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Emerging out of the “reproducibility crisis” in science, metascientists have become central players in debates about research integrity, scholarly communication, and science policy. The goal of this article is to introduce metascience to STS scholars, detail the scientific ideology that is apparent in its articles, strategy statements, and research projects, and discuss its institutional and intellectual future. Put simply, metascience is a scientific social movement that seeks to use the tools of science- especially, quantification and experimentation- to diagnose problems in research practice and improve efficiency. It draws together data scientists, experimental and statistical methodologists, and open science activists into a project with both intellectual and policy dimensions. Metascientists have been remarkably successful at winning grants, motivating news coverage, and changing policies at science agencies, journals, and universities. Moreover, metascience represents the apotheosis of several trends in research practice, scientific communication, and science governance including increased attention to methodological and statistical criticism of scientific practice, the promotion of “open science” by science funders and journals, the growing importance of both preprint and data repositories for scientific communication, and the new prominence of data scientists as research makes a turn toward Big Science.

While open access publishing effectively broadens access to scientific research products, the problem of \emph{making sense} of the volumes of new information is becoming increasingly acute. Traditional curation methods like peer-reviewed journals and recommendation services are failing to keep pace, resulting in unprecedented information overload and knowledge fragmentation. We contend that making sense of science requires open access to diverse sources of scientific sensemaking data, and that current frictions and failures of scientific sensemaking arise from deficiencies in reckoning with these kinds of data. Sensemaking data are the digital traces of sensemaking processes, in which individuals and groups organize and structure new information to improve subsequent decision-making and actions. Sensemaking data include explicit annotations (tags, votes, ratings, marginal comments) and commentaries made by researchers, as well implicit behavioral data generated through app usage (reference managers, website metrics, etc). Crucially, sensemaking data is currently scattered and siloed across a multitude of apps and formats, and also increasingly enclosed by publishers for profit. We provide an outline for Open Science Sensemaking (OSSm), an interoperable and decentralized annotation network. Such a system would enable researchers to record, own, and share their sensemaking data, thus contributing to the network while remaining resilient to platform capture. Shared annotation data will greatly benefit individual and collective sensemaking by enabling development of diverse content discovery services, from simple aggregation of reviews and ratings (e.g., ``Goodreads for scientific research'') to more advanced AI-augmented scientific intelligence systems.

This manuscript is a comprehensive historical and theoretical examination of the development of ‘multiversal methods’ as a response to the replication crisis. Multiversal methods are statistical procedures designed to assess the uncertainty arising from analyst-driven decisions in inferential models based on statistical regressions. The replication crisis is a surge in discovering that many studies fail to replicate the findings of previous studies. Replication crisis has raised concerns about the reliability and credibility of scientific research, particularly in social sciences and medicine. Section I provides a non-technical overview of the design of causal inference based on statistical regressions. Furtherly, it outlines and comments on the procedures to compute multiversal statistics. Section II presents the historical and social context within occurred key epistemological innovations contributing to the development of the theories behind multiversal methods. The section argues why and what these advancements drew from the epistemology of misinformation (‘bullshit epistemology’) for a sense of urgency for remedies to some enduring issues in scientific production: publication bias and p-hacking. Section III is a comment over two relevant works within paradigm of Open Science, to outline the limitations and challenges of this framework.

This paper argues that a normative frame of reference is necessary to redefine the notion of value from a more-than-human societal perspective, differentiating between ‘fetish value’ and ‘true value.’ The former is a product of capital, while the latter is capital's prey but also its antidote. The paper emphasizes the importance of a normative frame of reference that considers the economic, ethical, and political dimensions of value production, and calls for a shift in focus from a purely analytical understanding of capitalism as a social and economic system to a more integrated (analytical-normative) approach. This approach would require a more nuanced understanding of how value is created and distributed, and how it impacts different social groups and the environment. The paper argues that this new approach would enable us to imagine alternative economic systems that prioritize social and environmental well-being over profit maximization and shift the focus from merely challenging existing power relations and economic structures to creating alternative forms of value creation and exchange based on normative principles of social justice and ecological sustainability. The paper highlights the importance of perceiving capital as the product of the perversion of commons that are vital for the creation of true value.

This paper proposes a commonist value theory of labor by examining the relationship between human creativity and labor under capitalist relations. It argues that the innate (more than ) human creative power constitutes a vital commons that generates ‘true value’ in a commonist state of living. However, under capitalist relations, this creative force is transformed into labor through the process of primary abstraction, resulting in the loss of subjectivity of labor and its transformation into a material cause of capitalist (fetish) value. The paper distinguishes primary abstraction from secondary abstraction, which is the abstraction process in Marxian labor theory, and argues that a new commonist value theory must reflect the primacy of the original commoning nature of labor in generating value. It also highlights the need for a radical restructuring of labor relations to achieve a truly post-capitalist society. The contents of the paper include unpacking Marx’s notion of labor, exploring the true value of (more than) human creative power as an essential commons, going beyond reductionist notions of commons and commoning, understanding the alienation rooted in the loss of casual power and commoning nature of human creativity, examining the unheeded primary abstraction, and explaining how the secondary abstraction is the primary abstraction by other means.

One of the ambitions outlined by France’s second National Plan for Open Science (July 2021), was to create an Open Science Lab dedicated to developing “research on research” with a focus on open science and with the objective to inform French public policy decisions. As part of the groundwork for setting up this Lab, the French Committee for Open Science called for an exploratory study to better understand the international scope and context of “research on research” (RoR), and its connections with open science as well as other research currently being carried out in metascience, science of science, and science and technology studies.Far from presenting a static landscape, the study found that while some research on science and scientific communities are based on well-established, pre-existing academic fields and methods, other more recent trends (metascience, metaresearch, RoR, etc.) have adopted a prescriptive commitment to fostering better and more open science. It highlights the debates contemporary research on research and science is fueling around key issues such as reproducibility, evidence-based policy, integrity and inclusivity. It also echos some community-issued concerns about “reinventing the wheel” when it comes to studying science, scientific communities and their productions.

