This paper explores the intersection of time and relational economic sociology. Building on Viviana Zelizer’s relational framework, I argue that analyzing the temporal dimensions of exchange provides insight into how social ties gain meaning through economic practices. The paper shows time’s dual role as both an organizing structure bounding action, and a dynamic element that actors leverage to shape transactional contexts. As structure, time offers culturally-available templates like schedules and rhythms that facilitate coordination and signify predictable social meanings befitting particular relational categories. Yet time also constitutes relational work itself; strategic timing, duration, pacing, and sequencing of interactions signal context, manage expectations, and sustain bonds amidst entanglements. Synchronization through temporal agency prevents mismatches between transactions and social contexts that could strain ties. This agency in time ranges from passive adherence to dominant structures to active assertions of power resistance, enabling both domination and defiance across economic contexts. Analyzing shared temporal infrastructure within circuits of commerce further illuminates how actors distinguish those spheres of exchange at various scale from the impersonal market. Ultimately, incorporating temporality strengthens relational economic sociology by identifying a key mechanism through which practices of exchange become relationally meaningful.

This article critically re-examines the narrative that the Israeli system of spatial control has an exclusive negative impact on the West Bank economy. It focuses on the burgeoning fuel smuggling industry, which grew to constitute nearly one-third of the total consumed fuel in the West Bank by 2018. The article posits that the impacts of Israeli control on West Bank-Israeli economic relations involve an interplay between structural top-down imposition and Palestinian agency exerted from below. Drawing from documentary evidence and semi-structured interviews conducted with smugglers, Israeli, and Palestinian policymakers, the research reveals a paradox, finding its theoretical explanation in borderland studies. The barriers and fragmentation meant to oppress Palestinians create opportunities for new Palestinian economic beneficiaries. The article traces the emergence of smuggling networks that expand Palestinian-Israeli connections and cooperation. It concludes considering how the structure-agency interplay, which characterizes the Israeli colonial structure, affects the study of Palestinian political economy under Israeli occupation. This includes the influence of smuggling on supply, demand, pricing, and power hierarchies within the West Bank’s fuel sector.

Comparing police crime-rates to newspaper reports for a period of over six decades this reasearch first examined crime reporting in the media. Second, it confirmed what we know: location of crime news in the paper (front page, center), reports length, tone, choice of words, gender, race or class issues. Third, it suggests a new challenging insight. Rather than have periodic, discrete crimereports, waves or moral panics, the data indicate that the media maintains inflated, consistent and continuous levels of crime reporting, thereby keeping a relative high level of concern and fear thus normalizing and routinizing these concerns and fears.

Revisions are always hard and many times painful . . .Let me start with a real story: I was a freshman student at the department of philosophy and took a course in the philosophy of science. The professor was well known for his scholarly work in philosophy of science, yet notorious for his intolerance of students and for being very idiosyncratic. After seeing how he offended and teased the students, I decided to stay in the class as a free listening student and enjoyed the topics the class discussed on science and ethics. There were a few students who chose to formally enroll. Some students realized that the semester was moving on, yet the profes-sor did not discuss the final assignments in class.

Abstract. West Bank exports to Israel have faced significant challenges due to the Israeli system of spatial control, aimed at controlling Palestinians and facilitating settler expansion throughout the West Bank. The routing of Palestinian commercial freight through the separation barrier has escalated logistics costs, while settlement expansion in Area C has further impeded mobility between Palestinian self-rule areas. This article highlights the tactics employed by Palestinian economic actors to offset these challenges within the confines of intensified Israeli spatial control. Using data from observations, interviews, and documentary sources spanning 2019–2023, the study focuses on Palestinian furniture exports to Israel. It reveals that Palestinians have leveraged colonial spatial variations to their advantage by forming partnerships with Israelis to export products through Jewish settlements. The article concludes by advocating a disaggregated level of analysis that uncovers the dynamic interplay between Israeli spatial constraints and Palestinian agency in response. In the case of furniture exporters, this has led to deepening Palestinian–Israeli economic ties and increased engagement with the infrastructure of Israeli occupation to mitigate its economic impact.

