{"title":"Some turning points in the early sociology of Robert King Merton","authors":"Guglielmo Rinzivillo","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1947457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1947457","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Robert King Merton's early sociology of science is significant for the understating of modern sociology. The relationship between unplanned consequences and developments in science and technology is fundamental for a definition of the contemporary picture of social action developments. Theoretical interests link to the working-in-progress formulations. Empirical development emerges from these perspectives. The significance of the theoretical progression encapsulated in the American sociologist's doctoral dissertation is astounding (1938). The theory-research connection is equally significant when placed in relation to the scholarly output of the 1950s. In addition, the questions posed by Merton apply in the 1970s and 1990s sociology. They are fertile with interesting answers even today, which is a dramatically disturbed time due to the technological progress. This progress raises new ethical, political, and social questions about the future of humanity. Other sources of disorder derive from the ecological crisis that leads to a rethinking of the man-environment relationship. Merton does not address this topic. The twentieth-century totalitarianisms that have survived into the twenty-first century embed dangerously within the scientific technological development (e.g. the China case). The development of new medical-biological theories and practices impose new questions about the value attributed to life. This is of particular relevance today due to the global and devastating Covid 19 pandemic crisis.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"106 1","pages":"577 - 593"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77894534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sharing emotions through social media: a comparative analysis between the private and public digital affect cultures","authors":"R. Leon","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1947952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1947952","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The research concentrates on describing how emotions are shared on private and public digital affect cultures. Two case study units are selected from private and public environments. Further, the Facebook page of both units is analyzed and data are collected using Netvizz.App. The collected data are processed using sentiment analysis and social network analysis; the former brings forward the type of emotions that are disseminated within the digital affect communities while the latter is used for emphasizing how the emotions flow among members. The results show that several differences occur between the two entities in terms of behavior and emotional content. The former provides the environment and supports members’ interactions; as a consequence, its members share neutral, positive, and negative emotions with the moderator and also with one another. The latter provides the environment and fosters members’ interaction with the moderator; as a consequence, it is the main emotional generator while its members act as receivers. These findings have heoretical andpractical implications; on the one hand, they extend the literature on digital affect cultures while on the other hand, they help managers understand how their stakeholders feel and how do they chose to share their emotions through social media.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"30 7 1","pages":"268 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82982966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Pedro A. García-Bilbao, G. La Rocca
{"title":"Rethinking affective polarization and sharing of emotions in digital platform ecosystems. Theories and research practices","authors":"Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Pedro A. García-Bilbao, G. La Rocca","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1947949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1947949","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The purpose of this introduction is to set a useful frame for reading this thematic section. The key concepts of digital platforms, affective polarization, sharing of emotions are explored. The articles contained in this thematic section, which combine different research disciplines and techniques, provide to identify the different fields of communication within which the mediatization of emotions, the generation of affective cultures can prove to be a bearer of social, political cultural; and to outline methods and techniques for the analysis of emotions within digital platforms.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"3 1","pages":"223 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77466801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Roberto L. Barbeito Iglesias, Ángel H. Iglesias Alonso
{"title":"Political emotions and digital political mobilization in the new populist parties: the cases of Podemos and Vox in Spain","authors":"Roberto L. Barbeito Iglesias, Ángel H. Iglesias Alonso","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1947948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1947948","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 This text examines the role of emotions as a strategy of populist mobilization into a risk context, presuming that populism is a political style useful for any kind of political actor, but especially suitable for ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘low-cost’ parties. The article compares the cases of Podemos and Vox, the two populist parties that emerged successfully into the electoral scene after the Spanish movement of the Indignants (or 15M movement). Combining literature with an exploratory qualitative analysis of their websites and social media accounts, the paper argues that emotional persuasion is widely used by the two both populist parties’ framings, but in quite different ways, according to their cute different ideological projects. Moreover, the text holds that emotions are not exclusive of the populist nor the social protests, but they are a feature of current democracy and even intrinsic to representative democracy from its origins.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"473 1","pages":"246 - 267"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76521754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘#hellobrother needs to trend’: methodological reflections on the digital and emotional afterlife of mediated violence","authors":"Anu A. Harju, Jukka Huhtamäki","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1947951","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1947951","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In March 2019, the first ever act of terrorist violence in New Zealand was live-streamed on social media, making many social media users unwitting witnesses to the massacre on their devices. The Christchurch mosque attacks revealed a particular digital and emotional vulnerability embedded in the digital media infrastructure. The last words of the first victim soon transmorphed into #hellobrother that, as a digital artefact, participated in shaping the emotional landscape. Combining real-time digital media ethnography on Twitter with data science and computational tools, this multi-method study has two aims: first and foremost, to develop and apply new methodology for the study of unexpected, mediated events as they unfold in real time; second, to explore post-death digital artefacts through the concept of digital afterlife that we approach through two complementary perspectives, data afterlife (the technological) and data as afterlife (the emotional). Adopting a relational perspective, we further develop the concept, and highlight the constitutive role of data in the emotional dimension of digital afterlife arising from its capacity to enter affective arrangements. The methodological contributions include development of a conceptual and technological framework for conducting data science as ethnography and the introduction of Tweetboard, a novel artefact for investigating digital afterlife.