Diverse efforts are underway to reform the journal peer review system. Combined with growing interest in Open Science practices, Open Peer Review (OPR) has become of central concern to the scholarly community. However, what Open Peer Review is understood to encompass and how effective some of its elements are in meeting the expectations of the peer review system, are uncertain. This scoping review updates previous efforts to summarise research on OPR to date. Following the PRISMA methodological framework, it addresses the question: “What evidence has been reported in the scientific literature from 2017 to date regarding uptake, attitudes, and efficacy of two key aspects of Open Peer Review (Open Identities and Open Reports)?” The review identifies, analyses and synthesises 52 studies matching inclusion criteria, finding that OPR is growing, but still far from common practice. Our findings indicate positive attitudes towards Open Reports and more sceptical approaches to Open Identities. Changes in reviewer behaviour seem limited. and no evidence for lower acceptance rates of review invitations or slower turnaround times is reported. Concerns about power dynamics and potential backfiring on critical reviews are in need of further experimentation. We conclude that elements of OPR seem to be gaining acceptance, but more experimentation is needed. Evidence still mainly consists of either survey data or case studies of individual or few journals, not allowing for generalisability across fields and journals, and revealing no studies which compare the quality of review under Open Identities or Open Reports versus other modes of peer review.

The reform movement in science is seemingly constructing a new moral economy of science around process and bureaucracy, in which a new scientific etiquette is emerging that prescribes the performance of reformed science as civilised, efficient and objective. Bureaucratic innovations were borne out of the reform movement that seek to prescribe specific research processes, including but not limited to preregistration and registered reports. This moral economy emerges in the form of a bureaucracy and its epistemic uniformity actively suppresses scientific plurality. This paper argues that Eliasian drivers such as distinction, shame and disgust, act to pressure scientists into adopting this new etiquette. Even though the etiquette's appearance is quite new, it can be traced back to existing moral economies of science and their pursuit of efficiency and objectivity.

Familiarity is an elusive concept, capturing what we know intimately and what we only recognize from having seen before. This article aims to disambiguate these interpretations by proposing a sociological conceptualization of familiarity as a dynamic relationship to the world that develops over time and through experience and that allows one to progressively disattend from what appears as “usual.” Focusing on how urban environments and their human entities become familiar and stop being familiar, I propose that familiarity be thought of as an ongoing relational and interactional achievement, allowing us to focus on our daily activities while relying on a practical knowledge of our surroundings. The conceptualization process unfolds via five questions: What is familiarity? Where does it come from? What threatens it? What does it produce? How can it be operationalized and studied empirically?

Forthcoming in American Behavioral Scientist. The structured inequalities built into our sociotechnical institutions shape access to knowledge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, knowledge acquisition was shaped by news sources, class, and race. Through analysis of nationally representative data using logistic models, this study reveals how the use of different news sources differentially shapes access to accurate knowledge about COVID-19 topics for different demographics. Those who rely on informal and local news sources have the largest knowledge gaps about these topics, while those who seek information from national or international news outlets and politicians have the most accurate knowledge. Race and class influence knowledge of government operations, public health, and science of COVID-19. In particular, Black people, people with less education, and those with lower incomes are significantly less likely to have accurate knowledge about COVID-19, all else equal. These findings have implications for knowledge dissemination that impacts public health, as well as for how news media target different audiences in an increasingly fractured landscape.

This report is based on a 2016 survey of members and affiliates of three institutes of data science at major U.S. research universities, focusing on career paths for data scientists within academia. After considering how our respondents define data science, we identify various activities, priorities, resources, and concerns around data science in academia, especially with respect to data science careers. We end by providing recommendations about how universities can better support an emerging set of roles and responsibilities around data and computation within and across academic fields.

This short data visualisation and accompanying perspective explains recent trends and outlines three reasons to be even more optimistic about the future of Machine Learning in the academic Social Sciences.

This paper critically engages with dynamics of the Chinese food safety governance infrastructure following the melamine crisis. It presents a qualitative analysis of sixteen in-depth stakeholder interviews in Hunan, Hubei and Henan. We reveal tensions between a segmented model of governance and a centralised model, between a centralised top-down model and stakeholder participation, and between a public model and a private, decentral market where corporate reputation must result in transparency and trust. Stakeholders also see gaps between ideals of inclusive, transparent and participatory governance, and effective problem-solving. Governance of food safety in China, even when targeting inclusion and public accountability, remains heavily dependent on the central state as a pivotal actor.

There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in a modern capitalist world. However, social scientific interest in alienation had become parochial and balkanized by the 1970s. To reconstruct a unifying theory of alienation that addresses general features of capitalism, such as compulsory growth and commodification, and particular phases like financialized capitalism, we begin with the notion of futurelessness. Futurelessness refers to a deficient relationship to the future in which people’s senses of possibility ossify or dissipate. It may result from inclusion in and exclusion from capitalist mechanisms or processes. Moreover, processes of inclusion and exclusion may appear more voluntary or involuntary. With these general terms, we identify four manifestations of futurelessness in financial capitalism: commercial exhaustion, imaginative marginalization, therapeutic nowism, and pragmatic denialism. The conclusion addresses future-sustenance in an alienating world and the prospects of a more systematic and synthetic approach to alienation.