Background: The political and economic change accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a large wave of immigrants to Israel during the 1990s. These immigrants arrived from low-fertility contexts to a higher-fertility society. Objective: We consider how the fertility of cohorts of diverse immigrant women from a low fertility context shifts in the context of high fertility. Methods: We examine completed fertility, parity distributions, and age at first birth of immigrant women compared to native-born Jewish women. Data taken from the Israel Population Register and from Israel Social Surveys are examined by birth cohort, religion, and religiosity. Results: We document increases in completed fertility, proportions at final parity 3, age at first birth, and rapid reductions in proportions at final parity 1, across birth cohorts of immigrants who arrived between their early 20s and their early 30s. Rates of change slowed across cohorts of immigrants who arrived between ages 10–21. Relative to comparisons between all Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and all native-born Jews, there is much closer convergence between secular immigrants and the secular native-born in terms of completed fertility, but substantially less convergence in terms of age at first birth. We also describe strikingly different patterns of change among immigrants who are not classified as Jewish. Contribution: Patterns of immigrant convergence in fertility patterns vis-à-vis native-born groups differ markedly by religion and religiosity. Our findings highlight the importance of explicitly considering heterogeneity among immigrant and native-born groups.

After more than two months of intensive bombardment, Israel’s war in Gaza continues to exact a terrible human toll. As of this writing, Israeli forces have killed close to 20,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. According to the United Nations, roughly 1.8 million people, or 80 percent of Gaza’s population, have been internally displaced since the war’s start. Within Israel, an atmosphere of tension, fear, and anger prevails. Massive billboards and banners draped across high-rises announce, “Together, We Will Win.” Civilians and uniformed soldiers alike walk the streets armed with M-16s. Yet discontent with the government’s conduct of the war has also begun to simmer. Hamas and other Palestinian factions continue to hold at least 120 Israelis hostage, but the Benjamin Netanyahu administration often refers to returning them as only a secondary priority. Against this backdrop, and despite mounting repression, left-wing Israeli organizers and anti-occupation activists have begun to return to the streets.Their demand: a ceasefire and a deal to free all the hostages. On December 6, Dissent spoke with three left-wing Israeli activist-thinkers about the challenges facing the Israeli left right now.

The choice of our article—Reserve Soldiers as Transmigrants—for the 50th anniversary of Armed Forces & Society special issue indicates heightened interest in reserve forces and recognition of their organizational and social uniqueness. At base of our previous publications was an implicit assumption that reservists belong to diverse and representative social and cultural groups. In other words, we did not explicitly address the issues of the social distribution of reservists. In this short piece, we turn that assumption into a variable so that the key questions that arise for further research are “Who serves in the reserves?” and “What are the implications of the social distribution of reservists?” While these questions have been addressed in regard to conscripts and regulars, there is a dearth of relevant studies on reserves. We suggest that this line of analysis further illuminates the complexity of contracts and dynamics between reservists, the military, and the state.

Beyond its variable organizational structures, the nation-state is an idea or model – a now-global institution. Since the late nineteenth century, and at an accelerated rate after World War II, the core ideological model of the state has expanded to incorporate authority over, and responsibility for, more aspects of society. We track the worldwide impact of this process by describing and analyzing the rise of eleven relevant cabinet ministries across 190 countries, from 1870 to 2000. We find that early in the period, state penetration occurred in areas seen as central to the collective good – education, welfare, health, statistics, and labor. After the war, areas involving the status of the individual and the rationalization of nature and society were added in global formulations. New ministries focused on women, children, and family life, along with ministries of higher education and the environment. We show that these changes occur globally, rather than mainly as the result of the internal characteristics of countries. The expanded state, beyond its power, reflects structuration under the influence of global models: as the nation-state model expands in associations and discourse at the world level, organizational structuration develops at the national level.

The controversy over vaccines has recently intensified in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with calls from politicians, health professionals, journalists, and citizens to take harsh measures against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” while accusing them of spreading “fake news” and as such, of endangering public health. However, the issue of suppression of vaccine dissenters has rarely been studied from the point of view of those who raise concerns about vaccine safety. The purpose of the present study was to examine the subjective perceptions of professionals (physicians, nurses, researchers) involved with vaccines through practice and/or research and who take a critical view on vaccines, about what they perceive as the suppression of dissent in the field of vaccines, their response to it, and its potential implications on science and medicine. Respondents reported being subjected to a variety of censorship and suppression tactics, including the retraction of papers pointing to vaccine safety problems, negative publicity, difficulty in obtaining research funding, calls for dismissal, summonses to official hearings, suspension of medical licenses, and self-censorship. Respondents also reported on what has been termed a “backfire effect” – a counter-reaction that draws more attention to the opponents’ position. Suppression of dissent impairs scientific discourse and research practice while creating the false impression of scientific consensus.