observe that Americans tend to think that individuals with names typically used by Black and Hispanic people have lower educational attainment and income and are of a lower social class. Even when we present respondents with the educational attainment of a named individual, respondents still perceive Black people as lower social class than White people. We discuss the implications of these findings for past and future experimental work that uses names to signal race. We also articulate the importance of choosing names that best approximate the quantity that scholars want to estimate.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Charles Crabtree: Department of Government, Dartmouth College
E-mail: crabtree@dartmouth.edu; URL: charlescrabtree.com

S. Michael Gaddis: Senior Research Scientist, NWEA; Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles; and California Center for Population Research
E-mail: mgaddis@soc.ucla.edu; URL: stevenmichaelgaddis.com

John B. Holbein: Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia
E-mail: holbein@virginia.edu; URL: sites.google.com/site/johnbholbein/

Edvard Nergård Larsen: Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
E-mail: e.n.larsen@sosgeo.uio.no; URL: sv.uio.no/iss/english/people/aca/edvardnl

Acknowledgments: We thank the service workers and small businesses in San Francisco’s Mission District for the bountiful supply of burritos that provided fuel for the authors’ intense writing retreat that resulted in this article. We also thank NBA League Pass.

  • Citation: Crabtree, Charles, S. Michael Gaddis, John B. Holbein, and Edvard Nergård Larsen. 2022. “Racially Distinctive Names Signal Both Race/Ethnicity and Social Class.” Sociological Science 9: 454-472.
  • Received: December 4, 2021
  • Accepted: February 21, 2022
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Jeremy Freese
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a18


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Education and Social Fluidity: A Reweighting Approach

By on February 23, 2022 in Articles

Kristian Bernt Karlson

Sociological Science February 23, 2022
10.15195/v9.a2

Abstract

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Although sociologists have devoted considerable attention to studying the role of education in intergenerational social class mobility using log-linear models for contingency tables, indings in this literature are not free from rescaling or non-collapsibility bias caused by adjusting for education in these models. Drawing on the methodological literature on inverse probability reweighting, I present a straightforward standardization approach free from this bias. The approach reweighs in an initial step the mobility table cell frequencies to create a pseudo-population in which social class origins and education are independent of each other, after which one can apply any loglinear model to the reweighted mobility table. In contrast to the Karlson-Holm-Breen method, the approach yields coefficients that are comparable across different studies because they are unaffected by education’s predictive power of class destinations. Moreover, the approach is easily applied to models for various types of mobility patterns such as those in the core model of fluidity; it yields a single summary measure of overall mediation; and it can incorporate several mediating variables, allowing researchers to control for additional merit proxies such as cognitive skills or potential confounders such as age. I illustrate the utility of the approach in four empirical examples.
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Kristian Bernt Karlson: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: kbk@soc.ku.dk

Acknowledgments: The research leading to the results presented in this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 851293).

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Karlson, Kristian Bernt. 2022. “Education and Social Fluidity: A Reweighting Approach.” Sociological Science 9: 27-39.
  • Received: September 9, 2021
  • Accepted: December 16, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a2


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Filial Intelligence and Family Social Class, 1947 to 2012

By on October 20, 2021 in Articles

Lindsay Paterson

Sociological Science October 20, 2021
10.15195/v8.a16

Abstract

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Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social inequality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore measured intelligence is important to our understanding of how inequality operates and is reproduced. The present analysis uses social surveys of children aged 10 to 11 years in Britain between 1947 and 2012 to assess whether the social-class distribution of intelligence has changed. The main conclusions are that, although children’s intelligence relative to their peers remains associated with social class, the association may have weakened recently, mainly because the average intelligence in the highest-status classes may have moved closer to the mean.
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Lindsay Paterson: School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
E-mail: lindsay.paterson@ed.ac.uk

Acknowledgments: The research was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (grant number MRF-2017-002). I am grateful to Professor Ian J. Deary, director of the Lothian Birth Cohorts, University of Edinburgh, for data from the 1947 survey; to the Medical Research Council (MRC) Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing, University College London, and the principal investigators of the MRC National Survey of Health and Development (doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q101), for data from the 1957 survey; and to the UK Data Archive for data from the 1969, 1980, and 2012 surveys. I thank the study participants in all these surveys for their data, and also members of the scientific and data collection teams who have been involved in the data collection. I am grateful to Ian J. Deary and Roxanne Connelly for comments on a draft of the article.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Paterson, Lindsay. 2021. “Filial Intelligence and Family Social Class, 1947 to 2012.” Sociological Science 8: 325-345.
  • Received: August 13, 2021
  • Accepted: August 25, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Richard Breen
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a16


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The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment

