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Like other scientific disciplines, sociology can be observed as a social system made up of researchers, institutions, journals and publishers. These relationships are established via conceptual communications which form networks that establish the way in which disciplined are organized. At present, the big data phenomena offers the capacity to use large data collections to analyse social processes. Big scholarly data sources offer sociology immense quantities of data useful to describe and study the evolution of scientific disciplines in detail. In this article we characterised the last thirty years of sociology through its publications in impact factor journals. To do this, we use data about the sociology journals from Journal Citation reports augmented with article information from Microsoft Academic Graph. The analysis starts by describing the journals, countries of origin, languages, publishers, the decades in which they appeared and their impact factor. After this, we evaluate the evolution of numbers of articles and citations as well as co-authorship and gender proportion. Subsequently, we establish four groups of journal types and study their differences in the previous dimensions using hypothesis tests. Finally, we represent the relationships between authors and journals using an affiliation network that allows us to detect groups of journals that form interesting thematic and geographic communities. The novelty of the work consists in having used a data source of the so called big scholarly data with more than 300 million publications. The paper also provides several strategies to select the data of interest among the millions of publications to reduce their dimensionality in order to represent them in the form of a network. The results show a discipline dominated by Anglo-Saxon countries and large publishing conglomerates. The most prominent journals dominate citations whilst methodological journals have a higher degree of co-authorship and thematic journals have the lowest gender bias. The affiliation network between authors and journals contains two large groups, one formed by the pioneering American journals together with quantitative methodological journals and another one made up of English and qualitative methodological journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Film and audiovisual narratives has long been recognized as a legitimate subject of the social and human sciences. They are studied as institutions, as shapers of collective conscience, as social practice, as an industrial goods. In this paper we focus upon their documentary value and capacity for mapping different areas of socio-cultural experience. There is a vast body of bibliography about the social content of films and television programs, although the academic literature concerning the methodological issues related to their analysis is significantly smaller. This disparity underlines the gap between the growing interest for unraveling their social meanings and the lack of awareness of the difficulties involved in linking their contents and formal features to the social, cultural and historical context. Unwarranted generalizations, flawed inferences and reductionisms resulting from mistaken assumptions and unsuitable tools have lead Westwell (2007) to describe this field as a "sub-area in search of a methology". In order to tackle that issue, the main theories about the relationships between the moving image and reality are discussed in the first part of this article. Next, a catalogue of the methodologies most frequently applied to audiovisual narrative is presented, accompanied by an assessment of their pros and cons. For demostration purposes, the last part is dedicated to articulate those methods in a proposal for interpreting a well-known Spanish television documentary about a highly sensitive period in Spain's history: La Transición, by Elias de Andres and Victoria Prego. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambivalence, taken as the split of person in a multiple self, is a constitutive feature of human beings. Despite some theoretical approaches that have accepted this issue, sociology usually not to pay attention it deserves. This paper tries to systematize the fundamental sources of ambivalence (ontological, psychological, sociological and situational) and to highlight some of its (ontolo-gical, epistemological and methodological) implications for sociology. The aim is to show that the assumption of ambivalence makes the sociological theories of human beings more realistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Sociology was born with scientific vocation, its current status as a scientific discipline seems not to enjoy good health. Departing from this idea, the purpose of the paper is threefold: first, several arguments for explanations of social phenomena through mechanisms will be reviewed. Such explanations can offer a suitable way to Sociology to be able to develop as an authentic science. Second, the idea that such explanations can be computational programmes created by agent-based modelling will be justified. Finally, it will build new arguments about how such explanations can avoid the ambiguity and the obscurity conceptual that a part of sociology suffers; reduce its theoretical fragmentation and strengthen the multidisciplinary dialogue with the purpose of researching in depth social reality as well as being able to design effective policies against several social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Sociology was bom with scientific vocation, its current status as a scientific discipline seems not to enjoy good health. Departing from this idea, the purpose of the paper is threefold: first, several arguments for explanations of social phenomena through mechanisms will be reviewed. Such explanations can offer a suitable way to Sociology to be able to develop as an authentic science. Second, the idea that such explanations can be computational programmes created by agent-based modelling will be justified. Finally, it will build new arguments about how such explanations can avoid the ambiguity and the obscuríty conceptual that a part of sociology suffers; reduce its theoretical fragmentation and strengthen the multidisciplinary dialogue with the purpose of researching in depth social reality as well as being able to design effective policies against several social problems.` [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyse participatory methodologies applied to the planning and management of landscape and compares this analysis with the experience developed for the participatory planning of mount San Cristóbal-Ezkaba in the metropolitan area of Pamplona-Iruñea (Navarre). We reflect on its capabilities and advantages paying special attention to the strategies for gathering the social senses and landscape perceptions in different social groups and to incorporate them into the participatory process. Our research explores the effectiveness of different methodological designs and techniques to achieve this goal. The peculiarities of our case study allows us to examine the participatory processes and its potential to encourage citizen engagement with the conservation, planning and management of everyday environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has evidenced the necessity to question the «methodological nationalism» as fundamental assumption of the first modernity. This question breaks the assumption that the contours of the society coincide with those of the nation-state, and it supposes an epistemological challenge for the Sociology that adopted an outline of classification of the social space that could be denominated, from its birth, state-society isomorphism. In this paper we carry out some considerations on the epistemological and methodological challenges that the international migrations suppose for the Sociology and the main practices of social empirical research that generally drag inertias and epistemological assumptions anchored in the features of the societies of the first modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]