Subjects -> COMPUTER SCIENCE (Total: 2313 journals)
    - ANIMATION AND SIMULATION (33 journals)
    - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (133 journals)
    - AUTOMATION AND ROBOTICS (116 journals)
    - CLOUD COMPUTING AND NETWORKS (75 journals)
    - COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE (11 journals)
    - COMPUTER ENGINEERING (12 journals)
    - COMPUTER GAMES (23 journals)
    - COMPUTER PROGRAMMING (25 journals)
    - COMPUTER SCIENCE (1305 journals)
    - COMPUTER SECURITY (59 journals)
    - DATA BASE MANAGEMENT (21 journals)
    - DATA MINING (50 journals)
    - E-BUSINESS (21 journals)
    - E-LEARNING (30 journals)
    - ELECTRONIC DATA PROCESSING (23 journals)
    - IMAGE AND VIDEO PROCESSING (42 journals)
    - INFORMATION SYSTEMS (109 journals)
    - INTERNET (111 journals)
    - SOCIAL WEB (61 journals)
    - SOFTWARE (43 journals)
    - THEORY OF COMPUTING (10 journals)

COMPUTER SCIENCE (1305 journals)            First | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7     

Showing 1201 - 872 of 872 Journals sorted alphabetically
Software:Practice and Experience     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 12)
Southern Communication Journal     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 3)
Spatial Cognition & Computation     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 6)
Spreadsheets in Education     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Statistics, Optimization & Information Computing     Open Access   (Followers: 3)
Stochastic Analysis and Applications     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 3)
Stochastic Processes and their Applications     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 6)
Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 12)
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Informatica     Open Access  
Studies in Digital Heritage     Open Access   (Followers: 3)
Supercomputing Frontiers and Innovations     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Superhero Science and Technology     Open Access   (Followers: 5)
Sustainability Analytics and Modeling     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 5)
Sustainable Computing : Informatics and Systems     Hybrid Journal  
Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 4)
Sustainable Operations and Computers     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Swarm Intelligence     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 3)
Swiss Journal of Geosciences     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 1)
Synthese     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 20)
Synthesis Lectures on Biomedical Engineering     Full-text available via subscription  
Synthesis Lectures on Communication Networks     Full-text available via subscription  
Synthesis Lectures on Communications     Full-text available via subscription  
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 4)
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Science     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 1)
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Vision     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 2)
Synthesis Lectures on Digital Circuits and Systems     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 3)
Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies     Full-text available via subscription  
Synthesis Lectures on Mobile and Pervasive Computing     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 1)
Synthesis Lectures on Quantum Computing     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 2)
Synthesis Lectures on Signal Processing     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 1)
Synthesis Lectures on Speech and Audio Processing     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 2)
System analysis and applied information science     Open Access  
Systems & Control Letters     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 4)
Systems and Soft Computing     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 5)
Systems Research & Behavioral Science     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 2)
Techné : Research in Philosophy and Technology     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 2)
Technical Report Electronics and Computer Engineering     Open Access  
Technology Transfer: fundamental principles and innovative technical solutions     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Technology, Knowledge and Learning     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 3)
Technometrics     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 8)
TECHSI : Jurnal Teknik Informatika     Open Access  
TechTrends     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 8)
Telematics and Informatics     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 4)
Telemedicine and e-Health     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 12)
Telemedicine Reports     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 6)
TELKOMNIKA (Telecommunication, Computing, Electronics and Control)     Open Access   (Followers: 2)
The Bible and Critical Theory     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 3)
The Charleston Advisor     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 10)
The Communication Review     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 5)
The Electronic Library     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 964)
The Information Society: An International Journal     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 399)
The International Journal on Media Management     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 7)
The Journal of Architecture     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 15)
The Journal of Supercomputing     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 1)
The Lancet Digital Health     Open Access   (Followers: 9)
The R Journal     Open Access   (Followers: 3)
The Visual Computer     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 3)
Theoretical Computer Science     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 8)
Theory & Psychology     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 4)
Theory and Applications of Mathematics & Computer Science     Open Access   (Followers: 2)
Theory and Decision     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 4)
Theory and Research in Education     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 20)
Theory and Society     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 20)
Theory in Biosciences     Hybrid Journal  
Theory of Computing Systems     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 2)
Theory of Probability and its Applications     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 2)
Topology and its Applications     Full-text available via subscription  
Transactions In Gis     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 9)
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics     Open Access  
Transactions on Computer Science and Technology     Open Access   (Followers: 2)
Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 21)
Trends in Cognitive Sciences     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 182)
Trends in Computer Science and Information Technology     Open Access  
Ubiquity     Hybrid Journal  
Unisda Journal of Mathematics and Computer Science     Open Access  
Universal Access in the Information Society     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 11)
Universal Journal of Computational Mathematics     Open Access   (Followers: 2)
University of Sindh Journal of Information and Communication Technology     Open Access  
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 5)
VAWKUM Transaction on Computer Sciences     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Veri Bilimi     Open Access  
Vietnam Journal of Computer Science     Open Access   (Followers: 2)
Vilnius University Proceedings     Open Access  
Virtual Reality     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 9)
Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Virtual Worlds     Open Access  
Virtualidad, Educación y Ciencia     Open Access  
Visual Communication     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 11)
Visual Communication Quarterly     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 7)
VLSI Design     Open Access   (Followers: 19)
VRA Bulletin     Open Access   (Followers: 3)
Water SA     Open Access   (Followers: 1)
Wearable Technologies     Open Access   (Followers: 2)
West African Journal of Industrial and Academic Research     Open Access   (Followers: 2)
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews - Computational Statistics     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 1)
Wireless and Mobile Technologies     Open Access   (Followers: 4)
Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 10)
Wireless Networks     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 6)
Wireless Sensor Network     Open Access   (Followers: 3)
World Englishes     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 5)
Written Communication     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 9)
Xenobiotica     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 7)
XRDS     Full-text available via subscription   (Followers: 3)
ZDM     Hybrid Journal   (Followers: 2)
Zeitschrift fur Energiewirtschaft     Hybrid Journal  
Труды Института системного программирования РАН     Open Access  
Труды СПИИРАН     Open Access  