Forecasting the reproducibility of research findings is one of the key challenges of Metascience. To date, reliable above-chance predictions have mainly been achieved by pooling the subjective ratings of experts through surveys or via prediction markets. Obtaining such data is laborious, however, and unlikely to increase the theoretical understanding of reproducibility.Here we show that empirical measures of K, a principled metric of knowledge, are correlated with reproducibility forecasts made for the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative (BRI), an ongoing replication of 60 studies that use three common methodologies in the life sciences. For each study, we calculated the K value by dividing the effect size, measured in bits of Shannon entropy explained, by the descriptive complexity of the study’s methodology, calculated as the optimal Shannon encoding of a conceptual graph representing the replication protocol.K values were statistically associated with subjective predictions about studies’ replication probabilities and relative effect sizes. This relation was robust to controlling for study methodology, and was a stronger predictor than other plausible covariates, including the originally reported effect size, subjective ratings of a study’s methodological difficulty, and raters’ self-reported expertise. The superior fit of K may be due to its particular structure and metrics, which are rooted in information theory and may more accurately reflect the implicit calculations made by raters.This is the first evidence that an objective metric hypothesized to quantify scientific knowledge captures subjective judgments about reproducibility. This finding gives the first independent support of K’s underlying assumption that scientific knowledge is a process of information compression, and it may offer a new tool for metaresearch.

Humans invest in fantastic stories—mythologies. Recent evolutionary theories suggest that cultural selection may favour moralising stories that motivate prosocial behaviours. A key challenge is to explain the emergence of mythologies that lack explicit moral exemplars or directives. Here, we resolve this puzzle with an evolutionary model in which arbitrary mythologies transform a collection of egoistic individuals into a cooperative. We show how these otherwise puzzling amoral, nonsensical, and fictional narratives act as exquisitely functional coordination devices and facilitate the emergence of trust and cooperativeness in both large and small populations. Especially, in small populations, reflecting earlier hunter-gatherers communities, relative to our contemporary community sizes, the model is robust to the cognitive costs in adopting fictions.

Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey’s Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly religious or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is higher in AKP provinces not only because of a generic aim to conform to the stricter mores fostered by the victorious party. We find that those who veil, particularly those in AKP provinces who are not pious, are more politically active than those who do not veil. This may be an indication that veiling could partly be a strategic response to policies, which favour those who are or appear pious. Our study suggests that observable religious practices may have their independent dynamics driven by the pursuit of instrumental goals. Our results also suggest that parties with a religious ideology have an advantage over their secular counterparts in solving the clientelistic information problem, for they can rely on religious symbols for screening and signalling.

Promoting translational research as a means to overcoming chasms in the translation of knowledge through successive fields of research from basic science to public health impacts and back is a central challenge for research managers and policymakers. Organizational leaders need to assess baseline conditions, identify areas needing improvement, and to judge the impact of specific initiatives to sustain or improve translational research practices at their institutions. Currently, there is a lack of such an assessment tool addressing the specific context of translational biomedical research. To close this gap, we have developed a new survey for assessing the organizational climate for translational research. This self-assessment tool measures employees’ perceptions of translational research climate and underlying research practices in organizational environments and builds on the established Survey of Organizational Research Climate, assessing research integrity. Using this tool, we show that scientists at a large university hospital (Charité Berlin) perceive translation as a central and important component of their work. Importantly, local resources and direct support are main contributing factors for the practical implementation of translation into their own research practice. We identify and discuss potential leverage points for an improvement of research climate to foster successful translational research. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s11948-020-00234-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The distribution of credit, resources and opportunities in science is heavily skewed due to unjust practices and incentives, hardwired into science's rules, guidelines and conventions. A form of resistance widely available is to break those rules. We review instances of rule-breaking in scientific authorship to allow for a redefinition of the concept of civil disobedience in the context of academic research, as well as the conditions on which the label applies. We show that, in contrast to whistleblowing or conscientious objection, civil disobedience targets science's injustice on a more systemic level. Its further development will ease critical evaluation of deviant actions as well as helping us evaluate deviance, defiance and discontent in science beyond issues of authorship. However, empirically, civil disobedience in science engenders uncertainties and disagreements on the local status of both act and label.

International scientific mobility and research careers are two concepts that are intimately related. Yet, it has been very difficult for scholarship to pinpoint exactly how international mobility impacts on research careers. This paper contributes to this question by investigating links between international mobility, research career stage progression and job changes. It does so using a large-scale survey (MORE) which targets researchers based in European universities. The results establish that the profile of international mobility varies by academic research career stage. They also show that for researchers in the established mid-career phase who are working internationally, there are career advancement benefits associated with return mobility to their home country. However, these benefits may reduce if the timing of return is too delayed. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these results for researcher mobility policy in the context of the European Higher Education Area and the European Research Area., This research was partly supported by funding received from the Research Infrastructure for Research and Innovation Policy Studies project (RISIS, contract number 313082).

Part of the current enthusiasm about open science stems from its promises to reform scientific practice in service of the common good, to ensure that scientific outputs will be found and reused more easily, and to enhance scientific impact on policy and society. With this article, we question this optimism by analysing the potential for open science practices to enhance research uptake at the science–policy interface. Science advice is critical to help policy-makers make informed decisions. Likewise, some interpretations of open science hold that making research processes and outputs more transparent and accessible will also enhance the uptake of results by policy and society at large. However, we argue that this hope is based on an unjustifiably simplistic understanding of the science–policy interface that leaves key terms (“impact”, “uptake”) undefined. We show that this understanding—based upon linear models of research uptake—likewise grounds the influential “evidence–policy gap” diagnosis which holds that to improve research uptake, communication and interaction between researchers and policy-makers need to be improved. The overall normative stance of both discussions has sidelined empirical description of the science–policy interface, ignoring questions about the underlying differences between the policy domain and academia. Importantly, both open science and literature on closing the evidence–policy gap recommend improving communication (in terms of either the content or the means) as a viable strategy. To correct some of these views, we combine insights from policy theory with a narrative review of the literature on the evidence–policy gap in the health domain and find that removing barriers to access by itself will not be enough to foster research uptake.