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"70 1","pages":"310 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90250034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The construction of the meanings of #coronavirus on Twitter: An analysis of the initial reactions of the Italian people","authors":"Giovanni Boccia Artieri, F. Greco, G. La Rocca","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1947950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1947950","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The first months of 2020 saw the coronavirus pandemic explode. Moving from China, it arrived in Europe and hit Italy. The place where the debate around it exploded was the media ecosystem. In a short time, it was an explosion of tweets related to the hashtag #coronavirus on Twitter. With the aim of reconstructing the meanings of the hashtag and the content, in terms of sentiment and opinions, of the reactions of the Italians, we collected in a large size corpus, the hundred thousand Italian tweets containing the #coronavirus produced during the media hype period from the Twitter repository (February 24th - 28th, 2020). Media hype period was discovered by digging in the online articles of ‘la Repubblica', based on the presence of the words: coronavirus and Italy. The media hype is February 26th. The corpus underwent Emotional Text Mining (ETM), an unsupervised methodology, which allows social profiling based on communication. The study of the word chosen to talk about a topic and their co-occurrence allows the understanding of people’s symbolizations, representations, and sentiment, about the coronavirus. In a retrospective logic, this mechanism allows us to reconstruct the sensemaking and nuances of meaning attributed by users to the coronavirus hashtag.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"30 1","pages":"287 - 309"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89960074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital disinformation and emotions: exploring the social risks of affective polarization","authors":"Javier Serrano-Puche","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1947953","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1947953","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Considerable interest has recently emerged among communication scholars around what has been called the ‘information disorder’, that is, a constellation of media genres that includes disinformation, misinformation, fake news, propaganda and hyperpartisan news. The rise in this type of information pollution is related to a crisis of public communication where the public sphere in many countries has become divided and challenged by social and political tensions. On the other hand, the digital space emerges as a socio-technological environment configured around platforms that condition emotional expression through their affordances, favoring the appearance of affective publics. Taking the above into account, this paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding the role played by emotions in our present ‘information disorder’ and the societal risks that arise from it. It examines how fake news strategically relies on emotionally provocative content to induce outrage and other strong feelings among users, which are then viralized on platforms. The paper concludes by presenting some lines of action for minimizing those risks from the point of view of media literacy.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"151 1","pages":"231 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74889548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voicing the silence: the naturalisation of violence under the rule occupation","authors":"Aide Esu","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2020.1866314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2020.1866314","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article addresses the relevance of Israeli soldier narrations in which they bear witness to human agency under conflict and adversity to call for the end of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The soldiers, members of the NGO Breaking the Silence, speak up about the occupation, showing the conflicting experiences of military and civilian life in a society that normalises the denial of military human rights violations. By asking Israeli society to listen to their stories, the soldiers’ accounts show how the historic military power in the Occupied Palestine Territories (OPT) has evolved into a naturalisation of violence that generates a radical configuration of intractability, which has transformed the perception and meaning of violence. By framing the soldiers’ accounts in the space fragmentation and securitisation practices, the article argues how the asymmetrical use of force is exerted to manage and control the lives of the Palestinian population. The speech act addresses the ethics of doing something to make a difference in the conflict and the wish to renew social bonds, redefine pride and shame and return a sense of honour, loyalty and self-respect.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"36 1","pages":"159 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81106234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is there a canon in this class?","authors":"B. Grüning, M. Santoro","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2021.1926674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.1926674","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article addresses issues of interpretation and selection as they are dealt with in current debates on the nature, the content, and the effects of processes and mechanisms of canonization in sociology. It makes a case for a more empirically grounded and sociologically sensitive approach to these issues, drawing from recent research programmes in digital humanities (e.g. distant reading) and insisting on the benefits of cumulative case histories of individual scholars with their patterns of social relations in different countries and languages. The case of gender inclusion/exclusion is focused upon as both exemplary and symptomatic. Finally, the article introduces to the following five articles, presenting briefly their contents and ratio.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"82 1","pages":"7 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74938302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lost in translation. Institutional traps and unexpected effects hampering innovation in Italian LTC policies","authors":"M. Arlotti, A. Parma, C. Ranci","doi":"10.1080/03906701.2020.1868068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2020.1868068","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Despite its growing care needs, Italy has inertially reproduced its consolidated LTC system, dominated by institutional fragmentation, lack of in-kind services, and resulted in public policies which consist of unconditional cash benefits. This structure has encouraged family-based care arrangements (with gender inequalities) and created a large private care market which is dependent on irregular recruitment of migrant care workers employed by families. In 2012 an innovative LTC scheme dubbed, ‘Home Care Premium’ (HCP), was introduced as a new experimental programme (limited to public employees and their relatives) addressing the Italian LTC system's problematic features. It provided people in need of care with two benefits using a complex multilevel provision system. This article focuses on the 2014 HCP version, analyses its implementation and reflects critically on the problems undermining the innovation dynamic. In particular, the high degree of local discretion emerging in the programme's implementation and the low take-up among the potential beneficiaries compared to what expected will be considered. These results allow a better understanding of institutional traps and unexpected effects hampering innovation even when the reform is perfectly designed.","PeriodicalId":46079,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Sociology-Revue Internationale de Sociologie","volume":"55 1 1","pages":"144 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78328776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}