Sociology Research Articles

Laut sebagai Lanskap Budaya: Integrasi Kearifan Lokal dan Ekowisata Bahari di Kepulauan Kecil Maluku

This article explores the integration of local wisdom and marine ecotourism within the framework of “cultural seascapes” in small island communities in Maluku, focusing on the village of Hukurila, Ambon City. The study aims to develop a holistic understanding of how the sea is socially, culturally, and spiritually perceived and managed by local communities, and how such meanings shape sustainable ecotourism development. Employing a qualitative approach with participatory ethnographic methods, the research includes in-depth interviews, participant observation, and documentation of local practices such as sasi laut, maritime rituals, and customary coastal governance. Findings reveal that the sea is not merely viewed as an economic space but as a cultural landscape embedded with local values. Local communities actively participate as agents in managing tourism, rather than being passive objects of the industry. The contextual development of the “cultural seascapes” concept offers a novel approach to understanding human–marine relationships in small island settings, integrating tourism sociology, cultural anthropology, and political ecology. This study contributes to the advancement of sociological inquiry in eastern Indonesia—an often overlooked region—and recommends strengthening local community roles and adopting interdisciplinary, culturally sensitive frameworks in maritime tourism policymaking.

Where Memoir and Method Collide: Reconstructing Rules of Sociological Inquiry

Where Memoir and Method Collide: Reconstructing Rules of Sociological Inquiry

Collective Defense Mechanisms

Despite being an uncommon topic in sociological inquiry, collective defense mechanisms are a widely known phenomenon in social life. Whenever people experience anxieties in common, shared defensive processes can arise at an unconscious level, shunting off these anxieties from reflective awareness. This can happen in social and organizational settings that are intimate and impersonal, small and large, short-lived and enduring. How can we better theorize collective defenses and their role in the social world? This article demonstrates how coordination mechanisms can align individual defenses into shared defenses, a micro-to-macro transition. It explores how collective defenses can take on a variety of empirical forms, whether as interaction-order dynamics, cultural discourses and narratives, or institutionalized rules and arrangements. And it shows how this understanding of collective defenses can be incorporated into still larger frameworks of inquiry into power and inequality in social life. It also suggests ways in which methodological innovations can help the study of these shared defenses become more transparent, nonarbitrary, and rigorous, allaying concerns sociologists long have had about investigating unconscious processes. By highlighting the formation, deployment, and potential undoing of collective defense mechanisms, this article illuminates an exciting new terrain for sociologists to explore and opens up new possibilities for more constructive and non-defensive real-world problem solving.

Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages

How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups shape media discourse, to the spread of policy across institutions, to the diffusion of organizational structures and institution themselves. To study how ideas and narratives diffuse across text, we must first develop a method to identify whether texts share the same information and narratives, rather than the same broad themes or exact features. We propose a novel approach to measure this quantity of interest, which we call “narrative similarity,” by using large language models to distill texts to their core ideas and then compare the similarity of claims rather than of words, phrases, or sentences. The result is an estimand much closer to narrative similarity than what is possible with past relevant alternatives, including exact text reuse, which returns lexically similar documents; topic modeling, which returns topically similar documents; or an array of alternative approaches. We devise an approach to providing out-of-sample measures of performance (precision, recall, F1) and show that our approach outperforms relevant alternatives by a large margin. We apply our approach to an important case study: The spread of Russian claims about the development of a Ukrainian bioweapons program in U.S. mainstream and fringe news websites. While we focus on news in this application, our approach can be applied more broadly to the study of propaganda, misinformation, diffusion of policy and cultural objects, among other topics.

