Sociology 98M: Social Class

1: Build on a Lead You Have Already (The 'Item in Hand' Approach).

Key Resource: Google Scholar

Why:  You already know the value of examining footnotes and bibliographies for related scholarship or for identifying primary source material. 

Sometimes, though, you want to look beyond the item in hand -- not look at its antecedents but at its intellectual descendants -- the scholarship produced later and after, that has cited your item in its bibliography and footnotes. Following citation trails (Cited By) is an essential scholarly practice and Google Scholar is excellent for this kind of work. 

Example: Marshall, G. (1983). Some remarks on the study of working-class consciousness. Politics & Society, 12(3), 263-301.

 2: Check for a subject bibliography as a way to direct your reading.

Key Resource: Oxford Bibliographies Online

Why: Selective rather than exhaustive and combining a bit of description with a little bit of evaluation, OBO entries help you identify some of the most important and influential scholarship on a broad social, political, cultural or interdisciplinary disciplinary topic.

Your very focused research question may not have a bibliography, but its larger dimensions - or its theoretical implications or something intellectually "adjacent" to it are likely to have some representation. 

(Often, though, the issue in information-seeking isn't scarcity of material but overabundance. OBO entries can help you solve the dilemma of knowing who to read first, what to read for, or simply which voices in the conversation you should give some fuller attention to.)

Example Entries: 

• Social Mobility [OBO Sociology module]
• Black Middle Class [OBO African American Studies module]
• The Politics of Class Formation [OBO Political Science module]
• Urban Underclass [OBO Urban Studies module]

3:  Look for a more or less recent research overview on your topic or its broader dimensions.

Key Resource: Annual Reviews

Why: Literature reviews help you easily understand—and contextualize—the principal contributions that have been made in your field. They not only track trends over time in the scholarly discussions of a topic, but also synthesize and connect related work. They cite the trailblazers and sometimes the outliers, and they even root out errors of fact or concept. Typically, they include a final section that identifies remaining questions or future directions research might take.  Social science fields like political science, law, economics, sociology, and business -- where you can expect issues of labor and work to be discussed -- are well represented here. 

Example Review:

• DiPrete, T. A. (2020). The impact of inequality on intergenerational mobility. Annual Review of Sociology, 46(1), 379-398.

Other Strategies for locating literature reviews:

Stand-alone reviews

• In subject databases, like those described below, you'll often be able to limit by literature review or review essay or historiography. You may need look for these these filters under the document type or methodology category.  

Embedded reviews

•  In book-length studies, the introduction (by author[s] or editor[s]) often acts as miniaturized lit review.  In the process of announcing its purpose and origins, introductions identify the intellectual forbears who laid the groundwork.

• In dissertations, lit reviews commonly appear as an introductory or preliminary chapter. Try ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Dissertations aren't peer-reviewed in the same way that  published articles and academic books are, but they can also be a source for topics that are emerging, trending, or very current. 

4: Deploy Language Strategically to Surface Backgrounds, Contexts, and Agenda-Setting Materials

Key Resource: HOLLIS 

Examples:

• handbook: this is a key academic format, regardless of discipline and denotes a published book that republishes ground-breaking work, or commissions scholarly essays that summarize standard approaches and important or consensus views. Other terms to try: companion, reader or anthology or even essays.
• debate or controversy (or controvers* to pick up variants), or contested or disputed : these words often help you surface works that identify the "stakes" of a particular argument, action, phenomenon, etc. So will words like proponents, advocates or their opposites: opponents or critics. Watch for insider language as you read, including acronyms, like SES.. 
• theory or theoretical or philosophy or philosophical might help you find works in larger contexts or examined via a "lens" of some kind.  You can truncate these terms, too, by the way: theor*, philosoph*
• narrative* or case study or interview* or even the phrase "lived experiences" angles topics toward approach as do the more general terms, qualitative, quantitative, and  mixed methods.