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The article is an obituary that reports on the death of Alfonso Ortí Benlloch in November 2023. Ortí was a renowned sociologist and historian in Spain for the past seventy years, standing out for his analysis of agriculture, the rural world, rural Spain, and social classes in the country. He also contributed to the study of consumption and consumer society in Spain and participated in the Critical Qualitativism School of Madrid. Although he did not receive much academic recognition, his legacy has been crucial in sociology and the social sciences. The Editorial Board of Revista Empiria expresses their sorrow for the loss of this important person in their perspective. [Extracted from the article]

Social Sciences have been interested in biographical studies since the 1920s. However, this way of observing and analyzing social phenomena was displaced, between the World War II and the 1980s, from the methodological scene. According to Daniel Bertaux, the oblivion in which the biographical method fell in that period is attributable to a double imperialism: the one of the structural-functionalism and the one of survey research. During the 1980s there was a new appearance of the biographical method within the social sciences that progressively derived in the consolidation of an academic field in which take part multiple disciplines (history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, among others). The biographical studies field is characterized for the existence and, in the last years, proliferation of empirical research that relate theoretical elements that belong to different fields of knowledge. In this article, I present some reflections on the use of the biographical method within the social sciences. First of all, I make a brief historical review of the method origins, its disappearance from the methodological scene, its resurgence and, finally, its actual relevance. Then, I mention the main biographical research styles, according to the typology made by Ernesto Meccia (2019a). In third place, I highlight the differences between two terms that, within the biographical method field, are used frequently as synonyms: life history and life story. After that, I reflect on the truth status of the testimonies. In general terms, I conceive testimonies as tools for identity (re) construction and not only as factual accounts limited to an informative function. Then, I specify the way in which life stories assume a certain plot, an arrangement that is given by the biographical events or turning points. Finally, I show how life stories can express different social issues and problems that go beyond the biography itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing interest in the field of social sciences in the study of topics related to the so-called gig economy or platform economy and, among them, in the figure of the rider-a term that refers to the home delivery workers employed through digital platforms. In these platforms, the work of the riders is organized from algorithmic management logics, a mediation in which the panoptic quality of their forms of control and governmentality has tended to be emphasized. In contrast to these frameworks, this paper presents a theoretical-methodological approach that emphasizes the co-constitution-in an open agency- of the rider and the application, to ethnographically approach the everyday labor practices of riders. In the interest of exploring how algorithmic mediation functions in the diversity of riders' experiences, we analyze the coordination tasks responsible for producing the shared space-time geography and the flexible control strategies that mediate the application. The text describes how the algorithm generates a kind of scaffolding that defines directive spatiotemporalities in the riders' operations, within which the deliverers extend the landscape of calculability to those elements that the algorithm cannot consider and to those others that the rider must incorporate in order to make his activity compatible with the algorithmic logic. This article presents the initial results of an ethnography carried out in Madrid since September 2021 with riders from several of the main digital home delivery platforms: Glovo, Uber Eats, and Getir . Along with the fieldwork with riders, we interviewed four technologists in urban logistics. The results show that salaried riders have a less intense experience of the directive chronography of the algorithm, showing how autonomy is not necessarily equivalent to the riders' capability to choose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changes promoted in the dairy sector from the industrial restructuring process, which began decades ago, as well as the most recent governance systems and policies of the European Union in the matter, are fully related to the vast abandonment that a large number of dairy farms, both in Spain and Catalonia since years ago. This process is experienced in a special way by those smaller and family-type farms. Therefore, the consequences that this evolution of the sector may have in the medium and long term are not negligible from the perspective of the future of the agricultural world. For this reason, it is of great interest for the social sciences to know the socioeconomic conditions that currently characterize the evolution of dairy farms, as well as the social representations that farmers build on them. These will be the main objectives of the article. We therefore try to analyze the socio-economic conditions of the farms and the way in which they are conceived and valued by farmers, as well as exploring how they face their future. The empirical work has combined a quantitative analysis with a qualitative analysis through focus groups and interviews with dairy farmers. The results suggest the existence of fear of the end of the small family farm, as well as the disappointment of the ranchers in a crisis situation that they are not capable of reversing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the mid-twentieth century, the scientific field of social sciences has been transforming the trajectory of its institutionalization. This is because the trend towards reducing the number of disciplinary categories that had been identified since 1850 was reversed after the Second World War through a steady increase in names. However, such multiplication does not seem to have been developed proportionally to the necessary communication that should exist between them; suggesting a propensity of modern social sciences to hyper-specialize its subjects and therefore, to increase and extend the gaps between their related fields (also called here “No man’s land” spaces). This circumstance seems to be constituting a blockage in the field’s explanatory capacity, and studying it can contribute to unblocking it. Thus, the present research has focused on providing a micro and macro view of the discipline, on the one hand describing different phases through which it is developed and, on the other hand, by identifying the sociocultural conditioning to which it is exposed. From the analysis of these questions, two aspects have been obtained that seem to characterize the production of knowledge in modern social sciences, which are: a.) the existence of a higher risk of obstruction in the disciplinary construction after the specialization phase- because it is when research activity tends to be more likely to be trapped in hyperspecialization-, and b.) the tendency towards a greater appreciation due to its applicability to social interests of nomothetic attributes as opposed to idiographic ones-whose reproduction in knowledge is produced through mechanisms of legitimization. From these results, we can extract what seems to be a causal relationship between the nomothetic tendency of the current hyperspecialization, the increase of idiographic gaps between related fields, and the need for the legitimization of the theories in the contemporary symbolic universe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation criteria used by the Research Ethics Committees come from studies in medicine, some specialists project, from their sources and experiences, universal ethical requirements based on clinical research. This opens the discussion on whether such principles can be transferable to evaluate social science research, which commonly uses complex methodologies and knowledge that challenge the Committees on ways to understand informed consent, the risks and benefits of research. The objective of the article is to systematize the project review work of the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) of the University of Santiago, Chile. The methodology includes the content analysis of 114 projects from the social sciences. The seven universal ethical requirements of Ezekiel Emanuel were used as a guiding element of the analysis, whose proposal is assumed and followed by Chilean ministerial instructions that order the work of the Research Ethics Committees. Among the results is that the universal requirements of Emanuel are present in a large part of the projects in social sciences, but they are not enough to approach the specific situations of research in social sciences, being the deliberation of the investigations by multidisciplinary teams essential to respect the heterogeneity and complexity of the social subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]