21st Century Sociology Learning: Integrating Digital Literacy, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking

The rapid transformation of global society in the digital age necessitates the integration of 21st century competencies in higher education, particularly in the field of sociology. This study investigates the effectiveness of integrating digital literacy, collaborative learning, and critical thinking into sociology education among undergraduate students. A descriptive quantitative method was employed, involving 35 students from the Sociology Education Study Program at a public university in Indonesia. Data were collected through a validated Likert-scale questionnaire comprising 30 items across three core constructs. Descriptive statistical analysis revealed that students perceived the integration of these competencies to be highly effective. Digital literacy scored a mean of 4.31 (SD = 0.46), collaborative learning 4.25 (SD = 0.52), and critical thinking 4.37 (SD = 0.48), all categorized as “very high.” The overall average score was 4.31, corresponding to 86.2% in percentage agreement. These findings suggest that the learning model successfully fosters essential 21st century skills, equipping students with digital fluency, social collaboration, and analytical capacity in the context of sociological inquiry. The study concludes that a purposeful pedagogical design embedding these three competencies enhances students’ academic engagement and critical sociological understanding. It also calls for broader implementation and further research to explore long-term impacts and institutional scalability of 21st century learning frameworks in higher education.

Social media and education: A sociological study of perceptions, use and impact among youth in Aizawl

This study explores the intersection of social media and education among youth in Aizawl, Mizoram, offering a sociological perspective on its usage, perceptions, and impacts. With platforms such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram increasingly integrated into academic routines, the research investigates how these tools are reshaping educational engagement and information exchange. Based on quantitative data collected through structured surveys of individuals aged 18 to 30 from diverse academic and professional backgrounds, the study highlights both the benefits and challenges of digital engagement in learning environments. Theoretical grounding is provided by Technological Determinism and the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), enabling a balanced analysis of how technology shapes, and is shaped by, social context. Findings indicate that social media enhances accessibility to knowledge, fosters collaborative learning, and supports real-time academic communication. However, drawbacks such as distraction, procrastination, addiction, misinformation, and concerns about data privacy were also reported. This research underscores the dual nature of social media’s educational role simultaneously enabling and impeding academic development. The study recommends targeted digital literacy initiatives, institutional policies, and teacher preparedness to optimize its educational potential. It contributes to broader discussions on digital education in India, emphasizing the importance of context-specific sociological inquiry

Money and Social Transformation: The Reshaping of Duan and Lolat Traditions in an Indonesian Indigenous Society

This article examines the role of money in transforming the customary system of social relations known as Duan and Lolat in Larat, Tanimbar Islands, Indonesia. Duan and Lolat represent a kinship-based tradition that emphasizes solidarity, mutual respect, and non-economic forms of exchange between social groups. However, the growing influence of monetary logic has led to a shift in values and social practices within this indigenous system. Utilizing a qualitative approach through in-depth interviews and participant observation among customary leaders and community members, this study reveals that money now functions beyond its role as a medium of exchange—it mediates power relations, alters the meaning of traditional gift-giving, and transforms collective labor into transactional interactions. These findings highlight a structural transformation in Tanimbar society, positioned at the crossroads of modern economic pressures and efforts to preserve cultural identity. The novelty of this study lies in its interpretation of money as an agent of social transformation within a localized indigenous context. It calls for sociological inquiry to pay closer attention to the interplay between economy and culture in indigenous communities, and to conceptualize money not only as an economic instrument but also as a social symbol capable of redefining community values and relationships.

How to Ask the ‘Right’ Questions about Artificial Intelligence in Social Sciences? Human-Centered AI as a Problem and as a Solution

In 1985, an STS scholar, Steve Woolgar, published a paper, “Why not a Sociology of Machines? The Case of Sociology and Artificial Intelligence”. Yet, there is no solid sociological (social sciences in general) tradition of studying AI phenomena up to now. Why? Part of the answer: Woolgar’s question – are artificially intelligent machines sufficiently like humans to be treated as the subject of sociological inquiry? – directed scholars in the wrong way. In this paper, we demonstrate why this direction is wrong and which one should be taken instead. We begin with a rather short discussion of the “artificial intelligence’ (AI) definition; then, after a brief sketch of the human-centered system strategy, we delineate five types and three levels of social sciences research on AI. After that, we characterize our understanding of the problem of AI and Ethics. Further, we claim that HCAI is a united idea for the AI community, including social scientists who study machines and algorithms in society. In conclusion, we summarize our argument on why Woolgar’s question is ‘wrong’ and what the ‘right’ questions are for AI research.

