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The rise of quantitative research evaluation has changed not only the way knowledge is rated and ranked, but the way scientific knowledge is produced. This Focus discusses the outcomes of Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra’s research on the transformation of the British social sciences. While pushing social scientists to adapt to the new canons of evaluation, research assessment frameworks have increased disciplinary homogeneity at the detriment of diversity. Moving beyond the specificity of the British case, the comments that follow critically engage with the perspectives and proposals advanced by the author.

This introductory essay puts the sociological debates on FIAT in perspective, by showing the relations between the evolution of the Italian multinational and the changes in the practice of sociological inquiry. At several junctures, the debate on FIAT has been so publicly relevant that it became a difficult and somehow hostile terrain for the development of a “quiet and cold” explanatory sociology independent of any positioning in the field of contention. But this is exactly what makes the relation between the Italian automobile factory and sociology a specific one, a privileged perspective through which it is possible to look not only at the changes in the world of labor, but also at the evolution of the discipline over time.

This article aims to explore the forms of collective actions that are emerging in new sectors of digital capitalism. In particular, it enquires into the mobilisation of food delivery workers that has been developing since 2016 in four Italian cities: Milan, Turin, Bologna and Florence. Despite the high level of precarisation and atomisation that characterise this subset of gig economy jobs, the so-called riders were able to organise into self-organised workers' collectives, which not only gave rise to many protest events, but also drew the attention of the institutions and the media. What are the conditions and the strategies that made this possible? And, more broadly, what does this case tell us about the possibility of labour activism in gig economy work? We argue that the high level of activation of food delivery workers is to be related to their capability to provide resources for reconstructing social ties among workers and, in turn, for translating them into political engagement and contentious action. This is realised through the combination of three factors that will be scrutinised in the paper. The analysis points out that although precarisation creates significant obstacles to organisation and mobilisation, collective action does actually take place also in the gig economy, in certain conditions.

In this conversation, Michael Burawoy discusses how he discovered the sociology of Gramsci in radically diverse contexts — from a vibrant post-colonial Zambia to Analytical Marxism in Chicago. The British sociologist reconnects the travels of these debates to contemporary public sociology, updating Gramsci’s key sociological concepts with the critical scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu, the social anthropology of Jaap Van Velsen and Raja Jayaraman, and the political economy of Karl Polanyi. These somehow real and imaginary conversations with social theorists bring Burawoy to stress the importance of reflexivity in sociological research. This means that sociological imagination is fostered through a constant dialectical relation between the art of theorizing and the “concrete phantasies” of social movements, which are well exemplified in Wright’s “real utopias.” Moreover, in Burawoy’s view, a new “Modern Prince” is urgently needed today and it is a public sociology which recognizes the mission of his critical knowledge against marketization.

This essay draws a profile of Alessandro Pizzorno, one of the most prominent sociologists of postwar Europe. It focuses on the foundations of his theory which covers a broad set of sociological and political issues that go well beyond disciplines’ boundaries. The author traces a genealogy of Pizzorno’s theory of recognition from its inception with the early anthropological study on the mask to its more recent and complex sociological elaboration. While criticising the paradigms of rational choice Pizzorno founded his theory of recognition on a sustained dialogue with the social theories of Hegel and Hobbes. The explanatory role of sociology is therefore defined by a thorough and novel reconsideration of the relations between the theorist and the agent. From this perspective, the process of knowing is defined as a process of unveiling a foreign social reality where social life is considered through the metaphor of the stranger, expressing the foundational relation between the Self and the Other. In the author’s view, «theoretical pluralism» is what best describes Alessandro Pizzorno’s approach.