This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.
Those who attended the International Congress on Clinical Chemistry at The Hague in 1987 saw an exhibition illustrating the development of the subject during the last four centuries. We who missed that opportunity are now more than adequately compensated by this book in which Professor Buttner and Dr Habrich describe all the exhibits, illustrate many of them, and add an extensive commentary. The eight chapters, arranged in chronological order, correspond to the exhibition's showcases. Each is devoted to a major landmark in the subject and is centred on a personality who was representative of his age. The earliest figure, Franciscus Dele Boe Sylvius (1614-72), introduces the chapter entitled 'latrochemical concepts prevail against the ancient humoral a representative of the early days of mechanized analysis. However, the authors have not merely concentrated on these eight men and they are too modest when they deny, in their preface, that they have demonstrated the continuity of clinical chemistry. They have, in fact, produced a good history of the subject, including numerous references to primary and secondary literature and brief but sound biographical accounts of many scientists; and they show clearly how clinical chemistry emerged as a separate discipline in Germany and Austria in the mid-nineteenth century. Historians will be familiar with the microscopes of Leeuwenhoek and Hooke, but many pieces of apparatus are probably shown here for the first time. It is very instructive to see, for example, photographs of the four versions of the autoanalyser that Skeggs constructed between 1951 and 1953, and it is to be hoped that other contemporary scientists will be encouraged by his example to preserve the prototypes of their apparatus. Finally, high praise must be awarded to the typesetters, Typotop of Stuttgart, and the printers, A. Bachmeier of Weinheim. Using the resources of modern printing technology they have produced a book in which the text, in two colours, and the illustrations, monochrome and coloured, are splendidly integrated. collection of thirteen papers is an important indicator of new directions in the history and sociology of technology. Organized into four sections, the book deals first with new manifestos for the study of technology-Pinch and Bijker's social constructivist approach, drawing on the sociology of scientific knowledge and the empirical programme of relativism, Hughes's use of systems metaphor and Michel Callon's network theory. A second group of papers considers models which might be used to simplify the "thick description" of political, …
This paper offers a critical response to Rahsaan Mahadeo’s article, “A Call for Counter-Public Sociology.” I argue that public sociology is neither fixed nor fated to legitimize domination; rather, it is a contested field whose trajectory has diversified since its original formulation. The paper reviews Mahadeo’s arguments—regarding the university as knowledge gatekeeper, the privileging of elite publics, and sociology’s complicity with state power—and responds by highlighting contemporary practices of public sociology that contest these limitations. Drawing on theoretical developments and empirical cases, I show how emerging forms of public sociology amplify counter-hegemonic publics and foster emancipatory outcomes. I conclude that Mahadeo’s critique risks obscuring the work many public sociologists already undertake with diverse communities to resist and challenge structures of domination. The task ahead is not to abandon or simply rename public sociology, but to identify, expand, and align its radical potential with broader struggles for social transformation.
This article proposes a synthetic theory of socio-epistemic structuration to understand the reproduction of inequality in contemporary societies. I argue that social reality is not only determined by material structures and social networks but is fundamentally shaped by the epistemic frameworks -- ideologies, narratives, and attributions of agency -- that mediate actors' engagement with their environment. The theory integrates findings from critical race theory, network sociology, social capital studies, historical sociology, and analyses of emerging AI agency. I analyze how structures (from the ``racial contract'' to Facebook networks) and epistemic frameworks (from racist ideology to personal culture) mutually reinforce one another, creating resilient yet unequal life trajectories. Using data from large-scale experiments like the Moving to Opportunity and social network analyses, I demonstrate that exposure to diverse environments and social capital is a necessary but insufficient condition for social mobility; epistemic friction, manifested as `friending bias' and persistent cultural frameworks, systematically limits the benefits of such exposure. I conclude that a public and methodologically reflexive sociology must focus on unpacking and challenging these epistemic structures, recognizing the theoretical capacity of subaltern publics (``reverse tutelage'') and developing new methods to disentangle the complex interplay of homophily, contagion, and structural causation in a world of big data.
Computational sociology is growing in popularity, yet the analytic tools employed differ widely in power, transparency, and interpretability. In computer science, methods gain popularity after surpassing benchmarks of predictive accuracy, becoming the "state of the art." Computer scientists favor novelty and innovation for different reasons, but prioritizing technical prestige over methodological fit could unintentionally limit the scope of sociological inquiry. To illustrate, we focus on computational text analysis and revisit a prior study of college admissions essays, comparing analyses with both older and newer methods. These methods vary in flexibility and opacity, allowing us to compare performance across distinct methodological regimes. We find that newer techniques did not outperform prior results in meaningful ways. We also find that using the current state of the art, generative AI and large language models, could introduce bias and confounding that is difficult to extricate. We therefore argue that sociological inquiry benefits from methodological pluralism that aligns analytic choices with theoretical and empirical questions. While we frame this sociologically, scholars in other disciplines may confront what we call the "state-of-the-art fallacy", the belief that the tool computer scientists deem to be the best will work across topics, domains, and questions.
This article focuses on the challenges that uncertainty poses to countries in global and regional value chains. In this perspective, it focuses specifically on African countries and enriches the results with a comparative approach. Indeed, using a gravity model for 49 African countries and all their trading partners from 1990 to 2019, the paper proposes a comparative analysis of the effects of uncertainty on global trade in value chains and on trade in value chains within Africa. The robustness of the results shows that domestic uncertainty can drive the expansion of intra-African trade in value chains, while uncertainty in the partner country hinders the flourishing of trade relationships within a value chain.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
We present a comprehensive study on the emergence of Computational Social Science (CSS) - an interdisciplinary field leveraging computational methods to address social science questions - and its impact on adjacent social sciences. We trained a robust CSS classifier using papers from CSS-focused venues and applied it to 11 million papers spanning 1990 to 2021. Our analysis yielded three key findings. First, there were two critical inflections in the rise of CSS. The first occurred around 2005 when psychology, politics, and sociology began engaging with CSS. The second emerged in approximately 2014 when economics finally joined the trend. Sociology is currently the most engaged with CSS. Second, using the density of yearly knowledge embeddings constructed by advanced transformer models, we observed that CSS initially lacked a cohesive identity. From the early 2000s to 2014, however, it began to form a distinct cluster, creating boundaries between CSS and other social sciences, particularly in politics and sociology. After 2014, these boundaries faded, and CSS increasingly blended with the social sciences. Third, shared data-driven methods homogenized CSS papers across disciplines, with politics and economics showing the most alignment due to the combined influence of CSS and causal identification. Nevertheless, non-CSS papers in sociology, psychology, and politics became more divergent. Taken together, these findings highlight the dynamics of division and unity as new disciplines emerge within existing knowledge landscapes. A live demo of CSS evolution can be found in https://evolution-css.netlify.app/
Theory based AI research has had a hard time recently and the aim here is to propose a model of what LLMs are actually doing when they impress us with their language skills. The model integrates three established theories of human decision-making from philosophy, sociology, and computer science. The paper starts with the collective understanding of reasoning from the early days of AI research - primarily because that model is how we humans think we think, and is the most accessible. It then describes what is commonly thought of as "reactive systems" which is the position taken by many philosophers and indeed many contemporary AI researchers. The third component to the proposed model is from sociology and based on the idea that human intelligence is a collective skill for which individuals are merely actors. The resulting model provides an alternate view of ``mind reading'' in human communication.