Racial Profiling, Anti-Black Racism, Black Resistance and the Policing of Young Londoners

Abstract In this article, drawing on findings from an ethnographic study (2018–21) and a Participatory Action Research project in a London Borough, we explore the nature, impact, and forms of resistance to, police racial profiling. Centring accounts of ‘policed’ Black young Londoners we develop a reconceptualization of racial profiling in sociological terms as a dynamic process, understood as both didactic and dialogic; ‘didactic’ given the ways that policed individuals are compelled, uncomfortably, to ‘learn’ about their place in the social formation through profiling interactions; and ‘dialogic’ given the way that profiling instigates a series of claims and counterclaims whereby racist tropes and categorizations can be consolidated, contested and/or resisted as part of an ongoing process of cultural production.

A Comparative Analysis of Romanian Librarians’ Perception of their Working Environment

Work environment factors are influencing employees performance, and thus directly affecting the organization’s efficiency. The objective of this paper is to draw a general image regarding the way in which employees from school, county, and university libraries perceive tangible (furniture, work equipment) and intangible (security, temperature, silence, air quality) elements from their work environments in order to emphasize the main issues librarians are facing. The novelty of this research stems from the application of the strategic comparative management’s principles in order to collate the work environment perceptions of the three aforementioned libraries. The research method was sociological inquiry, based on a survey, implemented through a questionnaire, which was addressed nationwide to school, county, and university library employees, helping us identify attitudes towards the work environment. In general, librarians seem to be content with their work environment conditions, and they feel safe. There are significant differences within employee attitudes towards work environment factors. The most satisfied were school librarians, because they interact with fewer users and work in a smaller environment.

Socio-material perspectives on perceived accessibility of cycling: A sociological inquiry into practices, regulations and informal rules

Socio-material perspectives on perceived accessibility of cycling: A sociological inquiry into practices, regulations and informal rules

Toward an Austro‐Libertarian Sociology

ABSTRACTInterventionism has become a defining feature of modern societies, shaping individual behavior, economic activity, and social norms through state regulations, subsidies, and collectivist ideologies. Despite its profound impact, sociology has largely failed to critically examine the dynamics of interventionism from a praxeological standpoint in recent sociological debates, leaving a significant gap in understanding how individuals and communities adapt to coercive environments. This article proposes a new framework for sociological inquiry rooted in libertarian and Austrian principles, drawing on the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and others. Building on the Austrian tradition's emphasis on human action and spontaneous order, this framework—termed Austro‐Libertarian Sociology, Modern Austrian Sociology, Sociology of Spontaneous Social Orders or Sociology of Natural Order—focuses on how voluntary cooperation and decentralized systems emerge despite state‐imposed constraints. The method is structured around five domains: the sociology of human action, free‐market capitalism, property rights, freedom of contract, and natural competition. Furthermore, 12 innovative concepts, including State Dependency Syndrome, Adaptive Agency, and Spontaneous Resistance Networks, are introduced to analyze the societal consequences of interventionism and the resilience of natural social orders. The article also calls for the modernization of Austrian sociology by incorporating empirical tools to enhance its relevance in public debates. By critiquing contemporary sociology's collectivist biases and proposing a renewed discipline, this work aims to establish a sociological subfield capable of addressing the interplay between state intervention and societal adaptation, fostering a deeper understanding of decentralized, voluntary cooperation in an increasingly regulated world.

Towards a Sociology of Healthcare Robots.

