Research

My work centers on understanding how power, control, and cultural dynamics shape contested fields—those economic or political arenas where the rules are unsettled and state & non‐state actors interact in complex ways. This work proceeds across three main areas. First, I study gray markets to understand how legal ambiguities reshape power dynamics, give rise to new forms of social control, and influence the practices of stigmatized organizations. Second, I analyze the cultural logics of ideological violence, exploring how terrorism operates within broader social frameworks and how these frameworks inform state-sanctioned punishment. Third, I investigate the privatization of punishment, examining how companies that contract with prisons commodify the carceral experience and how this commodification impacts incarcerated individuals, their families, and the public. I take an interpretive analytical approach to these topics, with expertise in formal models of cultural analysis, narrative analysis, and visual sociology.

Research on Contested Markets

Kinney, Alexander B. 2024. “Becoming a Cannabis Professional.” Sociological Inquiry (Online first)

Kinney, Alexander B. 2024. “Surveillance, Social Control, and Managing Semi-Legality in U.S. Commercial Cannabis.” Social Problems 71(2):572–93. doi: 10.1093/socpro/spac037.

Kinney, Alexander B. 2023. “‘Cannabis Businesses Are Being Good Contributors to the Community’: The Regulated Cannabis Industry and Cannabis Normalization in the United States.” Crime & Delinquency. doi: 10.1177/00111287231193989.

Kinney, Alexander B. 2023. “Sumptuary Administration: How Contested Market Actors Shape the Trajectory of Policy When Regulated under Fragmented Governance.” Law & Policy 45(4):507–29. doi: 10.1111/lapo.12216.

Kinney, Alexander B. 2021. “Embedding into an Emerging Money System: The Case of Bitcoin.” Sociological Focus 54(1):77–92. doi: 10.1080/00380237.2020.1845260.

Kinney, Alexander B. 2019. “The Extra-Institutional Logics of an Emerging Market Field: Values and Practice in the Bitcoin Experience:” Social Currents. doi: 10.1177/2329496519880314.

Research on Contentious Politics

Puetz, Kyle, Andrew P. Davis, and Alexander B. Kinney. 2021. “Meaning Structures in the World Polity: A Semantic Network Analysis of Human Rights Terminology in the World’s Peace Agreements.” Poetics 88:101598.

Pfaffendorf, Jessica, Andrew P. Davis, and Alexander B. Kinney. 2021. “Masculinity, Ritual, and Racialized Status Threat: Examining Mass Shooter Manifestos Using Structural Topic Models.” Sociological Inquiry 91(2):287–312. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12409.

Kinney, Alexander B., Andrew P. Davis, and Yongjun Zhang. 2018. “Theming for Terror: Organizational Adornment in Terrorist Propaganda.” Poetics 69:27–40. doi: 10.1016/j.poetic.2018.05.001.

Research on the Commodification of Prison Experience

Please email me for my working papers in this area.