At first glance, Bourdieu’s field theory might be considered an unlikely case for research on transnational and global phenomena. However, scholarship in the last two decades shows that field analysis can indeed be useful to study cases beyond the national realm. Reviewing this research, this contribution is organized in three sections: It starts with a discussion of the (post-)national orientation of the field theoretical research program and outlines the ontology of transnational and global processes according to this program. Second, the contribution reviews the main strands of post-national field analysis and distills from this literature the empirical foci and analytical priorities. The third section takes stock of the theoretical efforts that have recently been made to de-nationalize the field theoretical research program and identifies the theoretical and conceptual contributions made in the process. The contribution concludes with an empirical, a methodological, and a theoretical question that should be addressed by future research.

The sociological study of knowledge infrastructures and classification has traditionally focused on the politics and practices of classifying things or people. However, actors’ work to escape dominant infrastructures and pre-established classification systems has received little attention. In response to this, this article argues that it is crucial to analyze, not only the practices and politics of classification, but also actors’ work to escape dominant classification systems. The article has two aims: First, to make a theoretical contribution to the study of classification by proposing to pay analytical attention to practices of escaping classification, what the article dubs classification egress. This concept directs our attention to—not only the practices and politics of classifying things—but also how actors work to escape or resist classification systems in practice. Second, the article aims to increase our understanding of the history of quantified and statistical health surveillance. In this, the article investigates how actors in health surveillance assembled a knowledge infrastructure for surveilling, quantifying, and detecting unknown patterns of congenital malformations in the wake of the Thalidomide disaster in the early 1960s. The empirical account centers on the actors’ work to detect congenital malformations and escaping the dominant nosological classification of diseases, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), by replacing it with a procedural standard for reporting of symptoms. Thus, the article investigates how actors deal with the tension between the-already-known-and-classified and the unknown-unclassified-phenomenon in health surveillance practice.

We disentangle two social structural views of fame: whether social structure influences fame directly or through the mechanism of creativity. We test these views in a significant empirical context: 90 pioneers of the early 20th century (1910–25) abstract art movement. Across two different types of ties, we find that social structure shapes fame directly rather than through the mechanism of enhanced creativity. Within the social structure of informal ties, an artist with greater structural and compositional diversity among her peers is likely to be more famous. Within the social structure of co-exhibition ties, an artist who is a part of a tight-knit clique is likely to be more famous. Across both types of ties, the effect of social structure is not associated with the artist’s creativity, which we measured using both subjective expert evaluations and an objective machine learning method. Rather, we argue that an artist with more nationally diverse peers had a creative identity that garnered more fame.

This contribution has originally been conceived as the introduction to my dissertation, to be submitted in February 2022 to the University of Graz (Department of Sociology). In the dissertation, I take up the vast discourse on data sharing to argue that until now, the most influential positions (exemplified in the works of philosopher Sabina Leonelli and information scientists Christine L. Borgman) have construed their subject matter rather narrowly, both in terms of the dominant case studies as well as in focusing on the narrowly stated epistemic goals of the Open Science movement (of ensuring reproducibility, transparency, and data reuse, say). I take issue with both of these claims based on a series of empirical case studies, to show that data sharing is broader than has hitherto been assumed, especially in terms of its aims which have, by and large, been modelled along the lines of enabling unspecified, global data reuse. With this preprint, I explain what this means based on an analysis of three discourses, all pertaining to data sharing: Discussions predominantly found within information science documenting a tremendous variability of data types, formats, practices, and sharing behaviour, and an empirical literature that has frequently overlooked the difficulties in accounting for data practices at the level of faculties, research groups, departments, or universities, as well as a more critical discourse that has recently emerged around the factors that inhibit data sharing and reuse, such as the situatedness and contextuality of data practices. The contribution documents a growing awareness of the situated nature of data practices, in particular with respect to research activities in the global south. It further documents mounting evidence for what has been called data contextuality, discussions that ensued from the observation, already a decade old, that “data” are impossible to define, leading to a view now known as the relational view of data (data as potential evidence for knowledge claims).

This contribution has originally been conceived as the introduction to my dissertation, to be submitted in February 2022 to the University of Graz (Department of Sociology). In the dissertation, I take up the vast discourse on data sharing to argue that until now, the most influential positions (exemplified in the works of philosopher Sabina Leonelli and information scientists Christine L. Borgman) have construed their subject matter rather narrowly, both in terms of the dominant case studies as well as in focusing on the narrowly stated epistemic goals of the Open Science movement (of ensuring reproducibility, transparency, and data reuse, say). I take issue with both of these claims based on a series of empirical case studies, to show that data sharing is broader than has hitherto been assumed, especially in terms of its aims which have, by and large, been modelled along the lines of enabling unspecified, global data reuse. With this preprint, I explain what this means based on an analysis of three discourses, all pertaining to data sharing: Discussions predominantly found within information science documenting a tremendous variability of data types, formats, practices, and sharing behaviour, and an empirical literature that has frequently overlooked the difficulties in accounting for data practices at the level of faculties, research groups, departments, or universities, as well as a more critical discourse that has recently emerged around the factors that inhibit data sharing and reuse, such as the situatedness and contextuality of data practices. The contribution documents a growing awareness of the situated nature of data practices, in particular with respect to research activities in the global south. It further documents mounting evidence for what has been called data contextuality, discussions that ensued from the observation, already a decade old, that “data” are impossible to define, leading to a view now known as the relational view of data (data as potential evidence for knowledge claims).

