Sociologica - International Journal for Sociological Debate

21/11/2024

I have been very critical of rational choice accounts of trust as introduced by prominent scholars such as James Coleman and Russell Hardin. However, in the spirit of sensemaking, I would not say they have been wrong, but their conceptualizations have been simplistic and incomplete.

Guido Möllering, Universität Witten/Herdecke

Practice(s) of Trusting. Commentary on Gil Eyal, Larry Au and Cristian Capotescu’s “Trust Is a Verb!” Authors Guido Möllering Reinhard Mohn Institute of Management, Faculty of Management, Economics & Society, Witten/Herdecke University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1157-7289 Guido Möllering is...

19/11/2024

In our risk society, as in any other, trust is fundamental and indispensable. Our society, however, which increasingly needs trust, makes it increasingly unlikely. Today, trusting (as a verb) takes the form of a dilemma that affects the very foundations of social life. When the willingness to trust is reduced, so is, as we have seen, social complexity. If one trusts, one can act in a controlled way without knowing all the information directly — if people cannot trust, fewer and less diverse possibilities are available to society as a whole.

Elena Esposito, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna

The Dilemma of Trust in the Risk Society. Commentary on Gil Eyal, Larry Au and Cristian Capotescu’s “Trust is a Verb!” Authors Elena Esposito Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna; Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld (Germany) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-...

17/11/2024

“Trust itself” is a figment of the scholastic imagination. There is only trusting: practical skilled action, partially relying on existing institutionalized frames, but ultimately giving rise to a complex, messy, eventful process wherein explicit reasons and tacit habits, skepticism and confidence, mistrust and little “leaps of faith” are all intertwined.

We should reject the problematization according to which everything else is riding on trust. It is a ruse meant to flatter sociologists and assign them a subordinate role in the machinery of social order. And we should reject the object, trust itself, proxied by surveys. What is left over when we subtract “trust itself”, however, is trusting as practical, skilled action. It can be the object of a fruitful sociological research program for decades to come.

Gil Eyal, Columbia University
Larry Au, The City College of New York
Cristian Capotescu, Columbia University

Trust is a Verb!: A Critical Reconstruction of the Sociological Theory of Trust Authors Gil Eyal Department of Sociology, Columbia University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7194-3864 Gil Eyal is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Trust Collaboratory at Columbia University (USA). He is the aut...

15/11/2024

If LLMs could generate data as if they were “participants”, answering questions, making decisions or arguing for those, this would certainly represent a seismic shift for many social sciences that have often been struggling with hard-to-find participants, expensive data collection and questionable convenience samples.
In what follows, we review the extant literature and the emergent debate on the topic and discuss what we see as the main concerns with the use of LLMs as a source of social science research data

Luca Rossi, IT-Universitetet i København
Katherine Harrison, Linköpings universitet
Irina Shklovski, Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen and Linköpings universitet

The Problems of LLM-generated Data in Social Science Research Authors Luca Rossi NERDS research group, Department of Digital Design, IT University of Copenhagen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3629-2039 Luca Rossi is an Associate Professor of Digital Media and Networks at the Department of Digital Desig...

13/11/2024

This essay accounts for a novel way to explore generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) based on the AI Methodology Map. The map is a pedagogical resource (interactive toolkit and teaching material) and theoretical framework designed to structure, visually represent, and explore generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) web-based applications (apps) for digital methods-led research

Janna Joceli Omena — Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London (United Kingdom)
Antonella Autuori — University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland
(SUPSI) (Switzerland); RMIT University, Melbourne (Australia)
Eduardo Leite Vasconcelos — Universidade Federal da Bahia - UFBA (Brazil)
Matteo Subet — University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI)
Massimo Botta — University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI)

AI Methodology Map. Practical and Theoretical Approach to Engage with GenAI for Digital Methods Research Authors Janna Joceli Omena Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8445-9502 Janna Joceli Omena is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Digital Methods....