  First | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7     

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Theory and Society
Journal Prestige (SJR): 1.45
Citation Impact (citeScore): 2
Number of Followers: 20  
 
  Hybrid Journal Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 1573-7853 - ISSN (Online) 0304-2421
Published by Springer-Verlag Homepage  [2467 journals]
  • The culture of official statistics. Symbolic domination and
           “bourgeois” assimilation in quantitative measurements of immigrant
           integration in Germany

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      Abstract: Abstract While cultural sociology has recently made a comeback in research on social inequality both in the context of poverty studies and studies of immigrant integration, it has rarely investigated how particular constructions of the problem of socioeconomic mobility are themselves culturally situated. The article addresses this neglect by investigating the problematization of disadvantaged lives within the relational framework of Bourdieu’s cultural theory of the state. Here, the state exercises symbolic violence by transforming one arbitrary cultural standpoint in social space into a universal standard, or a taken-for-granted “doxa,” against which other cultural positions can only come off as deficient. The article extends this perspective by addressing the role of official statistics in this process. Taking Germany’s official monitoring of the socioeconomic integration of immigrants as its case and drawing from document analysis, interviews, ethnographic observation, and data from the German General Social Survey, the article shows how such statistical instruments of the welfare state in fact tacitly universalize a model of the good life particular to civil servants, the very constructors of the monitors, as a benchmark for immigrant integration.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Critical reflections on Pollitt and Bouckaert’s construct of the
           neo-Weberian state (NWS) in their standard work on public management
           reform

