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This paper reflects on the understanding of the tourism phenomenon from social research in the era of big data, analyzing the use of artificial intelligence to identify emotions, social networks on the internet to draw user profiles and scoring systems to compute ratings. New research practices, arising from marketing, may relegate the measurement instruments that social scientists have traditionally used. Conditioned by their business purpose, these innovative techniques contain ethical and methodological problems that, in the field of tourism, are related to attempts to analyze emotions and opinions quantitatively. Problems that can become an object of analysis for the sociology of tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been, in the last decades, a bunch of different authors claiming the convenience of describing the most basic elements of current societies as fluids. As a consequence of this proposal, it began the construction of a theoretical model of social fluidity that still needs more accuracy and development. This paper, which is just the first half of a propaedeutic work, trays to build the necessary grounds for the empirical implementation of afore mentioned theoretical model. We start by reviewing the main concepts used by the so called "Theories of Complexity" in modelling complex processes in other scientific fields. Then we point out the limits that may be found in using these theories when modelling the specific complexity of current social fluidity. Finally we discuss how such concepts should be modified and developed in order to be useful in the context of a theory of social fluidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to offer a critical view on the role of emotions in financial markets. More specifically, I pretend to analyze the relationship between emotions and the socio-structural conditions of these markets. I propose an approach based on a) secondary ethnographic sources through which it is possible to explore the individual inter-subjectivity of the financial actors and b) a specific kind of financial literature whose main goal is to propose a behavioral-emotional regulation model for traders. According to several main concepts from Norbert Elias' sociology, I suggest an analytical scheme which connects the macro-sociological and micro-sociological aspects related to the presence and regulation of financial emotions. In this sense, I try to respond to two key questions: a) what are the typical emotions experienced by financial actors and which are their functions in the investment decision process? and b) which emotional regulation patterns are proposed to these actors in order to complete successful financial operations? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present theoretical and methodological reflections from two research projects. The main objective of both is to analyze the individuation processes in young people whose sociability spaces are in marginalized neighborhoods of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. The empirical data was constructed using the life story as methodological tool. The life stories were constructed from five or six individual semi structured interviews of about an hour and a half to 10 young people, 18 to 26 years old. The articulation between the analytical proposals of the sociology of individuation of Danilo Martuccelli and the methodological strategy of the life stories proves to be productive to capture simultaneously the heterogeneities and regularities found in the trials, supports and reflexivities that take part in the construction processes of young subjectivities in the current context of our society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I try to outline the existence of certain problems I have found during my research work, within sociology discipline, when it comes to follow some of the main threads of the complex fabric that constitutes the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). In the same way, I suggest some possible subterfuges to go around those problems. Two are the problems and two are the subterfuges as well destined to tackle them. On the one hand, I face the problem of the magnitude and fidelity that ANT's descriptions demand, thoroughly detailed and local, which clashes with the requirements of sociological theory that seeks abstractions and regularities. The subterfuge I propose is the one called "impressionist cartography". On the other hand, I bump into the difficulty of the irreversibility of mediations and the sanitized representations carried out, sometimes, by ANT. In order to fight this, I use the subterfuge oriented to adopt the premise of the "inevitable dirtiness of mediations". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the social sciences has provided a network of technologies, knowledges, practices and discourses to regulate and govern society. The social sciences may play a central role in developing forms of social control. Modern 'knowledge societies' manage the production of scientific knowledge in a way that privileges the kind of thinking that is consistent with current hegemonic thought, and reduces the possibility of critical perspectives (Slaughter y Leslie, 1997, 2001). The social sciences are in the paradox of questioning the fundamentals of what they, in some sense, actively constitute. The development of post-fordist societies and our academic location in the belly of the beast (Haraway, 1991) prompts a reflection on the context, possibilities and forms of critical work in our present institutional circumstances. This paper considers the methodological principles and political implications of academic critical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]