Sociologicial analyses of artistic practice have long drawn on theoretical traditions grounded in binaries and dualisms. Such analytical strategies, exemplified here by field theoretical approaches, center art objects and their movements in and across markets, where binaristic visions of art worlds do offer significant leverage. But when the analyst moves away from markets for art objects and looks to artistic practices the binaristic lens provides, at best, a blurred image with meaningful blind spots. This article suggests an alternative vision of artistic practice —one based on gravity rather than polarity—that captures the ways individuals and their actions make sense in a specific universe of meaning without forcing them into fundamentally competitive and economistic relationships. It leverages findings enabled by a unique sampling strategy in a four year study of visual artists in the United States to illuminate some limitations of binary theoretical frameworks, and outlines a generative alternative to dualism that promotes new analytical and theoretical directions for sociological analyses of artists and artistic practice. This alternative model provides new leverage on four persistent issues in analyses of artistic work: cultural change in occupational fields; actors’ attempts to manage overlapping but incommensurate forms of recognition, reputation, attention, and success; the persistent hegemony of markets for objects in both vernacular and sociological understandings of artistic practice; and questions of visibility and legitimacy central to understanding boundary formation and boundary work in creative fields. The gravitational metaphor promotes a distict set of strategies for the study of artistic work as well as other nontraditional occupations.

Sociologists have long been taken by certain pithy expressions from the founders of the discipline. We propose here both a new explanation for the endurance of these statements as well as an analysis of the power, limitations, and possibilities of aphorisms. By drawing from the critical scholarship concerned with aphorisms, we demonstrate that some of the allure of the classical sociological texts derives from their form, and particularly their reliance on the relative autonomy of the aphorism. Through examining Marx’s “opiate of the people,” Weber’s “iron cage,” and, briefly, two more contemporary sociological aphorisms, we suggest that aphorisms have an ambivalent role in sociological theory: they make claims memorable even as they potentially oversimplify complex arguments. Yet that very simplification can provide a point of focus for productive misreading and reinterpretation.

Though calendar reform has fallen out of fashion in the early 21st century, the Gregorian Calendar is still a problematic timekeeping system that would benefit from adjustment or outright replacement. A number of reforms have been suggested since its implementation. Some of these, I argue, were too radical or not beneficial enough to warrant widespread adoption. I suggest instead a 12-month perennial calendar based on the French Republican Calendar (FRC), with 10-day weeks and three-week months. This, in my view, would bring enough benefit to warrant change, while also not shifting too many frames of reference at once. It would also be devoid of the social-political complexities which prematurely killed the FRC. In essence, it would be the as close to a metric calendar that could realistically be adopted in the near future. I term it the Tellus Calendar.

Proposals for slowing climate change by reflecting sunlight back to space, known as solar geoengineering (SG), are gaining traction in climate policy. Given SG’s capacity to slow warming without reducing carbon emissions, prominent criticism suggests that it will enable fossil fueled business-as-usual. This assessment is not without merit, yet the primary funders of SG research do not emanate from fossil capital. We analyze sources of funding for SG research, finding close ties to financial and technological capital as well as a number of billionaire philanthropists. These corporate sectors and associated philanthropies comprise part of “climate capital” – the fraction of the capitalist class aligned with climate action. We argue that SG is being positioned as a tactic for enabling incremental, market-driven decarbonization, explore key institutions advocating this approach in US climate policy, and conclude that SG is poised to serve as a tool for class compromise between fossil and climate capital.

Scholars have recently remarked upon the emergence of what Richard Florida has termed The New Urban Crisis, a global phenomenon whereby cities are being lumped into winners and losers, with inequality rising in the winner cities where real estate prices are pushing out those who most need access to the opportunities hoarded within. In this article, I argue that the new urban crisis is not a crisis of the city per se but is itself a symptom of greater crises occurring at the level of global capitalism. By revisiting Castells’ The Urban Question, I read the new urban crisis as a product of how the urban social structure fits into the reproduction of capitalism on a global scale, arguing that, under the regime of flexible accumulation, the urban social structure is asked to reproduce two distinct circuits of capital accumulation set loose by the transition to post-industrialism: accumulation via production and accumulation via finance. These distinct circuits of accumulation utilize the elements of urban social structures differentially, often at cross purposes. This produces continued crises in the reproduction of capitalism, as well as continually shifting relations between elements of the urban social structure, producing a plurality of urban forms.

In this study we explore the disciplinary diversity present within subject specialties in the social sciences and humanities. Subject specialties are operationalized as textually coherent clusters of documents. We apply topic modelling to textual information on the individual document level (titles and abstracts) to cluster a multilingual set of roughly 45,000 documents into subject specialties. The dataset includes the metadata of journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and monographs. We make use of two indicators, namely, the organizational affiliation based on the departmental address of the authors and the cognitive orientation based on the disciplinary classifications at the publication level. First, we study the disciplinary diversity of the clusters by calculating a Hill-type diversity index. We draw an overall picture of the distribution of subject specialties over diversity scores and contrast the two indicators with each other. The goal is to discover whether some subject specialties are inherently multi- or interdisciplinary in nature, and whether the different indicators are telling a well-aligned, similar story. Second, for each cluster of documents we calculate the dominance, i.e. the relative size of the largest discipline. This proxy of disciplinary concentration gives an idea of the extent to which a specialty is disciplined. The results show that all subject specialties analyzed serve as interdisciplinary trading grounds, with outliers in both directions of the disciplinary-interdisciplinary continuum. For a large share of specialties, the dominant cognitive and organizational disciplinary classification were found to be well aligned. We present a typology of subject specialties by contrasting the organizational and cognitive diversity scores.

