Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Since the mid-twentieth century, the scientific field of social sciences has been transforming the trajectory of its institutionalization. This is because the trend towards reducing the number of disciplinary categories that had been identified since 1850 was reversed after the Second World War through a steady increase in names. However, such multiplication does not seem to have been developed proportionally to the necessary communication that should exist between them; suggesting a propensity of modern social sciences to hyper-specialize its subjects and therefore, to increase and extend the gaps between their related fields (also called here “No man’s land” spaces). This circumstance seems to be constituting a blockage in the field’s explanatory capacity, and studying it can contribute to unblocking it. Thus, the present research has focused on providing a micro and macro view of the discipline, on the one hand describing different phases through which it is developed and, on the other hand, by identifying the sociocultural conditioning to which it is exposed. From the analysis of these questions, two aspects have been obtained that seem to characterize the production of knowledge in modern social sciences, which are: a.) the existence of a higher risk of obstruction in the disciplinary construction after the specialization phase- because it is when research activity tends to be more likely to be trapped in hyperspecialization-, and b.) the tendency towards a greater appreciation due to its applicability to social interests of nomothetic attributes as opposed to idiographic ones-whose reproduction in knowledge is produced through mechanisms of legitimization. From these results, we can extract what seems to be a causal relationship between the nomothetic tendency of the current hyperspecialization, the increase of idiographic gaps between related fields, and the need for the legitimization of the theories in the contemporary symbolic universe.

The evaluation criteria used by the Research Ethics Committees come from studies in medicine, some specialists project, from their sources and experiences, universal ethical requirements based on clinical research. This opens the discussion on whether such principles can be transferable to evaluate social science research, which commonly uses complex methodologies and knowledge that challenge the Committees on ways to understand informed consent, the risks and benefits of research. The objective of the article is to systematize the project review work of the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) of the University of Santiago, Chile. The methodology includes the content analysis of 114 projects from the social sciences. The seven universal ethical requirements of Ezekiel Emanuel were used as a guiding element of the analysis, whose proposal is assumed and followed by Chilean ministerial instructions that order the work of the Research Ethics Committees. Among the results is that the universal requirements of Emanuel are present in a large part of the projects in social sciences, but they are not enough to approach the specific situations of research in social sciences, being the deliberation of the investigations by multidisciplinary teams essential to respect the heterogeneity and complexity of the social subject.

This article offers a possibility of theoretical-methodological synergy for addressing different social problems. This is a work that explores the participation of the gay community in the social world configured in Chilean cyberpress texts between 2012-2017. The exploration is carried out from the theoretical-methodological articulation of the sociosemiotic APPRAISAL and IDEATION systems assigned to functional systemic linguistics to illustrate the relationship between social change and discursive change. The discursive analysis from these systems reveals that the gay community represented in the corpus constitutes an agent of social transformation, because it denounces homophobic violence and defends the victims, questions political and religious authorities, promotes changes and legal reforms and is recognized as political interlocutor before the events produced.

This article presents a conceptual reflection and a methodological proposal for studying social inequalities from a comparative perspective. The proposal incorporates a theoretical-conceptual approach to comparative qualitative analysis, reviewing a number of traditions that inform the analysis and production of comparative studies, comparative cases, and the comparative biographical perspective in social science research. First, this reflection makes it possible to formulate, at a conceptual level, a Comparative Biographical Perspective (CBP), which is then reviewed and discussed considering a specific methodological design for comparing cases in Argentina, Chile, and Spain. The empirical analysis of the theoretical model makes it possible to adjust elements of the initial proposal and analyze its scope and possibilities for more wide-ranging studies, thus extending the preliminary experience led by an INCASI research group. In the results section, an analysis is presented of the particularities of the comparative biographical perspective as an articulation of case studies, the biographical approach, and comparative methods. It is asserted that this perspective has the potential to articulate and add tension to the macro-, meso-, and micro-social scales, leading to comparison at four levels: intra-scalar, intra-configurative, inter-scalar, and inter-configurative. The temporal dimension, as a core element of biographical studies, incorporates dynamism and a longitudinal perspective into case follow-up processes. This was mainly revealed by the empirical testing of the model. The piloting of the theoretical model presented in the article –based on the comparative biographical perspective– made it possible to observe differences between countries (cases), social classes (high, middle, and low), and subjects (within each class) in three cities of the three countries selected, shedding light on the macro-, meso-, and micro-social scales, their articulations with temporality, and their possible comparisons in future research. Lastly, the article outlines the potential and limitations of the perspective discussed, emphasizing the challenges that must be addressed to consolidate the comparative analysis proposal advanced and providing theoretical and empirical materials for enriching debate and contributing to the progress of comparative methodology.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 are set in goals to which almost all the governments of the world adhere, and it is the first time that they have agreed on a multidimensional poverty objective that explicitly includes children. In the last decade, there have been many contributions that have been made from the conceptual and methodological point of view to the construction of multidimensional poverty measures, particularly aimed at measuring the phenomenon of child poverty. These proposals, in some cases, either take the perspective of Sen's capabilities, or the human rights approach, or are more aligned with the approach of socially agreed deprivation. This last approach is the one used by the European Union, and incorporated through 18 indicators in a specific module of "Material Deprivation" of the Survey of the European Union of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), in which Relevance information from households with children. Based on the proposal for the EU and with the intention of being able to develop a comparative analysis between Spain and Argentina, progress was made in adapting the indicators of the Argentine Social Debt Survey (EDSA) of the Debt Observatory Program Social Argentina (ODSA) of the Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA), seeking comparability with those present in the Survey of Living Conditions (ECV) of the National Institute of Statistics of Spain. In this process of compatibility of the instruments, conceptual and methodological decisions will be made that are systematized and discussed in this article. The compatible constructed index reconciles 11 common indicators for children between 3 and 15 years of age in Argentina and Spain that were found to be valid, valid, reliable and additive. 

