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editorial2017
SSI0010.1177/0539018417735406Social Science InformationEditorial

Editorial

Social Science Information

Social sciences and social

2017, Vol. 56(4) 499­–501
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0539018417735406
https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018417735406
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The social sciences are held to identify major social transformations by means of empiri-
cal observation and conceptual reflection. At the same time, they are themselves part of
those transformations. They may be involved in them before becoming conscious of
them. The empirical gaze may need to be redirected because new phenomena have arisen
or existing ones may have lost or gained in significance. And concepts that appeared to
have been solidly established lose their grip on social reality ‘when the light of the great
cultural problems moves on’, as Max Weber had put it in his essay on objectivity more
than a century ago.
There is today widespread agreement that the social world has been undergoing a
major social transformation over the past half century – incidentally, roughly over the
period of publication of Social Science Information/Information sur les sciences sociales.
Many different terms are used to capture this transformation – transformation of moder-
nity, end of the Westphalian state system, globalization, information revolution, rise of
neoliberal capitalism, return of religion, rise of ecological awareness, to name only a few.
But the view is by now widely accepted that the elements these terms refer to are inter-
linked and together amount to a major social transformation. The variety of terms then
indicates an ongoing debate rather than profound disagreement: debate over where to
direct the empirical gaze to identify the most significant elements of the transformation,
and debate over the degree to which a conceptual transformation in the social sciences is
required to appropriately interpret and understand the social transformation. The first
five articles brought together in this issue are all part of this debate and try to advance it,
some of them more in terms of theoretical reflection, others more oriented towards
understanding newly arising social phenomena. Their focus is on sociology, but not on
sociology as an isolated discipline. They set developments within sociology within the
context of broader debates about epistemology and concept-formation (León-Medina,
Ghisleni, Mica) and thematize as well as build on the relation of sociology to neighbour-
ing disciplines, such as economics (Mica), anthropology (Ghisleni, Augusto and Simões),
political science (Salmela and von Scheve) and psychology (Salmela and von Scheve,
Augusto and Simões).
The first set of three articles focuses on approaches that situate themselves explicitly
within sociology: analytical sociology (León-Medina), sociology of everyday life
(Ghisleni), and economic sociology (Mica). These articles have a common background
in critical debates in the social sciences that started roughly half a century ago and even
have a somewhat common denominator: the doubts about a way of thinking that postu-
lates a great solidity of the social world and that assigns causal power over individuals to
500 Social Science Information 56(4)

social entities. The Durkheimian postulation of society as an entity sui generis and the
Parsonsian emphasis on the problem of social order stand out, but this way of thinking
has long been characteristic for sociology, even to some extent constitutive of the disci-
pline. From the 1960s onwards, and increasingly so, these assumptions have been ques-
tioned, up to being widely discarded. Analytical sociology, sociology of everyday life
and ‘new’ economic sociology were proposed, in highly different ways, as – comprehen-
sive or partial – alternatives to structuralism and functionalism. Most importantly, they
were developed as approaches that place the acting human beings and their interpreta-
tions of the social world in the centre of attention, without though renouncing the social-
science objective of understanding and explaining how large-scale social phenomena
arise from the interaction of human beings.
What is particular to the articles assembled here is that they, at our current moment, can
provide critical reflections on the prior attempts at rethinking and reconceptualizing.
While each of the authors is sympathetic to the approach they discuss, they all point to
flaws and limitations (León-Medina, Mica) or at least to new, yet unaddressed challenges
(Ghisleni). León-Medina shows that the initial proposal of analytical sociology was not as
clear and compelling as it had been presented. Subsequent debate recognized the initial
flaws, but was not able to correct them without opening up new problems. Where León-
Medina recognizes lack of clarity in the key concept of ‘mechanism’ and its in-built
assumptions about the linkages between acting human beings and large-scale phenomena,
Mica argues something similar with regard to the concept of the ‘unintended’, as the
large-scale outcome of actions and interactions, which is key to economic sociology, old
and new, but insufficiently elaborated. Both approaches focus on human action and its
outcomes, in contrast to collectivistic or holistic assumptions of much earlier sociology,
but they do so without adopting the atomism characteristic of much economic thinking.
In contrast to the (self-)critical tones adopted by León-Medina and Mica, Ghisleni
reviews the sociology of everyday life in positive terms throughout, but he underlines a
need for renewal with a view to addressing current ‘mass knowledge society’. The soci-
ology of everyday life used to focus on direct, mostly face-to-face interactions, even
though mediating technologies were also considered. Today, Ghisleni argues, mediated
interactions have become so much more common and widespread that a diagnosis of
society from an everyday-life perspective needs to frontally address this condition. This
is where his article meets Augusto and Simões’s analysis of the fascination with, and
concerns about, Facebook interactions. The distinction between ‘organizational’ and
‘social surveillance’, used by Augusto and Simões, may turn out to be one fruitful tool
for understanding Ghisleni’s ‘mass knowledge society’.
The relation between liberty and security, addressed by Augusto and Simões, is also
in the background of the rise or return of extreme-right populism in Western societies,
reflected upon by Salmela and von Scheve, who in this sense join the agenda of Ghisleni
and Augusto and Simões of identifying and analysing key novel features of contempo-
rary society. Furthermore, Salmela and von Scheve’s article also has a conceptual dimen-
sion that links it to the discussions provided by León-Medina and Mica. They accept,
namely, that ‘structural’ explanations have some bearing on understanding the rise of
right-wing populism, not least a worsened socio-economic situation that affects certain
groups in society particularly unfavourably. However, they insist on the need of finding
Editorial 501

the ‘mechanism’ that translates a socio-economic condition into political attitudes and
actions. Towards that end, they resort to psychology and explore the importance of expe-
riences of shame and humiliation for a change in political attitudes.

The transformations of the social sciences in the course of social transformations,

including transformations of the institutional embedding of science and research, are and
will remain a continuous thread of debate in the pages of Social Science Information/
Information sur les sciences sociales.
In this issue, for instance, Wannyn discusses the institutional emergence and stabilization
of a somewhat controversial academic research branch called neuromarketing. Rendering
the socio-technical complexities surrounding the apparition of a new disciplinary field, his
text demonstrates that, beyond any institutionalization process (and the problems attached to
such a process), there remains an inherent tendency for disciplines themselves to be over-
come – and to be overcome precisely by the ‘object’ that was supposed to found the disci-
pline in question (the anthropos for anthropology, the social for sociology and social sciences
in general or the cognitive brain for neuromarketing). In the case of neuromarketing, it is the
nature of cognition itself, and its afferent imperatives of measurability, that was challenging
the institutionalization of both knowledge and practice.
Chang’s article, on the other hand, raises related issues surrounding the commodifica-
tion of knowledge. Through an analysis of university patent models, this text reminds us
of the multi-factorial dimensions at play within any public-private endeavour. Both
Wannyn’s and Chan’s pieces underline the difficulties of any good social science work.
They demonstrate once again the impossibility, for the social sciences, to be completely
detached from the very changes (social, technical, ecological) they are supposed to ren-
der. Addressing such impossibilities and proposing alternatives to the ‘observation-and-
explanation-of-social-fact’ avenue is, indeed, one of Social Science Information/
Information sur les sciences sociales’s mandate.
The social sciences need to maintain – and to some extent: regain - the capacity for
self-reflection that is needed not to be overwhelmed by social transformations without
understanding them and, importantly, without being able to develop new tools for under-
standing them. In this sense, the self-observation of the social sciences and of the scien-
tific practices and institutions in general will be a regular feature of this journal.
David Jaclin and Peter Wagner
Ottawa and Barcelona, September 2017