Consumer research is interested in the way consumers navigate consumption in the face of disruption, often using practice theory to focus on how practitioners creatively realign practice elements in order to carry on. Although recognising their significance, this research undertheorizes the significance, role and characteristics of 'meanings' in practice adaptation, presenting them as constraining and yet easy to adapt. We explore and theorize meanings in practice adaptation by mobilising the theoretical leverage of Schatzki’s (2002) concept of ‘teleoaffective structures’. Through our empirical material, we illuminate how multifaceted teleoaffective components constituent of teleoaffective structures are integrated differently into routinised practice performances in relatively stable ways; incorporated via ‘teleoaffective profiles’ that are unique to practitioners but properties of practices. Furthermore, we propose that teleoaffective profiles have different characteristics that condition practice adaptation, as teleological orientations and affective engagements afford different pathways towards integration with available materials and competences. We use our empirical material, based on interviews with loyal gym-based resistance training practitioners during COVID-19 gym closures, to illuminate our argument that practitioners can have ‘rigid’, ‘elastic’ or ‘fluid’ teleoaffective profiles. The characteristics of these profiles, which are unique but remain the properties of the practice, mean that adaptation processes and experiences unfold differently. This perspective advances from accounts of adaptation that are centred on binary outcomes of success or failure. Furthermore, our theorization advances from practice-oriented consumption adaptation research that foregrounds practitioner creativity and fails to adequately incorporate understandings of how practice elements condition adaptation processes. Yet, we retain practitioner experiences in our analysis. Teleoaffective components, profiles and properties provides further theoretical leverage to the practice turn in consumption research and advances the burgeoning focus on the significance of teleoaffective structures in the topographies of practices

Wikipedia, a collaborative crowd-sourced platform, is the largest, most visited online encyclopedia. Since it spreads information freely in more than 300 languages, many users, tools, and dashboards rely on its content. Hence, there is a need to maintain its fairness and completeness. However, previous research has indicated the existence of a significant gender gap in Wikipedia biographical articles. We already know that a minimal proportion of those articles portray women and there are gender asymmetries in the textual content of these articles, but little has been reported about the visual aspects (e.g., image volume or image quality) of the gender gap. Here, we analyze all biographies available on Wikipedia across 300 occupations in the ten most widely spoken languages, and undertake quantitative and qualitative analysis of gender differences in the written and visual content. The cross-lingual results indicate that (1) much of the male bias in content arises when editors select which personalities should have a Wikipedia page, (2) the trends in written and visual content are quite dissimilar, (3) men biographies tend to have more images across languages, and (4) female biographies average better visual quality. A more granular analysis is performed on English Wikipedia, distinguishing trends in occupations and qualitatively analyzing science and technology biographies. The overall results shed light on the kinds of visual biases that emerge in the collaborative creation of Wikipedia and yield guidelines for future management of contributions on the platform.

Cet article analyse le débat entre Jean-Claude Gardin et Jean-Claude Passeron, illustrant la manière dont les démarcations entre structuralismes et poststructuralismes ont pu être opérées dans le cadre technique d’une dispute épistémologique. Les acteurs, la chronologie, et les principales thèses de la dispute sont d'abord présentées. Sont ensuite analysés les clivages les plus saillants des thèses défendues par les deux auteurs: 1) les termes permettant d'établir les descriptions des phénomènes humains avant tout raisonnement à leur propos; 2) les raisonnements employés, en tenant compte de l'éventuelle existence d'un type de raisonnement spécifique aux sciences de l'homme. 3) la formalisation des descriptions et des raisonnements, laquelle implique un certain degré d'abstraction par rapport à leurs ancrages historiques et soulève le problème de la fixation de ce degré. 4) le caractère historique des raisonnements menés en sciences de l'homme et les conséquences de cette propriété pour leur communication et leur validation.

Catjects are neither objects nor subjects, yet draw on both. Just as subjects catjects underlie themselves and just as objects they face themselves. They are categorical constructions of realities out of reality. Catjects describe a calculus of distinctions combining observations within their contexts to produce and reproduce phenomena of all kinds, most notably social one. Social phenomena are phenomena which entertain relations of communication (and control) between observations and their distinctions and which rely on communication (and control) as their mechanism to differentiate within an environment and to reproduce in time. The paper draws on George Spencer-Browns calculus of indications to understand distinctions as connections. Catjects may best be understood as eigen-values of recursive and reflexive functions. Catjects are ways to model, formalize, or symbolize control projects within natural, social, and artificial domains. Among other things they help to understand digitization as a way of systems to code how they draw on their environments and produce their information.

Understanding the artificiality of belief is crucial for the image it generates regarding task performance in the course of problem-solving. This paper examines the contribution of the artificial as a model of human intervention and its relationship to a model of human participation. Specifically, it details the logical differences underlying how belief operationalizes the perception of complexity and its effects on task performance in human and machine problem-solving. Three configurations of artificiality are presented to explain these differences and their effects on the relationship between representation and computation in problem-solving. The first describes the “natural artifact” that arises from a symbolic model of intelligence and the design of a maze. The second describes the “natural artifact” that arises from a sub-symbolic model of intelligence and the design of a mold. The third examines how a hybrid model of intelligence requires “socio-cognitive artifacts” in which a means of adaptation is primarily mediated by discourse rather than design. In doing so, the paper examines how momentary beliefs explain the situational rationality of task performance. The paper concludes with a commentary on the requisites of artificial intelligibility in machine problem-solving.

