Most insights about the ecological emergency come from the earth and climate sciences as well as from the life sciences, and as such they have upset established certainties in the social sciences and humanities. At the very least, they have forced the social sciences and humanities to refocus their attention on the ways in which human societies are dependent on the condition of planet Earth and of other life forms on it. In response, it is often argued that the social sciences and humanities have to overcome their anthropocentrism and/or commitment to human exceptionalism. This article provides a selective review of this ongoing debate, certainly with a personal taint, by distinguishing an epistemological, an ontological, and a world-historical and moral-philosophical question. In the first step, the article asks how the increased knowledge of the planetary condition impacts on the condition and the results of human knowledge-seeking. The second step explores the relation between the human and the non-human, which was opened up to questioning by, in particular, some strands of research in the sociology of the sciences and technology and in anthropology. Third, the implication of the first two steps for the analysis of world history is assessed, asking about the role of human beings in creating social phenomena of large scale and long duration, such as colonialism and capitalism, and their moral responsibility for the impact of these phenomena on the planet and on human and non-human life. In conclusion, it is argued that ontological anthropocentrism can be overcome, but that some degree of human exceptionalism is unavoidable in epistemological terms and necessary in moral-philosophical terms.

This article contends that the ocean—so often romanticized as boundless, fluid, and open—is in fact saturated: chemically, logistically, and affectively. Drawing from recent work in environmental humanities, blue humanities, and extinction studies, it reframes saturation not merely as a scientific metric but as a political and ecological condition. The sea emerges here as a site where residues of capital accumulate and circulate: a sensorium of extraction, corrosion, and multiagent pressure. The analysis unfolds in three movements. First, it revisits maps of ocean acidification—specifically aragonite saturation states—to interrogate their visual logics, affective registers, and epistemic assumptions. In dialogue with Helmreich’s chromatic critique and Alaimo’s materialist poetics, it asks what these representations disclose and occlude about marine dissolution. Second, it examines maritime traffic as a surface of capitalist saturation, where logistical networks redraw the ocean as a grid of extraction and relentless circulation. Here, the sea becomes infrastructural: crisscrossed by tankers, flagged by financial abstraction. Third, it traces the spectral presence of ghost nets—plastic apparitions that persist beyond utility—whose entanglements dramatize the slow violence of ecological breakdown as media. Rather than presenting saturation as a static endpoint, the article proposes it as a method of reading: a way to sense capitalism’s corrosive density across ecological, aesthetic, and cartographic forms. In place of redemption or narrative closure, it invites attention to viscosity, opacity, and the uneasy durations of the ecological emergency. The ocean, in this frame, is not emptied but overfull—haunted by accumulation, shaped by refusal, and vital as a critical medium for rethinking ecology in the era of loss and extinction due to capitalist praxes.

The ecological emergency poses a major challenge to agri-food systems, increasing attention to sustainable transitions. While environmental impacts have gathered attention, social aspects have often remained overlooked in sustainability assessments. This article examines the social dynamics shaping agri-food systems through qualitative analysis of stakeholder narratives, including farmers, value-chain actors, and agrarian advisors. Key elements found include values, practices, preferences, and relationship networks that influence social sustainability. Findings highlight the significance of product commercialization (i.e. farm viability and value-chain structure) and the social composition of the farm (i.e. farming working conditions) as key social dimensions determining the sustainability of agri-food systems. These dimensions vary across agricultural models, reflecting trade-offs between economic and social factors. The study underscores the importance of understanding social mechanisms that sustain agri-food systems to support farmers’ well-being.

Article Processing Charges (APC) play a crucial role in the dynamics that structure science and are at the heart of many debates. In this article, we analyze the perceptions, challenges and stances towards APCs of 3,313 researchers from CONICET (Argentina) who responded to the survey carried out as part of the GRIP APC project. Based on field theory (Bourdieu) and on the concept of structural heterogeneity, we formulate two hypotheses, which we test through multiple correspondence analysis: firstly, that the space of positions taken with regard to APC reveals the heterogeneity of a space marked by the existence of bifrontier elites, characteristic of the polarized functioning of a semi-peripheral scientific field such as Argentina’s; secondly, that there is a structural homology between the space of positions taken and scientific fields.

Socioeconomic status has long been understood as a key factor in individuals’ attitudes, cognition, and well-being. However, less attention has been given to the determinants of subjective socioeconomic status with consideration for the disparity between objective socioeconomic status and subjective socioeconomic status. Drawing on a nation-wide survey in China, this study explores how authoritarianism, system justification, and subjective well-being impact the formation of individuals’ subjective socioeconomic status. Results indicate that system justification and subjective well-being positively affect people’s perception of social identity, while authoritarianism adversely influences this perception. In addition, Internet use is found to significantly inhibit the effects of authoritarianism and subjective well-being on subjective socioeconomic status, which mitigates Chinese people’s cognitive bias between objective socioeconomic status and subjective socioeconomic status. The research findings shed light on the relationship between political ideology, well-being, Internet use, and subjective socioeconomic status, as well as contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about how Internet use could influence the public positively.

