Sociologica - International Journal for Sociological Debate

06/02/2025

There is always a tendency to overlook the micro-practices of cooperation and collaboration that go beyond a one-to-one relationship between a mentor and a mentee (C***a, 2011; 2013). The conversation that follows seeks to foreground mentoring as a collegial and distributed practice of reciprocity, care, and support happening in the interstices of academia.

Silvia Gherardi — Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università di Trento
Michela C***a — Department of Organization and Management, Mälardalens universitet
Laura Lucia Parolin — Department of Culture and Language, Syddansk Universitet – University of Southern Denmark

Mentoring as a Distributed Practice of Care: A Conversation Authors Silvia Gherardi Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7026-2418 Silvia Gherardi recently retired from the University of Trento (Italy). Her research interests include feminist....

05/02/2025

We are very sad and deeply affected by the tragic news of the sudden passing of Michael Burawoy.

He was a dear friend of Sociologica, and a founding and permanent member of our Advisory Board.

The very first article published by the journal in its inaugural issue, way back in 2007, was the Italian translation of his very important essay "On Public Sociology": https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.2383/24188

Over the years, a relationship of mutual esteem has been preserved and nurtured with other stunning contributions, among which today we want to remember the amazing conversation with Riccardo Emilio Chesta entitled "The Modern Prince and the Sociological Imagination", in 2019: https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/9392

Michael Burawoy was a generous, brilliant, outstanding scholar and his legacy will always be precious and inspiring for all of us.

04/02/2025

There is a peculiar expression that appears in the Talmud twice. It can be translated literally as “make for thyself a Rabbi”. I cite it when I speak to newly admitted PhD students, because I think it contains several important lessons about mentoring and being a mentee.

https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/20360

Gil Eyal — Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Keep Your Mentee Disappointed Authors Gil Eyal Department of Sociology, Columbia University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7194-3864 Gil Eyal is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University (USA), where he has taught Social Theory and the Sociology of Expertise for 22 years, prior to which he taught...

02/02/2025

Mentoring is a much more complex thing. Besides the learning of scholarly skills, it includes helping a young aspirant to acquire the ambitions, the behavioral skills, the emotional regulation, the right use of “professional” body language, to make “playing the game” a second nature — knowing how to position themselves in the field, how to enter into alliances, and how to chose opponents (and to reject those who do not deserve to be opponents). It also includes helping them in their professional path to overcome constraints, and to detect and use opportunities.

László Bruszt, Central European University

Finding a Mentor and Being a Mentor Authors László Bruszt CEU Democracy Institute, Department of Political Science, Central European University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7624-0308 László Bruszt is the Director of the CEU Democracy Institute and Professor of Sociology at the Central European Un...

31/01/2025

In addition to publishing creative research, curating special issues on vital topics, organizing author-meets-critics debates, and conducting interviews with leading sociologists, Sociologica also plays a leading role in the discipline by offering reflections on important aspects of the sociological craft. Throughout their careers, social scientists must, for example, come up with compelling research topics, revise their manuscripts for publication, and decide when and where to publish. Despite their importance, these skills are left in the shadows — seldom if ever addressed during graduate training.

In our efforts to demystify this tacit knowledge, we have published 3 special features: “Heuristics of Discovery” (vol. 12, no. 1), “Publication Strategies” (vol. 13, no. 1), and “Revising” (vol. 16, no. 1). These 30 essays were brought together in a book, Practicing Sociology: Tacit Knowledge for the Social Scientific Craft (Stark, 2023) in which I also offer my own reflections on what it means to practice sociology.

For this issue, we invited leading sociologists from Latin America, the United States, Eastern and Western Europe to contribute to a special feature: On Mentoring.

David Stark , Co-editor-in-chief of Sociologica

Continuing Our Reflections on the Sociological Craft Authors David Stark Department of Sociology, Columbia University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2435-9619 David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He has stu...

29/01/2025

The new issue 18(3)/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/1350

The issue proposes an amazing Special Feature titled “On Mentoring”, edited and introduced by David Stark, with seven contributions by László Bruszt, Gil Eyal, Silvia Gherardi, Michela C***a, and Laura Lucia Parolin, Darío Rodríguez, Mike Savage, Walter W. Powell and Alford A. Young, Jr.

The Essay Section hosts an interesting contribution by Christopher Anderson, titled “Between the Center and the Margins: Todd Gitlin and the Politics of Communication”, while the Section Debate/Author Meets Critics is focused on Patrik Aspers’ new book “Uncertainty: Individual Problems and Public Solutions (Oxford UP, 2024), edited and introduced by Ugo Corte, with three challenging commentaries by Bruce G. Carruthers, Tobias Werron and Andy Alaszewski, followed by Patrik Aspers’ reply.

The issue is completed by an engaging Focus on “Problems of Democracy”, edited and introduced by Jonathan Bach, with three contributions by László Bruszt, Gina Neff and Pablo J. Boczkowski.

We hope you will enjoy this brand-new issue of the journal!

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