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The point is to show the co-evolution of scholarly communication and the surveillance advertising economy. The essay then refines the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq. The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to universities and other customers. The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics mark. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics, with the implication that university customers are budgetary victims twice over. The products’ purpose, I stress, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades, in tandem with the view that the university’s main purpose is to grow regional and national economies. A final pair of concerns is that publishers’ prediction projects may camouflage and perpetuate existing biases in the system—and that scholars may internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

Die Grundlagen des Theoretisierens werden in der Soziologie bisher kaum reflektiert. Unterschiedliche Vorstellungen zum Wesen von Theorie(n) erschweren zudem eine systematische Auseinandersetzung mit der Praxis der Theoriebildung. Der Beitrag adressiert dieses Desiderat, indem wir die Grundprobleme des Theoretisierens in der Soziologie und zentrale Modi soziologischer Theoriebildung herausarbeiten. Wir grenzen uns hierbei von Vorstellungen empirischer Theoriebildung und insbesondere von Richard Swedbergs theorizing-Konzeption ab, da diese die Vielfalt von Theoriearbeit in der Soziologie unterschätzen. Die Praxis des Theoretisierens lässt sich nicht auf eine einzige Art und Weise der Theoriebildung reduzieren, denn es greifen stets verschiedene Ebenen, Elemente und Bezugsprobleme theoretischer Reflexion ineinander. Auf dieser Basis unterscheiden wir abschließend sechs Modi des Theoretisierens, die die Theoriearbeit in der Soziologie grundlegend prägen und die sich nicht aufeinander reduzieren lassen.

Where do visionary ideas come from? Although the products of vision as manifested in technical innovation are readily observed, the ideas that eventually change the world are often obscured. Here we develop a novel method that uses deep learning to identify visionary ideas from the language used by individuals and groups. Quantifying vision this way unearths prescient ideas, individuals, and documents that prevailing methods would fail to detect. Applying our model to corpora spanning the disparate worlds of politics, law, and business, we demonstrate that it reliably detects vision in each domain. Moreover, counter to many prevailing intuitions, vision emanates from each domain’s periphery rather than its center. These findings suggest that vision may be as much as property of contexts as of individuals.

Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the example of the gender wage gap in the United States, this article showcases how stylized facts travel into political debates, and how the choices made in characterizing an aspect of economic life (such as controlling for full-time work, but little else) interact with social movement activism, and folk understandings of economic life shaped by legal consciousness. The gender wage gap was first calculated in the 1950s, but did not take on special importance until the 1960s-1970s when feminists rallied around the statistic as a useful aggregate measure of women's economic disempowerment. Academics soon followed, and sociologists and economists began to publish studies documenting trends in the gap and trying to account for its sources. The comparable worth movement of the 1980s explicitly argued that the wage gap resulted from occupational segregation and the devaluation of women's work. As that movement faltered in the late 1980s, the gender wage gap became increasingly understood through the lens of women's choices and tradeoffs between work and family, and occupational segregation dropped out of the narrative, even as academics documented the persistent importance of segregation in explaining the remaining gap. Throughout this period, the gap was frequently misunderstood or misrepresented as reflecting the narrow sort of same-job, different-pay discrimination made illegal by the 1963 Equal Pay Act, adding confusion to the public debate over women's economic position. These dynamics showcase how technical choices made in the identification of stylized facts, such as statistical controls, are simultaneously deeply political choices.

Sociological scholarship on political revolution has recently begun to embrace a process-based understanding of revolutions. Such a processual ontology opens up for understanding hitherto unaddressed processes of counterrevolution. Historians of the Spring of Nations, and The Second French Republic (1848–52) in particular, have failed to address the international aspects of the revolutions, and above all of counterrevolution in the period. This paper addresses this gap through a historical case study of the French Catholic clergy in the Second French Republic. The study applies an amalgamation of recent theoretical developments from revolution scholarship in order to dissect the empirical material and births a new framework in the process. The results demonstrate the important intersocial work of Catholic clergy on the triumph of the counterrevolution in France. The political concerns of the Papal States and Pope Pius IX spilled over into French politics and cemented the legitimacy of the counterrevolutionary turn and fuelled the rise of Louis Napoleon. From these results a new theoretical framework that addresses the intersocial nature of political agency and moves beyond a domestic understanding of political processes is developed. Further studies applying this approach across cases are encouraged in order to better understand how these processes unfold and how multiple intersocial influences can interplay.

This paper provides a comparative historical account of a contemporary phenomenon: the tendency to equate “ethical” goods with aesthetic quality. Studies of moral markets suggest that this equation of ethics and quality would reveal a process whereby these pre-existing moral sensibilities are conveyed through and fought over in the market. Yet this paper argues that we should also examine how markets forms can condition moral sensibilities in the process, not just convey or host them. Drawing on primary source archival materials from late eighteenth century abolitionists and turn-of-the-twentieth-century consumer activists, the author demonstrates that these activists participated in a recurring purity politics of consumption conditioned by the commodity form. This manifests in activists’ equation of: 1) the treatment of the laborers and 2) the quality of the labor with 3) the quality of the goods. To claim that goods were pure, in many instances, was also to claim that the laborers and the labor conditions behind those goods were as well. This purity politics, further, entails both public and private ways of arguing for the equation of ethics and quality, as well as distinct civic visions of ethical labor. It also opens up ways to explore certain racialized dimensions of the commodity form.

