Sociologica. V.12 N.1 (2018)
ISSN 1971-8853

Symposium: Heuristics of Discovery

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8217

Introduction to the Symposium

Elena Esposito — University of Bielefeld (Germany); University of Modena-Reggio Emilia (Italy) — — http://www.elena-esposito.com

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld and at the University of Modena-Reggio Emilia. She published many works on the theory of social systems, media theory, memory theory and sociology of financial markets. Her current research projects focus on a sociology of algorithms. Esposito’s recent publications include Artificial Communication? The Production of Contingency by Algorithms. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 46, 2017; Algorithmic Memory and the Right To Be Forgotten on the Web. Big Data & Society, 2017; Critique without Crisis: Systems Theory as a Critical Sociology. Thesis Eleven, 143(1), 2017, pp. 18–27

Marco Santoro — University of Bologna, Department of the Arts (Italy) — — https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/marco.santoro

Marco Santoro is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna and a founding editor of Sociologica. He works on the sociology of ideas, the history of the social sciences, cultural production and consumption especially in the fields of music and cinema, and on mafias. He has recently co-edited with R. Helmes-Hayes the Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes (Anthem Press, 2016), and is the author of “Bourdieu’s International Circulation: An Exercise in Intellectual Mapping” (with A. Gallelli and B. Grüning), in The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz (Oxford UP, 2018).

David Stark — Department of Sociology, Columbia University (United States); Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick (UK) — — http://www.davidcstark.com

David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and also Professor of Social Science at the University of Warwick. His book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (2009, Princeton University Press) is an ethnographic account of how organizations and their members search for what is valuable. Stark’s current research is supported by a five-year Advanced Career Award from the European Research Council for a project on “Diversity and Performance: Networks of Cognition in Markets and Teams.”

Published: 2018-07-26

As part of our ongoing interest in reflexivity about sociological practice, we are publishing a set of essays in which sociologists responded to the following request:

For the journal Sociologica, we are inviting a number of prominent sociologists to contribute to a special feature on “Heuristics of Discovery”. In general terms, we’re interested in how people come to work on the problems they do. We could use the word “choice” but perhaps some contributors will think that already has a decisionist bias. In an even broader sense, one could write about any aspect of work process — writing with a co-author, matching method to research question, ways to think about data, use of illustrations, or other topics.

The question provoked highly diverse responses, as you will see in these brief but richly insightful essays.