The Nobel Prize stands above all other awards in science in terms of both scientific prestige and public recognition.  This paper examines the determinants of awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics. Using a novel dataset of candidate nominations, publications, and social networks from 1901 to 1966 – the most recent year available under the Nobel statutes – we analyze the contributions of social closure, cultural closure, and cumulative advantage to the selection of laureates by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  The results show that cultural closure – the preference of judges for certain specialties within physics over others – plays an especially important role in prize decisions.  Our findings are consistent with the existence of a strong and globally recognized hierarchy of research topics within physics, which has consequences for the development of scientific research over the long term.

The laureates, nominators, and nominees for the three Nobel Prizes in science are all doubtless members of a scientific elite.  The process of awarding the Nobel Prize therefore offers a vantage point on the dynamics of international scientific hierarchies.  Under the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the nominating system tasks representatives of various national scientific elites with recommending members for the international “ultra-elite” of Nobel laureates.  This chapter examines the population of German, Austrian, and Swiss nominators and nominees, paying special attention to the role of each country in the nomination process.  The results provide evidence for a clear hierarchy of countries, but with sharp differences in the structure of the scientific hierarchy across each of the three science prizes.  The international scale of merit is most well-defined in physics, while national elites in chemistry and medicine displayed more independence and, in medicine, a lack of consensus at the international level.  Taken together, the results suggest a complex relationship between national and international scientific elites.  

In the early decades of the 19th century, physicians in the USA enjoyed unquestioned authority in medicine and increasing state recognition. But by mid-century, their monopoly had given way to a raucous free market for medical care. To explain the causes and consequences of this dismantling of a professional monopoly, we draw on political sociology. We argue that to maintain a monopoly, a dominant profession must defend its cultural authority against rival claims and preserve its institutional support from the state. A dominant profession can lose its monopoly if rival occupations mobilize to challenge its cultural authority and if populist political coalitions mobilize to repeal laws upholding professional monopolies. Our analysis, which covers all states in the Union by 1860, reveals that the dynamics of contention, both within the system of professions and in the wider political arena, can erode the foundations of professional monopolies.

The worldwide financial crisis that began in 2007 was set off by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the US, which caused widespread banking failures in the US and forced the federal government to provide a massive bailout to the financial sector. The crisis simultaneously reverberated to banks around the world, and eventually brought about a worldwide recession. This paper documents why other countries, especially in Western Europe, were so susceptible to the housing price downturn. We explore various mechanisms by which the financial crisis might have spread including the existence of similar regulatory schemes, government deficits and current account imbalances, trade linkages, and the presence of a housing bubble. We present a surprising result: European banks went down because they were pursuing the same strategies to make profit as the American banks in the same markets. They had joined the market in the US for mortgage-backed securities and funded them by borrowing in the asset-backed-commercialpaper market. When the housing market turned down, they suffered the same fate as their US counterparts. Our study makes a broader theoretical point suggesting that subsequent studies of global finance and financial markets need to consider the identities and strategies of the banks that structure the main markets for different products. This insight has implications for the literatures on financialization, globalization, and the sociology of finance.

Research on financialization has been constrained by limited suitable measures for cases outside of the for-profit sector. Using the case of US higher education, we consider financialization as both increasing reliance on financial investment returns and increasing costs from transactions to acquire capital. We document returns and costs across four types of transactions: (i) revenues from endowment investments, (ii) interest payments on institutional borrowing by colleges, (iii) profits extracted by investors in for-profit colleges and (iv) interest payments on student loan borrowing by households. Estimated annual funding from endowment investments grew from $16 billion in 2003 to $20 billion in 2012. Meanwhile financing costs grew from $21 billion in 2003 to $48 billion in 2012, or from 5 to 9% of the total higher education spending, even as interest rates declined. Increases in financial returns, however, were concentrated at wealthy colleges whereas increases in financing costs tended to outpace returns at poorer institutions. We discuss the implications of the findings for resource allocation, organizational governance and stratification among colleges and households.

Personal relationships are embedded in both spatial and relational contexts. Using data on 60 intentional communities from the Urban Communes Data Set, we examine how such embedding is related to the persistence and re-formation of close personal ties over a thirteen year period, beginning from when most members had been out of their group environments more than a decade. We find that local network structure—the pattern of dyads immediately surrounding any dyad—is extremely weighty in which ties persist, which lapse, and which are re-initiated, but that the precise ways in which local structure affects contact are bound up with the distance between dyad members. We also find asymmetries in these processes that other studies have been unable to uncover—that processes that lead ties to be dropped are not the same as those that lead them to be renewed; that increases in local embeddedness are not opposite of decreases; that change in contact is not the same as change in friendship. Finally, there is evidence of hierarchical effects influencing the retention of friendships more than twenty-five years after most respondents left their groups.

The worldwide financial crisis that began in 2007 was set off by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the USA. The crisis simultaneously reverberated to banks around the world, and eventually brought about a worldwide recession. The biggest banks in the developed world got in trouble because they were pursuing the same strategies to make profit as the American banks. They had joined the market in the USA for mortgage-backed securities and funded them by borrowing in the asset-backed commercial paper market. When the housing market turned down, they suffered the same fate as their US counterparts. Financial deregulation played a complex role in this process. Most of the banks that participated in this market came from countries where financial deregulation occurred. But not all banks from countries with financial deregulation entered this market. Countries with high levels of financial deregulation also experienced deeper recessions, suggesting that in the home market, banks had taken on riskier loans as well. Our study makes a broader theoretical point, suggesting that subsequent studies of global finance and financial markets need to consider the identities and strategies of the banks as their tactics explain a lot about how the global markets for different financial products are structured.