This research shows how face masks became politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. While differences in mask wearing behaviors between liberals and conservatives declined over the course of the pandemic, masks remained controversial in the American public sphere. We argue that political divisions over masks cannot be understood by looking to partisan differences in mask wearing behaviors alone. Instead, we show how the mask became a political symbol enrolled into larger patterns of affective polarization, defined by animosity toward the opposing party. This study relies primarily on a combination of qualitative coding and computational text analysis of a large corpus of opinion articles published during the first 10 months of 2020 (n = 7,970). It also relies on supplemental analyses of social media data (from Twitter), the transcripts of major news networks, and longitudinal survey data. We show that backlash against mask refusal—rather than mask refusal itself—was the primary way that masks took on political significance in the American public sphere. Anti-mask discourse consistently occupied a marginal role in the public sphere, while backlash against mask refusal came to prominence and did not decline even as mask wearing behaviors normalized and partly depolarized. We argue that the mask refusal backlash discourse appealed primarily to liberals and show that it was particularly resonant with national political discourses. Beyond the case, this research demonstrates how to use media data to understand how a new set of issues and objects becomes integrated into broader patterns of political polarization.

This chapter draws on the literature reviews of 387 books and articles about sex differences to argue that the scientific authority of the sex binary is often rhetorically established through misleading, revisionist histories of the field.

It is a paradox that science helps us understand the world today better than ever before, while at the same time, science is under siege as misinformation and ‚alternative facts‘ are spread in social media’s filter bubbles and echo chambers. This paper presents an explorative key case study on media personae as potential science communicators on social media. By integrating the concept of para-social opinion leadership into the model of media personae as informal science communicators on social media, the paper explores how media personae can act as opinion leaders and advocate the understanding and communication of science in an informal and creative way.

Americans are increasingly polarized by a variety of metrics. The dimensions, extent, causes, and consequences of that polarization have been the subject of much debate. Yet despite the centrality of religion to early discussions, the analytical focus on America’s divides has largely shifted toward partisan identity, political ideology, race, and class interests. I show that religion remains powerfully implicated in all dimensions of American polarization, and sociologists must once again make religion more central to their analyses. After outlining research on American polarization, focusing on the role of religion, I survey findings within the burgeoning literatures on cultural transformation processes, (white) Christian nationalism, complex religion, and Americans’ attitudes toward science in order to underscore the centrality of ethno-religious identities, religious demography, and religious institutions for both shaping and exacerbating various forms of polarization. Lastly, I propose an agenda for elucidating religion’s ongoing role in understanding polarization beyond public opinion research at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. Though polarization research has been dominated by political scientists, leveraging religion in our analyses—not merely as a sui generis “variable,” but as a “site” of complex social behavior—facilitates novel sociological contributions to these literatures via our relative attention to multiple levels of analysis, theoretical eclecticism, and methodological fluidity.

The contribution examines whether systematic research assessments go hand in hand with a dedifferentiation of disciplinary cultures. The case of application for this question is the British Research Excellence Framework (REF). The analysis reveals that history departments in the upper rank groups of the REF publish first and foremost articles in high impact journals, while those departments that are not rewarded by the assessment publish mainly contributions to edited volumes. The contribution concludes that research assessments that are generically applied across disciplines and that are both symbolically and materially efficacious go hand in hand with a dedifferentiation of disciplinary cultures in terms of publication activities.

Interdisciplinary sensitivity takes into account the epistemic upheaval of the Anthropocene. However, the still fragmented academic organization between nature and society counteracts intellectual progress. The paper explores the possibilities of enhancing collaboration between biology and sociology by providing an empirical reflection of common methodological grounds. Building on practice theory, pragmatism, science studies and sociocultural anthropology, I discuss current nature–society relationships through an ethnography of a taxonomist’s laboratory, followed up by a biodiversity expedition in Papua New Guinea. I address analogical thinking as a device for interdisciplinary collaboration through four modes of fieldwork enrollment: Ontological, disciplinary, transdisciplinary and experimental. The paper concludes with two arguments: Firstly, fieldwork could engender new knowledge in between differing epistemic cultures and, secondly, an analogical fieldwork approach based on the interrelatedness of experience, trial and cooperation facilitates promising pathways for sustainable futures of inquiry.

Like any disaster, COVID-19 laid waste to infrastructure and the ability for a community to do community. But, unlike a tornado or nuclear meltdown, COVID-19 laid waste to social infrastructure in unique ways that only a disease can do. On the one hand, a pandemic brings biological dangers that, in turn, make all individuals—loved ones, too—into potential threats of biological contamination. On the other hand, the efforts to contain diseases present social dangers, as isolation and distancing threatens mundane and spectacular ritualized encounters and mask-wearing heighten our awareness of the biological risk. By exploring the link between disasters and disease, this paper leverages the contamination process, beginning first with the barriers it presents to making and remaking the self in everyday life. Constraints on ritualized encounters, both in terms of delimiting face-to-face interaction and in determining that some spaces have contaminative risks, reduces collective life to imagined communities or shifts to digitally mediated spaces. The former intensifies the sense of anomie people feel as their social world appears as though it were disintegrating while the latter presents severe neurobiological challenges to reproducing what face-to-face interaction habitually generates. Finally, these micro/meso-level processes are contextualized by considering how institutions, particularly polity but also science, manage collective risk and how their efficacy may either contribute to the erosion of solidarity or provide a sense of support in the face of anomic terror. Using the US to illustrate these processes, we are able to show how an inefficacious State response weakens the already tenuous connective tissue that holds a diffuse and diverse population together, while also exposing and intensifying existing political, economic, and cultural fissures, thereby further eroding existing solidarity and the capacity to rebuild post-pandemic cohesion.