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      Abstract: Abstract Pollitt and Bouckaert and their neo-Weberian state (NWS) have been chosen as the subject for this essay because the book has become a standard work in the public management movement. It is frequently cited and has been re-published in multiple editions (most recently in 2017). The authors also refer explicitly to Max Weber. This contribution seeks to draw attention to three important aspects, which inevitably overlap with one another: 1. There is no Weber in the neo-Weberian State (introduction, 1; section II). Pollitt and Bouckaert fail to grasp that Weber’s understanding of the state [the state as an “institution” (Anstalt); and the state as an “idea of validity” (Geltungsvorstellung)] is not identical to his ideal type of modern bureaucracy; it is the features of the latter on which they draw. The ideal type is a standard measure constructed in order to establish how close any concrete, given instance of bureaucracy comes to it (introduction, 3). Meanwhile, the “neutral official” insisted upon by Weber has “taken their leave” in Germany from important positions (section III, 3). Furthermore, Weber did not address those structures and processes internal to the administration which are precisely the object of interest for the new public management reformers. Weber’s lack of interest arises from the fact the members of an Anstalt, whether it is the state or the Church (WuG, § 15, no. 2), are subject to imposed orders (oktroyierte Ordnungen) and, as such, do not enjoy the “right to have a say”. Scharpf (1973a) was the first to pay particular attention to the problems brought about by specialisation and by the division of labour within the administration that are responsible for an incremental form of politics (section III, 3); even if he later ascribes advantages to the combination of “negative” and “positive coordination” (Scharpf 1991: 18ff.). 2. The “legalistic culture” that characterises Germany will be considered in a more differentiated way, drawing on empirical studies which provide information, for example, on how laws (i.e. programmes) actually originate inside the ministerial apparatus (introduction, 2; section III, 2 and 3) or how use is made of the power of authority (Weisungsrecht) in practice (introduction, 2; section III, 2 and 3), even when, formally, it claims to have validity (section III). In this way, only empirical studies (Benz 1994; Bohne 1981; Dose 1997; Dose/Voigt 1995; Treiber 2007a) prove that the administration that implements laws has often, in practice, become a “negotiative administration” (introduction, 2). Such a phenomenon as a “co-operative administration”, which negotiates rather than rules, is a “foreign concept” in Weber’s discussion of the state and modern bureaucracy. Scharpf’s (1970) comparison between constitutional governance in Germany and legal relief in America is enlightening when it comes to the meaning of the constitutional state (Rechtsstaat) (introduction, 2; section III); the same applies to his discussion of the failed federalist reforms, which sought, among other things, to mitigate, if not entirely eliminate, the opportunities for blockades provided by political entanglement (Politikverflechtung) (section III). Neither was it possible to realise long overdue proposals to reform administrative law (Verwaltungsrecht) (section III, 1), which involved weakening or removing altogether three important assumptions in the dominant administrative doctrine (the “dogmatic normality”) and which also included the ambitious intention for the law to achieve tangible impact (Hoffmann-Riem 1994). Nonetheless, while no-one would dispute that reform of the federal government and administration remained “on the agenda” (Scharpf 1991, Mayntz/ Scharpf 1973), the priorities of such a reform were, and still are, different to those of new public management reform [the key terms here are Planung (“planning”) and the term that replaced it, Steuerung (“management”)]1. 3. Pollitt and Bouckaert ascribe to the neo-Weberian state extremely varied functions without providing any (theoretical) basis for them. In this way, the notion of public management reform that they present acquires the status of a “reformist philosophy” (introduction, 3; section IV). See Scharpf (1991) for a theoretically well-founded argumentation on the State’s ability to act in our days. Scharpf’s essay will be discussed briefly (section IV). Conclusion ...
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • The genesis of Brexit in the UK: outline of a multi-field model

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      Abstract: Abstract This paper outlines a sociological model of the conditions of possibility of the UK’s decision to withdraw from the European Union in 2016. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu and those inspired by him, it synthesises and goes beyond the partial and fragmentary accounts offered so far to offer a more comprehensive narrative implicating the interrelation of multiple fields, with agents’ evolving strategies within the different fields being the major fulcra. To be specific, the conditions of possibility for the referendum result were provided by mutations within the global field of nation states ricocheting through the UK’s political field, ethno-racial field and class structure.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Memory for forgetfulness: Conceptualizing a memory practice of settler
           colonial disavowal

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      Abstract: Abstract This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help reproduce settler colonial processes of accumulation and displacement at the micro-level. The article draws on archival data from avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist colonies to explicate patterned representations of Palestinian villages that Zionist forces gradually displaced prior to and during the 1948 War/Nakba. I demonstrate how the colonial settlers attributed political meaning through five representational modes: contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive and settlers as progressive and developed; denying an indigenous connection to the land; emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural progress and settler superiority; asymmetrically assessing settler and indigenous belongings to national collectives; and legitimizing land purchases that dispossessed indigenous cultivators, despite the settlers’ socialist ideology, while reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation. I theorize a form of settler colonial memory based not merely on erasure, but on recognition and disavowal. Finally, I argue that local memory is a significant site of production in which the conceptual tools to both trace the historical processes of supremacy and subvert asymmetrical sociality lie.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Bureaucracy and the politics of time in state-business relations: Waiting
           to recruit migrant labour in Mauritius

