Search

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]

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]

This paper proposes a model for characterize-ing and analyzing workspaces in contemporary Latin American organizations that seeks to portray the heterogeneous forms in which the activity of work unfolds in a single social and productive space. This model may be relevant for different types of social studies of work insofar as it sheds light on the structural characteristics that account for different social and subjective processes. It proposes the notion of work scenarios, understood as typical labor configurations where certain ways of organizing work and employment and human management practices converge which reflect the basic contribution that is expected of workers by the organization, and the type of relation the organization offers in return. In addition to proposing analytical criteria and methodological approach strategies, the paper describes a qualitative research experience that tested the notion of work scenarios as a result of which six scenarios were identified that provided cross-section of important sectors of the Chilean economy. [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]

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]