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In public and private sectors alike, decision-making is increasingly carried out through the employment of 'algorithmic actors' and artificial intelligence. The apparent efficiency of these means in the eyes of politicians and the public has made recourse to them possible. Along with this belief in their efficiency, however, fears emerge that nonhuman actors have displaced judicious human decision-making. This article examines this belief and its contestation, drawing on overlapping notions of 'delegation' in the political sociologies of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu. We undertake two case studies of attempts to delegate decision-making to algorithms: the 2020 UK 'A-level' grade determination and the Australian 'robodebt' welfare funds recovery scheme. In both cases, the decision-making delegated to algorithms was publicly discredited as critics invoked a different form of fairness than the one used by those deploying the technology. In the 'A-level' case, complainants drew on a grammar of individual merit, while complainants in the 'robodebt' case made a technical critique of the algorithm's efficiency. Using a theory of delegation, we contribute to understanding how publics articulate resistance to automated decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article paints the portrait of Yvan, a skinhead who lived in close proximity to the streets and to life at the margins, with all its attendant violence, before dying at the age of 28. While the salient features of this portrait might seem to be social relegation and brutal racism, the value of this text is to be found in the complexity and nuance that Yvan brought to the descriptions of his own life. This insider perspective follows on from the tradition of biographical studies dedicated to the process of 'becoming deviant' inaugurated by the first sociologists of the Chicago School, while at the same time providing the material for a theoretical proposition expressed through the concepts of brutalized life and reflective violence. Much of Yvan's life was a litany of violence, which he first endured, then threw back in society's face and perpetrated himself, no doubt precisely because this life of his had been brutalized by such all-permeating violence. These two concepts have the potential to be extended to other cases and to enrich sociological debates about forms of violence that cannot fully be explained by situational and practical approaches (such as those of Randall Collins), or by perspectives that focus on structural and symbolic factors (as in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu). The notions of reflective violence and brutalized life therefore transcend Yvan's biography to form his sociological legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]