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      Abstract: Abstract Time is money. According to E.P. Thompson, this saying lies at the core of the logic of capitalism. And yet, in the vast literature on state-capital relations, the strategic value of time has remained relatively neglected compared to rent distribution and monetary exchanges. Elaborating on the recruitment of migrants by employers and their intermediaries in Mauritius, this article explores the role of bureaucratic time and delays in businesses’ access to the fundamental resource for economic accumulation: labour. It reveals a bifurcated bureaucratic pathway, a two-speed logic in the Mauritian bureaucracy of migration. On one side is the lengthy and unpredictable process of administering the authorisations to recruit foreign workers; on the other appear what I term the “shortcuts through the red tape”, the exemptions to the bureaucratic procedures and delays that benefit politically connected actors. Drawing on this case study, I contend that the politics of waiting, inherent to bureaucratic routine, matters in the relations between business and the state.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Rethinking the “crisis of expertise”: a relational approach

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      Abstract: Abstract Concerns about a “crisis of expertise” have been raised recently in both scholarship and public debate. This article asks why there is such a widespread perception that expertise is in crisis, and why this “crisis” has posed such a difficult puzzle for sociology to explain. It argues that what has been interpreted as a crisis is better understood as a transformation: the dissolution of a regime of expertise organized around practices of social integration, and its displacement by a new regime organized around practices of expulsion. This article introduces a new framework that envisages expertise as an historically constituted phenomenon, which is the outcome of relational networks (which I call alliances). It argues that this approach, in which expertise(s) are understood as the historically contingent outcome of alliances between knowledge producers, problems, and modes of intervention, can better account for recent shifts. It does this by enabling us to reinterpret what has been described as a general crisis of expertise as, instead, the observed effects of the dissolution of specific alliances of knowledge and practice. This article demonstrates the power of this relational approach through two case studies: the dissolution of the expert alliances organized around the rehabilitative approach to crime and the counterinsurgency approach to irregular political violence. In each these cases, it finds that, as alliances of social expertise, characterized by policies and interventions that attempted to discipline problem actors and integrate them into society, unraveled, they were displaced by new alliances that sought to manage problems through practices of exclusion. The paper concludes with a theory of why the field of sociology has had such difficulty explaining the crisis of expertise.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Resignation without relief: democratic governance and the relinquishing of
           parental rights

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      Abstract: Abstract Sociologists have long studied the ways people resist oppression but have devoted far less empirical attention to the ways people resign to it. As a result, researchers have neglected the mechanisms of resignation and how people narrate their lived experiences. Drawing on 81 interviews with parents with past child protective services cases, this article provides an empirical account of resignation in an institutional setting, documenting how parents understand relinquishing their rights as a process of personalization, calculation, or socialization. Phenomenologically, parents typically confronted multiple barriers and setbacks simultaneously, the combined weight of which pressured them to “give up,” interpreting structural and institutional pressures as individual choice. This article accordingly identifies resignation as a crucial feature of democratic governance.
      PubDate: 2023-02-23
       
  • Social media, meet old politics: preservation and innovation in Colombian
           presidential elections, 2010–2018

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      Abstract: Abstract This article develops a framework to analyze how political actors adopt social media in systems characterized by clientelism and populism, tracing the consequences and disruptive capabilities of the forms of social media adoption. The framework proceeds in two analytical stages. The first locates actors’ structural positions in the political system (internal/external) and their relationship with the mainstream media (allied/antagonistic). The second builds on pragmatism focusing on iterative problem situations actors face that explain forms of social media adoption. In examining the structural positions and problem-solving stages of Colombian political actors, this article articulates three paths of adoption: habit preservation, internal innovation, and external innovation. Preservationists understand the new technology in old terms, projecting their understandings of old media onto the new one. Internal innovators combine clientelist practices and communication ones, upholding core routines while integrating new ones; they show a potential to reshape the system internally, making viable part of it, but changing the balance of power between existing elites. External innovators develop practices that integrate physical spaces and online communication, displaying a disruptive potential for existing core practices and the political system. In this way, the framework and empirical case link and develop the literatures on clientelism and political communication.
      PubDate: 2023-01-20
       
