Housing discrimination as a field in the making: institutional coupling, epistemic accumulation, and the uneven production of knowledge (1972–2022)

Abstract

Abstract Housing discrimination remains a persistent source of inequality in access to housing and related life chances. Yet the evolution of academic knowledge on this phenomenon has rarely been examined as an object of inquiry in its own right. This article asks how research on housing discrimination has developed between 1972 and 2022, how the field is structured in thematic and geographic terms, and how these dynamics can be interpreted in relation to broader institutional transformations in housing governance. Theoretically, the article bridges housing-discrimination research and comparative housing studies by conceptualising housing discrimination as an outcome of governance arrangements shaping access to housing across market, welfare, and regulatory domains. Drawing on the concepts of housing decommodification and policy accumulation, we explain the evolution of the field through three mechanisms: centralised diffusion, institutional coupling, and epistemic accumulation, which together account for the uneven production of knowledge on housing discrimination. Empirically, the analysis relies on a curated corpus of 1,350 peer-reviewed publications retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus. Using bibliometric mapping, co-authorship network analysis, term co-occurrence and temporal analysis, the article reconstructs the intellectual architecture of the field over five decades. The results identify three enduring thematic clusters: race-based discrimination and segregation; law, education, and social rights; and health, gender, and identity. While research output has expanded rapidly since the early 2000s, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis, the field remains strongly centralised around the US and the UK. We show that thematic diversification and epistemic asymmetries closely mirror cycles of housing decommodification and fragmented institutional change. The article contributes to housing studies by offering the first systematic, global reconstruction of housing-discrimination research and by advancing a sociological explanation of how knowledge production and housing institutions co-evolve. It highlights epistemic inequality as a key, yet overlooked, dimension of housing governance.