The International comparative studies of social stratification and class mobility are based on class schemes designed for industrialized countries. One such scheme, the EGP scheme developed by Erikson and Goldthorpe, has become a standard in the field. The use of this scheme in other regions of the world, including Latin America, has been crucial for the comparative analysis. However, this scheme may not reflect heterogeneities in the prevailing labor relations in developing countries, where salaried and self-employment occupations are segmented into high and low productivity sectors, with unequal working conditions and remuneration. We propose an adaptation of the EGP scheme to take into account this heterogeneity. Based on this adaptation, subjected to various tests of coherence and empirical homologation, we use data from national household surveys in Latin American and European countries, characterize their class structures and analyze the association between class membership and living conditions. Our results indicate that this modified version of the EGP class scheme improves the characterizations of class structures, as well as our understanding of the structural foundations of poverty and income inequality in Latin America. For this we use household surveys, and a homogeneous codification of the uniform classifier of Occupations to be able to make the comparisons, along with harmonizing variables to develop the analysis.

This paper formulates a proposal for the construction of two composite indicators of social inequality intended for the comparative analysis of the social stratification between Spain and Argentina as a result of various comparative research advances carried out in different projects over the last few years. A multidimensional theoretical perspective on social stratification is adopted and an analysis model for comparative study between the two countries is implemented, which incorporates the gender dimension, which reduces coverage bias selecting the entire society and which takes into account household as an analysis unit, thus avoiding population dismemberment. We hypothesize that both countries maintain similar general patterns in terms of social stratification that structure the social inequalities of households. Although structuring patterns are common, the levels of inequality they entail are accentuated in the case of Argentina. We also understand that these levels are reproduced both when whole of society is taken into account and when only households with an employed population are considered. To account for the hypothesis, the article presents two strategies that seek to obtain two measures of social stratification as composite indicators. On the one hand, following the typological construction methodology that we call structural and articulated, where we seek to obtain a qualitative measure through a Typology of Social Stratification (TSS). On the other hand, and in the context of this methodology, we propose to generate an alternative composite indicator that measures inequalities with a quantitative variable through a Social Stratification Index (SSI). In both cases, the ultimate objective is to use these measures in the comparative study of social stratification over time and through space. In this paper, Spain and Argentina are compared with 2018 sectional data and the hypothesis is partially corroborated.

The commons are nowadays conceptualised as relational, unfinished, inappropriable entities that constitute an antagonistic space against capitalist appropiation, valorisation and acumulation. Such processes are nowadays present in the knowledge production practices that take place in universities. Here, we stand as researchers who inhabit this ambivalent place that Donna Haraway calls ‘the belly of the beast’ (Haraway, 1995) to inquire into the possible epistemological, methodological and political elements that may question cognitive capitalism enclosing logics in our research practice. To do so we draw on two cases: firstly, the Community Social Center Luis Buñuel, in Zaragoza, Spain, a “participation school” originated during the indignados movement; and secondly, the Cartografía de la Solidaridad project, a research developed in Barcelona, Spain, dealing with migrant solidarity initiatives in the face of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, in 2015. Throughout the article, we foreground examples of research practices of these two cases that contribute to an alternative rationale behind knowledge production. Such practices promote alternative uses of knowledge that go beyond its inclusion in capitalist valorisation, and seek to question epistemic hierarchies to which we contribute in our academic praxis. Moreover, we review two forms in which this methodological approach can support already existing commoning processes by contributing to the articulation of differences within and between social groups. Commoning methodologies, we argue, may contrbute in a modest way to change the conditions of possibility for social change and trigger processes of social transformation in the context in which they are deployed.

This work compares social mobility in Buenos Aires and Montevideo over a period of 50 years, based on the oldest and most recent social mobility surveys in each of them. The comparison is restricted to male heads of household, as they were the only ones included in the oldest data. Notwithstanding this limitation, the comparison is useful for future studies because it provides results for modeling data. Recent data comes from the EMOTE2 survey for Montevideo and the ENES 2012 of the PISAC project for Buenos Aires. Mobility data circa 1960 comes from ICPRS for Buenos Aires, and from works of the time for Montevideo, which allowed completing tables and distributions through Iterative Proportional Fitting. The hypotheses of the time and the most recent ones about these cities were reviewed, and they were channeled within the contemporary discussion that analyzes social mobility, which focuses especially on the association between class origins, educational achievements, and current class. Using loglinear models, hypotheses about constant fluidity, inequality of educational opportunities, and the return of educational capital were explored. Divergent changes and trends in class mobility and reproduction between the two cities were verified. Class inequality continues to dominate social mobility, but between both dates there is greater social fluidity in Buenos Aires than in Montevideo. The effect of class inequality is notable through how educational achievement is distributed and rewarded. No substantive advance of meritocracy is noted, and part of the problem is the mismatch of educational attainment and current class position. The conclusions contribute to a sequence of comparative studies that INCASI is developing. The results are interpreted as a counterpoint and dialogue with recent international trends.