  • Moments of identity: dynamics of artist, persona, and audience in
           electronic music

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      Abstract: Abstract In our account of artistic identities among electronic music artists, we point to the notion of persona as a key element in a triadic framework for studying the dynamics of identity. Building on pragmatist theory, we further draw on Pizzorno’s concept of mask and Luhmann’s notion of second-order observation to highlight the dual properties of persona: whether like a mask that is put on or like a probe that is put out, persona is a part that stands apart. Persona is an object that alter can recognize and by which ego can be recognized; but what is recognized defies the person’s complete control. We thus conceptualize identity as a multi-sided relationship that involves person, persona, and others. Building on our ethnographic research among electronic music artists in Berlin and New York, we characterize this relationship in terms of attachment between artist and persona, between artist and audience, and between persona and audience. These attachments are variable and independent from one another. The resulting model is an analytic tool to examine identity as the ongoing outcome of the three-way dynamics of such shifting attachments. We are attentive to persona because the creation and curation of online profiles have become a pervasive element in many people’s daily interactions in both social and work situations.
      PubDate: 2023-01-01
       
  • Deindustrialization, social disintegration, and health: a neoclassical
           sociological approach

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      Abstract: Abstract Deindustrialization is a major burden on workers’ health in many countries, calling for theoretically informed sociological analysis. Here, we present a novel neoclassical sociological synthesis of the lived experience of deindustrialization. We conceptualize industry as a social institution whose disintegration has widespread implications for the social fabric. Combining Durkheimian and Marxian categories, we show that deindustrialization generates ruptures in economic production, which entail job and income loss, increased exploitation, social inequality, and the disruption of services. These ruptures spill over to the field of social reproduction, generating material deprivation, job strain, fatalism, increased domestic workload, anomie, community disintegration, and alienation. These ruptures in social reproduction are sources of psychosocial stress, through which deindustrialization gets embodied as ill health and dysfunctional health behavior. We substantiate this framework through the extensive qualitative thematic analysis of 82 life history interviews in Hungary’s rust belt.
      PubDate: 2023-01-01
       
  • Democracy underwater: public participation, technical expertise, and
           climate infrastructure planning in New York City

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      Abstract: Abstract This article provides an explanation for how increased public participation can paradoxically translate into limited democratic decision-making in urban settings. Recent sociological research shows how governments can control participatory forums to restrict the distribution of resources to poor neighborhoods or to advance private land development interests. Yet such explanations cannot account for the decoupling of participation from democratic decision-making in the case of planning for climate change, which expands the substantive topics and public funding decisions that involve urban residents. Through an in-depth case study of one of the largest coastal protection projects in the world and drawing on global scholarship on participation, this article narrates the social production of resistance to climate change infrastructure by showing how the state sidestepped public input and exercised authority through appeals to the rationality of technical expertise. After a lengthy participation process wherein participants reported satisfaction with how their input was included in designs, city officials switched decision-making styles and used expertise from engineers to render the publicly-supported plan unfeasible, while continuing to involve residents in the process. As a result, conflict arose between activists and public housing representatives, bitterly dividing the neighborhood over who could legitimately claim to represent the interests of the “frontline community.” By documenting the experience of participants in the process before and after the switch in decision-making styles, this article advances a sociological description of public influence in policy: The ability for participants in a planning process to recognize their own input reflected in finished plans.
      PubDate: 2023-01-01
       
  • Towards a sociology of curiosity: theoretical and empirical consideration
           of the epistemic drive notion

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      Abstract: Abstract The article argues for the social production of curiosity. Due its motivating characteristic, curiosity is reconceptualized as an epistemic drive which organizes the social production of knowledge under given socio-historical and local-cultural circumstances. First, historical, philosophical, and sociological literature is reviewed to give a context for the argument. Then a theoretical apparatus is developed considering the emergence, development, and impact of epistemic drives which serves as a foundation for empirical analysis. The second part demonstrates applicability by discussing the problem of economic incentives in scientific research. I argue that scientific projects with little to none immediate economic return have a significant disadvantage in acquiring funding which in turn impacts the mobilization of curiosity in their field. A tendency which systematically yields a disproportionate distribution of knowledge. In conclusion, the article suggests the usefulness of the epistemic drive notion in understanding curiosity as a sociological object.
      PubDate: 2023-01-01
       