11/11/2024

Implementing a fully LLM-based pipeline presents significant validation challenges, necessitating a reevaluation of established accuracy assessment strategies. Drawing on the experience gained while designing and validating the pipeline, we explore the specific choices made during the validation protocol, focusing on three key characteristics of LLM-integrated research that complicate accuracy evaluation: the versatility of LLMs as general-purpose models, offering numerous application options with varying degrees of supervision, from multilingual capabilities, including underrepresented languages in research, to diverse content types, tasks, and fields of study; the varying levels of granularity and nuance in LLM-uncovered narratives; and the limitations of human assessment capabilities when evaluating models pre-trained on extensive datasets.

Giada Marino e Fabio Giglietto, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo

Integrating Large Language Models in Political Discourse Studies on Social Media: Challenges of Validating an LLMs-in-the-loop Pipeline Authors Giada Marino Department of Communication Sciences, Humanities and International Studies, University of Urbino Carlo Bo https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9087-2608...

09/11/2024

LLM-based text annotation has become something of an academic Wild West, as the lack of established standards has meant that both researchers and reviewers lack benchmarks for evaluating LLM-based research, leading to risks of low-quality research and invalid results. LLMs fit poorly into our existing epistemic frameworks: many of the lessons from machine learning are obsolete, and while using LLMs at times appears eerily similar to working with human coders, such similarities can be equally misleading
This brief paper seeks to contribute to addressing the need for common standards by suggesting a set of best practices for how LLMs can be reliably, reproducibly, and ethically employed for text annotation.

Petter Törnberg, University of Amsterdam / Universiteit van Amsterdam

Best Practices for Text Annotation with Large Language Models Authors Petter Törnberg Institute for Language, Logic and Computation, University of Amsterdam https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8722-8646 Petter Törnberg is an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterda...

07/11/2024

The users of a AI assistant based on a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT are too often led by their interactions with it to believe that it can “think” and “know” in a strikingly similar way to humans, albeit limited in equally remarkable fashion. But this belief in the human-likeness of AI is erroneous, as the LLM’s performance of “thinking” and “knowing” is only superficially similar to that of humans.
The point of this essay is to equip researchers, teachers and citizens with a way to realize, by themselves, that the LLM way of knowing is fundamentally different from that of humans. We contend that even though LLMs “know”, and even though they also “assert” that they know, they “ignore” what their “knowledge” does or does not cover.

Mathieu Jacomy, Aalborg Universitet
Erik Borra, University of Amsterdam / Universiteit van Amsterdam

05/11/2024

Generative artificial intelligence encompasses models designed to synthesize new text, images, sounds, or other kinds of content according to the datasets they have been trained on [...] For users of generative models, who might not have direct access to neither the model itself nor the training data, this entails an epistemological challenge, as all that is available for interpretation is the input and the output, with everything in between hidden away inside nested black boxes.
This essay proposes that these nested black boxes can be, if not opened and examined, at least shaken for clues about their functioning. My argument is that, while the high-dimensional nature of latent spaces makes them fundamentally impenetrable to human cognition, the correlation between inputs and outputs can be operationalized to obtain some insights into the data a model has been trained on, what the model has learned from it, and how the model draws upon it to synthesize new information. As a qualitative researcher, I approach these questions from the perspective of everyday use at the human scale.

Gabriele de Seta, i Bergen

https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/19512

Synthetic Probes: A Qualitative Experiment in Latent Space Exploration Authors Gabriele de Seta Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0497-2811 Gabriele de Seta is, technically, a sociologist. He is a Researcher at the University o...

03/11/2024

This article introduces the symposium on “Repurposing Generative AI for Social Research”
The rapid advancement of Generative AI technologies, particularly Large Language Models, has ushered in a new era of possibilities — but also a whole new set of interrogation — for social research. This symposium brings together a set of contributions that collectively explore the diverse ways in which Generative AI could be “repurposed” in a digital methods fashion.

Federico Pilati, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Anders Kristian Munk, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet - DTU
Tommaso Venturini, Université de Genève

https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/20378

Generative AI for Social Research: Going Native with Artificial Intelligence Authors Federico Pilati Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5526-1011 Federico Pilati is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and R...