We propose a sociological approach to healthcare robots that emphasises the heterogeneous ethics of mutual labour and the complex definitions of care that emerge through robot design/deployment. This argument is the product of a narrative literature review that examined assistive robots deployed in care settings. We found that although the deployment of healthcare robots has redefined the concept of care, as featured in geography, legal studies, and philosophy, it rarely appears in sociological inquiry. There are three fields that this approach to a sociology of health and illness complements. These are (1) phenomenology and the new approaches to touch and recognition in embodied relations with robots, (2) biopolitics, where the governance of life is conceptualised as a conjunction between the biological and artificial and (3) the reconfiguration of healthcare labour around mutuality, where robots both maintain and are maintained by the human. We end by suggesting that the increased implementation of robotics into care work provides a broader sociological opportunity for addressing how boundaries of 'human' can be rethought alongside new healthcare technologies.

Ensuring No One is Left Behind: A Sociological Inquiry into the Intersectional Impediments to Dalit Women Accessing Higher Education in India

Ensuring No One is Left Behind: A Sociological Inquiry into the Intersectional Impediments to Dalit Women Accessing Higher Education in India

Toward a Sociology of Transportation

ABSTRACT Despite the relevance of transportation to the economy, lifestyle, culture, and politics of the modern world and its importance in shaping the global climate, American sociologists have tended to exempt it from direct analysis. This has resulted in a missed opportunity for theoretical innovation around issues of movement, the environment, racial disparities, civil society, and political beliefs. The goal of this paper is to showcase how transportation processes, particularly automobility, are integral to social organization and change and how recent work in various fields is increasingly incorporating transportation into theorization about social life. Taking three areas of sociological inquiry—microsociology, social stratification, and political sociology—I show how deeper concentration on the material and symbolic aspects of transportation can enrich these topics and meaningfully shape future research directions.

The sociology of prescribing: A narrative review and agenda.

Prescribing is a key symbol of the authority of medical practice, and is restricted to qualified clinicians who permit access to many medicines. Variously framed as over- or under-prescribed, or otherwise inadequately provisioned, sociologists have attended to the clinical logics and practices underpinning prescribing. Despite being a key feature in medical practice, there is only scattered attention to a 'sociology of prescribing' or a general social theory of prescribing. In contrast, there has been a flourishing sociology of diagnosis in recent decades that organises the field. Revisiting a nascent sociology of prescribing that emerged in the 1970s, this article reviews sociological (and other social scientific) contributions to prescribing and provides an agenda for a contemporary approach to sociological perspectives on drug prescribing. A sociology of prescribing conceptualises the act of prescribing as an embodied and relational social practice shaped through the complex choreographies of health encounters and systems. Early prescribing literature documented variations in prescribing practices across clinical sites, attended to the divergent expectations of the prescription between doctor and patient, and characterised prescribing as symbolically potent, enabling the doctor to alleviate, validate, and placate patient concerns. While health industries understand prescribing as a technical process of following the mandates of ethics and evidence-based medicine (or 'rational prescribing'), social research has identified pharmaceutical detailing, workplace cultures, and practice-relevant knowledge as key determinants of prescribing practice. Recent sociological inquiry has also focused on professional tensions with the expansion of non-medical prescribing, critiques of the (bio)medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation of society, and the impacts of new technologies like electronic prescribing. I propose care, expertise, power, and work as domains for future sociological inquiry on prescribing. Attending to these domains will be vital as prescribing is continually reimagined through transformations in the technological and political arrangements of pharmaceuticals and healthcare.