  • Epistemic doubt and affective certainty: counting homotransphobia in
           Brazil

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      Abstract: Abstract Statistics circulate with ambivalence in governance settings and mass publics—both extolled as authoritative knowledge and the object of distrustful scrutiny. In the field of human rights activism, where the means to create authoritative knowledge operates asymmetrically between activists, organizations, and state actors, this makes statistical production and circulation subject to an intense politics of knowledge. LGBTI human rights actors in Brazil, for instance, constantly produce numbers that endeavor to make homophobia and transphobia epistemically and affectively real to various audiences. From community surveys of personal experiences of violence or discrimination, to civil society reports of homicides, to federal government reports from human rights hotline complaints, LGBTI activists are awash in figures where they find themselves the producers, consumers, and subject material of such data. This article documents how activists and civil servants count violence, constructing homophobia and transphobia as knowable objects. These counting practices emerge from activists’ counterpublic circulations of knowledge about objects as well as epistemic infrastructures (police, journalistic coverage, hotlines) through which LGBTI peoples’ experience becomes refracted. Aware of these complications, activists deploy epistemic doubt and affective certainty to the field of statistics—utilizing the knowledge they offer while questioning whether violence can be measured at all.
      PubDate: 2023-01-01
       
  • “Burning the bridges”: escalation in the pursuit of
           authenticity

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      Abstract: Abstract We develop a process-based framework, articulating the escalation of difference between “private” self and “public” display as an alternative trajectory in the pursuit of authenticity to alignment and compromise. A parsimonious model presents an endogenous dynamic of binary choice that generates momentum toward polarization. The model is illustrated in the context of “black” metal – a branch of heavy metal music that appeared in Norway in the early 1990s, notorious for its involvement in criminal activities. Using fanzine data, we construct a narrative of how a process of escalation led to innovation and transgression through self-selection and exclusion. The analysis addresses two related theoretical problems – what motivates actors to challenge normative scripts and “burn the bridges” to social acceptance, and why such challenges may prove more effective in achieving recognition than compromise. Examples from politics, culture and sports reinforce the importance of these problems.
      PubDate: 2023-01-01
       
  • Pricing the priceless child 2.0: children as human capital investment

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      Abstract: Abstract This article takes Viviana Zelizer’s (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child to the new millennium. Zelizer documented the transformation between the 19th and 20th century from an “economically useful” to an “emotionally priceless” child. She observed that by the 1930s, American children were practically economically worthless but invested with significant emotional value. What has happened to this emotionally priceless child at the dawn of the new millennium' Has there been a new transformation in the social value of children, and, if so, what might have such a transformation entailed' To address these questions, we examine overtime trends that point to increasing devotion of resources and time to children’s education, a key input in the exceedingly influential human capital theory, which connects investment into children’s human capital with their future market value. Therefore, we argue that the priceless child 2.0 is a useful-to-be human capital investment child. We use four empirical examples of overtime growth in children’s human capital investment: (a) enrollments in early childhood education, (b) federal spending on early education, (c) federal spending on K-12 programs, and (d) parental spending on child care, education and extracurricular activities. In the conclusion, we discuss some potential consequences and concerns about raising children as human capital investment.
      PubDate: 2022-12-08
      DOI: 10.1007/s11186-022-09508-x
       
  • Ambivalences of smallness: population statistics and narratives of scale
           among American Jewry

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      Abstract: Abstract Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry – an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively.
      PubDate: 2022-12-04
      DOI: 10.1007/s11186-022-09473-5
       
  • A theory of intersubjectivity: experience, interaction and the anchoring
           of meaning

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      Abstract: Abstract Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding this theory. Schutz tied intersubjectivity to the way people experience the world of everyday life: a world that he held as distinct from other provinces of meaning, such as religious experience, humor, or scientific reasoning. However, as this article shows, such neat distinctions are problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: The cognitive styles that define different provinces of meaning often bleed into one another; people often inhabit multiple provinces of meaning simultaneously. Intersubjectivity may thus be simultaneously anchored in multiple worlds, opening a host of empirical research questions: not only about how intersubjectivity is done in interaction, but about how different kinds of intersubjective experiences are constructed, how multi-layered they are, as well as opening up questions about possible asymmetries in the experiences of intersubjectivity.
      PubDate: 2022-11-17
      DOI: 10.1007/s11186-022-09507-y
       