This article examines the use of homeopathy from the perspective of Bourdieu’s theory of social space and practice. Theoretically, we elaborate that the use of alternative medicine is subject to practical logics that cannot be reduced to and are incompatible with a scholastic rationalist logic. However, belief in scientific logic and evidence, like belief in alternative rationalities, is situated in the social space of society itself, which can be involved in societal and political conflicts. To reveal the multiplicity of logic behind the use and non-use of homeopathy we combine multiple correspondence analysis and logistic regression models to analyze the position of the (non-)use of homeopathy in the social space and its relation to additional societal, political, and health-related factors. With survey data from the European Social Survey (ESS round 7, 2014) for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, we show how the (non-)use of homeopathy and the different rationalities and societal antagonisms involved are structured by this transnational space but that certain sociodemographic factors produce effects beyond this social space.

Stakeholder theory is a growing body of scholarly literature at the crossroads of business ethics and strategic management. This literature encompasses two distinct levels of inquiry, the levels of the firm and of the capitalistic system as a whole. At the firm level, stakeholder theory provides insight into the roots of the firm-level competitive advantage, whereas at the system level, it explores how capitalistic business can act as a social institution serving moral goals. Until now, the firm-level and system-level perspectives in stakeholder theory have not been effectively integrated. Drawing on the classical institutional economics of John Commons, the present paper elaborates the distinction between the firm and system levels of stakeholder collaboration and examines how they are interconnected. Stakeholder collaboration is shown to be shaped by larger institutions, such as habits, customs, public purposes, and prevailing perceptions of reasonableness. Whereas the system-level perspective in stakeholder theory focuses on the evolution of these larger institutions, the firm-level perspective explores how these institutions contribute to the emergence of the firm-level competitive advantage, thereby generating evolutionary forces that adjust the larger institutions.

The uncitedness phenomenon was noticed in the 1960s, and Hamilton’s seminal paper in 1991 on uncitedness provoked debate about uncited scientific work. Uncitedness is usually associated with poor quality and zero-impact papers, but some have argued that the community has been misguided to think uncited papers are intellectually worthless. This study aims to help arts and humanities and social sciences scholars take necessary measures to avoid uncitedness by examining the relationship between uncitedness and document features, including document type, publication language, the number of authors, the length of the document, and the number of references. The study collected publications in information science and library science, economics in social sciences, and history and philosophy in arts and humanities. The publication period was from 1997 to 2016, and the citation window was 5 years. In total, we retrieved 653,796 documents from the Web of Science database. The results show inverse relations between uncitedness and document length, number of authors, and number of references. The findings suggest more uncited papers in arts and humanities than in social sciences. The findings also confirmed that the number of uncited research articles, reviews, and proceeding papers had decreased steadily from 1997 to 2016.

In this article, we introduce and explore the concept of organizational disintegration – the idea that organizations have an inner tendency to gradually drift from ordered and patterned design toward fragmentation, disorganization, and disorder. In doing this, we draw on previous studies on organizational disorder, entropy, and disorganization; explore some core ideas of these perspectives; and offer a theoretical account of organizations’ tendency toward disintegration. Organizational disintegration is understood as a by-product of increasing organizational complexity, the adaptation to which entails the proliferation of disorder processes such as the loss of control, coordination, and the emergence of tension, inconsistencies, and contradictions within an organizational structure and functions. Organizational disintegration may be a universal property of all organizations and a fundamental tendency present at each stage of an organization’s life. Because organizations have to regularly respond, change, and adapt to environmental shifts, organizational disintegration inevitably arises and evolves as a by-product of these cumulative complexity-generation processes. This phenomenon can be seen as an organizational analog of entropy. We offer theoretical and empirical implications for organization theory and systems science.

This article discusses how, in today’s world of disruptive and dramatic social change, non-sports related coaching, which includes a wide range of services such as life coaching, career coaching, executive coaching, and team coaching, can inadvertently fuel undesirable social dynamics. There is little or no awareness of this risk among coaches and coachees. The global, fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar industry aimed at supporting people and organizations to perform better and increase wellbeing while managing and adapting to change has been developed with limited sociological input. The article is based on 15 years of social constructionist-informed reflective practice by a sociologist-turned-coach, and uses a multi-layered theory-driven autoethnographic account to argue for a sociologically informed paradigm shift in coaching, as well as relevant sociological knowledge, learning sciences, and action research methodology in coaches’ education. It presents the rationale and key features of a new coaching approach that places dramatic social change-relevant sociological concepts at the heart of the process, helps people develop psycho-sociological awareness, and uses a learning-to-develop through research design. A new definition of coaching to address dramatic social change is derived. Coaching practitioners will find dramatic social change-relevant sociological concepts, critical reflections, coaching questions, and procedures to expand coaching effectiveness. Interdisciplinary research topics are proposed, combining coaching sociology – which must be developed to make coaching a well-founded profession – and coaching psychology, which currently dominates the knowledge production in the field. Implications for workplace strategies to attract, motivate, and retain employees in search of meaning or purpose in life are also suggested.