Navigating Class, Religion, and Education: Exploring Nigerian Christian Middle-Class Dynamics in Nigeria

The Nigerian middle class has been the subject of extensive sociological inquiry, yet the intersection of religion, education, and social mobility within this group remains underexplored, particularly among Christian communities in Lagos State. This paper examines the historical and contemporary factors shaping the emergence and reproduction of the Nigerian Christian middle class. Drawing on existing studies, the analysis highlights the role of missionary education, familial strategies, and professional advancement in fostering upward mobility. The heterogeneity of Christian denominations, stratification within religious communities, and the role of gender and migration are explored to provide a nuanced understanding of how Nigerian Christians navigate social hierarchies. The study also identifies gaps in current research, emphasizing the need for focused empirical studies to unpack the complex interplay of religion, class, and education. Findings contribute to the broader discourse on the sociology of religion and middle-class identity formation in Nigeria.

The Impact of Patricia Leavy’s Sociological Fiction

This article examines the impact of Patricia Leavy’s Sociological Fiction upon students, professors, and other readers. Utilizing examples from over seven years teaching and writing sociological fiction works at a private liberal arts university in the southeastern United States, I illustrate and discuss some ways Leavy’s works facilitate (1) students finding themselves and sociology as a field of study; (2) professors navigating personal and professional questions during the life course; and (3) readers, regardless of identity, navigating self-development, reflection, and sociological inquiry as a potential interest or commitment. In so doing, I suggest examples of sociological fiction by Leavy and others that may be utilized as the primary and/or supplemental contents for sociological teaching within and beyond sociology-specific course offerings at colleges and universities.

"Neo-Phenomenological Sociology: Exploring Embodied Sociality and Pathic Interactions beyond Traditional Phenomenology"

This study presents an alternative sociological phenomenology rooted in Hermann Schmitz's "New Phenomenology," termed Neo-phenomenological Sociology (NPS). NPS diverges from traditional phenomenological sociology by establishing joint situations as the socio-ontological foundation, emphasizing situational contexts over individual consciousness. It introduces felt-body communication as the core unit of social analysis, shifting focus from cognitive interactions to embodied, affective engagements. The felt body and emotional involvement are highlighted as pre-personal characteristics, underscoring the significance of pre-reflective, embodied experiences in sociality. NPS aims to correct the cognitive and intentional biases of conventional sociology by integrating the pathic aspects of social behavior—those intuitive, spontaneous, and affective elements often overlooked by traditional social sciences. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of the subtleties of social interactions, including non-verbal communication and the influence of environments and objects on human behavior. NPS also expands the scope of sociological inquiry to include transhuman interactions, acknowledging the social relevance of animals, objects, and environments. By focusing on these often-ignored dimensions, NPS provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing the complexities of social life, offering new insights into the interplay between individuals, their bodies, and their surroundings.

The interplay of time and space in human behavior: a sociological perspective on the TSCH model

The concept of spatiotemporal correlation, initially rooted in the domain of physics, has increasingly become of interest to scholars across various fields. This burgeoning interest is especially noted within the realm of human dynamics, where the examination of human behavior’s spatiotemporal aspects is emerging. The exploration into the nuanced ways in which human actions intertwine with geographical contexts is paramount. This paper delves into the Time-Space Characteristic Correlation of Human Behavior (TSCH) model, a pioneering framework that melds the intricacies of human behavior with geographic considerations through a micro-dynamic approach to population strategy, employing the mean-field limit method. This study scrutinizes the spatiotemporal dynamics of individual travel behaviors, focusing on specific traits such as sudden increases in activity (paroxysm B), behavioral memory (M), and the radius of gyration (Rg). The stability of these behavioral waves is evaluated through the application of the “db4” wavelet basis function, revealing stable fluctuations in population travel patterns that resonate deeply with regional characteristics. The model enables the computation of the overall cost burden of area visits for local residents, uncovering a power-law correlation between this cost and the spatial attractiveness of urban centers when analyzed at a collective level. Our findings underscore a profound linkage between the temporal and spatial patterns of human behavior at the urban scale. Furthermore, the TSCH model’s advancement facilitates a nuanced understanding of complex social issues, including urban development, public health management, and transportation systems optimization, offering valuable insights for sociological inquiry and practical application in addressing contemporary societal challenges.