  • The survival game: Impression management and strategies of survival under
           extreme conditions in a Soviet Gulag prison camp

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      Abstract: Abstract How do people survive under extreme conditions' Will selfish, non-cooperating free-rider types – the solo players – have the best chances of surviving' Or would cooperating, hard-working types – the team players – have higher chances' All morale put aside, it is interesting to know whether non-cooperation or cooperation pays off in a game characterized by scarcity and hard competition for survival. A study of people in such a Hobbesian state of nature can also teach us important lessons about social dynamics in contemporary, prosperous societies. An interesting case of ‘The survival game’ can be found in Solzhenitsyn’s (1963 [1962]) self-biographical book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting life in a Soviet Gulag prison camp in Siberia January 1951. We use Solzhenitsyn’s work as evidence of the interplay between five player types among prisoners: Cooperative blind-riders (BRs), hard-riders (HRs) and tough-riders (TRs), i.e. the so-called ‘toilers’; non-cooperative easy-riders (ERs), looked upon by the toilers as ‘bastards’, ‘screws’ and ‘errand boys’; and finally Low-riders (LRs), comprising ‘goners’ and ‘jackals’. The main research question addresses the successfulness of the survival strategies of the five player types. Apart from a Multiple Player Approach (MPA) that may be seen as a further development of second-generation theory of collective action (Ostrom & Ahn, 2009), we apply Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory on our case. Hence, we argue that impression management at two different ‘stages’ – the Brigade stage and the Camp stage – is crucial for survival for hard-riding as well as for easy-riding players, in particular strategic masking. Seeking to unite Goffman and game-theoretic MPA, our overall purpose is to make a theoretical contribution to “game-related sociology” (Swedberg, 2001).
      PubDate: 2022-11-14
      DOI: 10.1007/s11186-022-09502-3
       
  • “Black people don’t love nature”: white environmentalist
           imaginations of cause, calling, and capacity

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      Abstract: Abstract I examine how white British members of a London-area environmental group conceptualize race in relation to ecological disasters. Based on a five-year (2018–2022) ethnographic study, members employed racialized narratives and symbolic boundaries to construct who was the cause of disasters, who had the moral responsibility or calling to remediate disasters, and who possessed the adequate resources and capacity to fix disasters. Together, these narratives formed a tripartite racial imaginary which functioned to demarcate the symbolic boundaries of an ideal, white racial identity that was intimately crocheted with notions of authentic guilt and remorse, responsibility and liability, work ethics, competent knowledge, resource mobilization, moral commitment, and racial paternalism and superiority. Through the pursuit of this White racial ideal, members frequently conceptualized ecological disasters throughout the non-white world as the fault of specific actions by non-White people, identified unique racialized actors as the proper responsible parties for working on the remediation of ecological disasters, and also assigned particular White people from Westernized, industrial, democratic states as the only people in possession of the appropriate knowledge, resources, and character to clean-up and manage a healthy environment.
      PubDate: 2022-11-09
      DOI: 10.1007/s11186-022-09505-0
       
  • The means and ends of nature

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      Abstract: Abstract What should sociologists make of nature' Pragmatism provides one possible answer to this question by centering the practical relations between humans and nonhuman nature. Stefan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements offers perhaps the most ambitious effort to develop a pragmatist sociology of nature. The book’s polemical aim is to depose a family of theories that, Bargheer argues, dominate our way of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture. This essay constructs an alternative, more accommodating critical encounter between competing theories. It begins by simultaneously granting Bargheer’s positive theoretical contributions while entertaining several virtues of opposing theories of nature and culture that the book largely overlooks. The results include three challenges for a pragmatist sociology of nature: the problem of depth; the problem of breadth, and the problem of differentiation. I argue that this accommodating critical encounter may result in a smaller distance between pragmatism and other sociological theories of nature and culture, and opens to more opportunities for synthetic conversations, rather than pointing to unbridgeable chasms.
      PubDate: 2022-11-01
      DOI: 10.1007/s11186-022-09496-y
       
 
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