01/11/2024

The new issue 18(2)/2024 of “Sociologica. International Journal for Sociological Debate” has been published and is now freely available online, at the link:

https://sociologica.unibo.it/issue/view/1317

The issue proposes an amazing Symposium titled “Repurposing Generative AI for Social Research”, edited and introduced by Federico Pilati, Anders Kristian Munk and Tommaso Venturini, with six contributions by Gabriele de Seta, Mathieu Jacomy and Erik Borra, Petter Törnberg, Giada Marino and Fabio Giglietto, Janna Joceli Omena with Antonella Autuori, Eduardo Leite Vasconcelos, Matteo Subet and Massimo Botta, Luca Rossi with Katherine Harrison and Irina Shklovski.

The Essay Section hosts an insightful contribution by Gil Eyal, Larry Au, and Cristian Capotescu, titled “Trust is a Verb!: A Critical Reconstruction of the Sociological Theory of Trust”, followed by two challenging commentaries by Elena Esposito and Guido Möllering, and completed by the authors’ reply

09/07/2024

Howard Becker, one of the most influential and revered sociologists of our time, died on August 16, 2023. His theorizing and methods for doing research have influenced three generations of researchers. He began as an outsider in the field, yet drew people to his approach. This essay is a tribute to his memory.

Ugo Corte, University of Stavanger
https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/19640/17927

07/07/2024

Our goal in this paper is to offer a general theory of the ways in which communication breakdowns arise and the conditions under which they can generate positive outcomes.
Özgecan Koçak (Emory University) and Phanish Puranam (INSEAD)
https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/18956/17925

05/07/2024

Weaving together biographical episodes with intellectual insights, in this interview Levi offers some thoughts on the relationship between history and the social sciences, assessing (and questioning) the possibilities of generalization, examining the problems posed by the linguistic turn, and discussing the notion of truth with which historians and social scientists work. The conversation also represents a unique opportunity to consider how these debates bear the long-lasting mark of Clifford Geertz’s ways of thinking and doing social science.

Giovanni Zampieri (Università degli Studi di Padova interviews Giovanni Levi (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia)

https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/19223/17929

03/07/2024

My copy of The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz, 1973; TIC) is the one my (now ex-) husband, [Donald Scott] bought for us when it first came out in 1973. It has markings in the margins in his handwriting and mine, their similarities and differences indicative of the various uses to which we—both of us historians—put our readings. It is, in effect, an historical artifact, reminding me of the impact of that first reading and allowing me to reflect on my own evolution as a scholar interested in theorizing power and difference as it influenced my second reading of the text.

Joan W. Scott (Institute for Advanced Study)
https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/17903/17921

01/07/2024

How can we explain the success of Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures in American sociology? On rereading Geertz today, it seems insufficient to point to the limits of Parson’s account of values and the lack of culture elsewhere in the discipline at the time to understand why such relatively concept-free and eclectic essays could become the placeholder for “culture” in some circles. If Geertz was successful partly because of the ambiguity of his work, this ambiguity is not perfectly open.

Monika Krause (The London School of Economics and Political Science - LSE
https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/18663/17919

29/06/2024

The battles between interpretive and explanatory sociologies have subsided into occasional skirmishes, but a murky haze still hangs over the battlefield. We hope to dispel some of the haze, but more importantly to build on the ground the combatants have cleared. [...] Many practitioners of interpretation insist, as Geertz (1983, p. 22) does, that interpretation is itself a distinctive kind of explanation
Ann Swidler (UC Berkeley) and Ronald L. Jepperson (The University of Tulsa) here: https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/18837/17917

27/06/2024

The key conceptual components of Geertz’s enterprise can be located in his case for an interpretive theory of culture, epitomized in the methodological commitment to providing a ‘thick description’.

Simon Susen (City, University of London)
Read the essay "The Interpretation of Cultures: Geertz Is Still in Town" here: https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/18664/17931