By on September 12, 2018 in Articles

Kyla Thomas

Sociological Science, September 12, 2018
10.15195/v5.a24

Abstract
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This article investigates cultural forms of class bias in the middle-income U.S. labor market. Results from an audit study of employment discrimination in four U.S. cities reveal that cultural signals of class, when included in résumés, have a systematic effect on the callback rates of women applying to customer-facing jobs. For these women, displays of highbrow taste—the cultural signals of a higher-class background—generate significantly higher rates of employer callback than displays of lowbrow taste—the cultural signals of a lower-class background. Meanwhile, cultural signals of class have no systematic effect on the callback rates of male and/or non–customer-facing job applicants. Results from a survey-experimental study of 1,428 U.S. hiring managers suggest that these differing patterns of employer callback may be explained by the positive effect of higher-class cultural signals on perceptions of polish and competence and their negative effect on perceptions of warmth.
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Kyla Thomas: Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California
E-mail: kylathom@usc.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Paul DiMaggio for his intellectual guidance and support as well as Viviana Zelizer, Devah Pager, Susan Fiske, David Pedulla, Patrick Ishizuka, René Flores, and participants of the University of Michigan’s Inequality and Family Working Group for their valuable insights and feedback. This research was supported by the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation, Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Social Organization, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Thomas, Kyla. 2018. “The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment.” Sociological Science 5: 562-595.
  • Received: November 17, 2017
  • Accepted: July 15, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a24


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Trump Voters and the White Working Class

By on April 16, 2018 in Articles

Stephen L. Morgan, Jiwon Lee

Sociological Science, April 16, 2018
10.15195/v5.a10

Abstract
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To evaluate the claim that white working-class voters were a crucial block of support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, this article offers two sets of results. First, self-reports of presidential votes in 2012 and 2016 from the American National Election Studies show that Obama-to-Trump voters and 2012 eligible nonvoters composed a substantial share of Trump’s 2016 voters and were disproportionately likely to be members of the white working class. Second, when county vote tallies in 2012 and 2016 are merged with the public-use microdata samples of the 2012-to-2016 American Community Surveys, areal variations across 1,142 geographic units that sensibly partition the United States show that Trump’s gains in 2016 above Romney’s performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportion of the voting population in each area that was white and working class. Taken together, these results support the claim that Trump’s appeal to the white working class was crucial for his victory.
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Stephen L. Morgan: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University.
E-mail: stephen.morgan@jhu.edu.

Jiwon Lee: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University.
E-mail: jiwonlee@jhu.edu.

Acknowledgements: We thank the seminar participants at Johns Hopkins University and
New York University for their suggestions.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Morgan, Stephen L., and Jiwon Lee. 2018. “Trump Voters and the White Working Class.” Sociological Science 5:234-245.
  • Received: February 19, 2018
  • Accepted: March 25, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a10

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The White Working Class and Voter Turnout in U.S. Presidential Elections, 2004 to 2016

By on November 20, 2017 in Articles

Stephen L. Morgan, Jiwon Lee

Sociological Science, November 20, 2017
DOI 10.15195/v4.a27

Abstract
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Through an analysis of the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 Current Population Surveys as well as the 2004 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article investigates class differences and patterns of voter turnout for the last four U.S. presidential elections. After developing some support for the claim that a surge of white, working-class voters emerged in competitive states in 2016, a portrait of class differences on political matters among white, non-Hispanic, eligible voters between 2004 and 2016 is offered to assess the electoral consequences of this surge. These latter results are consistent with the claim that racial prejudice, anti-immigrant sentiment, concerns about economic security, and frustration with government responsiveness may have led many white, working-class voters to support an outsider candidate who campaigned on these themes. However, these same results give no support to the related claim that the white working class changed its positions on these matters in response to the 2016 primary election campaign or in the months just before the general election.

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Stephen L. Morgan: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Email: stephen.morgan@jhu.edu

Jiwon Lee: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Email: jiwonlee@jhu.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank the editors for their incisive suggestions for revisions.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Morgan, Stephen L., and Jiwon Lee. 2017. “The White Working Class and Voter Turnout in U.S. Presidential Elections, 2004 to 2016.” Sociological Science 4: 656-685.
  • Received: October 2, 2017
  • Accepted: October 12, 2017
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v4.a27

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Social Class and Party Identification During the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Presidencies

By on August 3, 2017 in Articles

Stephen L. Morgan, Jiwon Lee

Sociological Science, August 3, 2017
DOI 10.15195/v4.a16

Abstract
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Through an analysis of the 1994 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article demonstrates that a substantial proportion of eligible voters within the working class turned away from solid identification with either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party during the Obama presidency. Even before the 2016 election cycle commenced, conditions were uncharacteristically propitious for a Republican candidate who could appeal to prospective voters in the working class, especially those who had not voted in recent presidential elections but could be mobilized to vote. These findings support the contested position that variation in party identification is a genuine leading indicator of electoral outcomes and perhaps also, in this case, of party realignment.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Stephen L. Morgan: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Email: stephen.morgan@jhu.edu

Jiwon Lee: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Email: jiwonlee@jhu.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Danny Schlozman for a helpful orienting discussion of these topics as well as Andy Cherlin, Mike Hout, Jennifer Silva, and Tom Smith for comments on the penultimate draft.

Supplemental Material
GSS Methodological Report No. 125, A Coding of Social Class for the General Social Survey

  • Citation: Morgan, Stephen L., and Jiwon Lee. 2017. “Social Class and Party Identification During the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Presidencies.” Sociological Science 4: 394-423.
  • Received: June 12, 2017
  • Accepted: June 25, 2017
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v4.a16


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