Social theory | EPFL Graph Search

Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies (e.g. positivism and antipositivism), the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing. Definitions Social theory by definition is used to make distinctions and generalizations among different types of societies, and to analyze modernity as it has emerged in the past few centuries. Social theory, as it is recognized today,

Le dehors de toute fête : une sociologie urbaine de la sécurité au Montreux Jazz Festival

Lucien Jean Delley

This thesis is the result of four years of investigation carried out as « security coordinator » of the Monteux Jazz Festival. From this operational commitment, I sought to understand : how the festival is integrated into the city ; what affects the safety of the public and disturbs the urban order ; the apparatus implemented for risk management. The analyses focus on two spatial figures: the club and the park. The first part retraces the difficult adoption of electronic music in the 1990s, before raising questions pertaining to the Strobe Klub in situ, in particular the conditions of production of clubbing - an experience now largely integrated into the regulated and profitable system of urban leisure. The second part focuses on the festive occupation of a public park located outside the perimeter of the event; from a night that degenerates between young people and the police, to the development and implementation of an urban mediation project. The results of this research allow to draw a sociological framework for the festive space by highlighting three urban security regimes (tension, domestication, taming) which correspond to specific ways of dealing with risk (fear, suspicion, relationship) and are part of a dialectic of outside/inside (exclusion, selection, inclusion). These are both personal and collective ways of engaging and experiencing disorder, of preparing spaces or implementing practices. The importance of social work in the management of large public events and other crowd moments also emerges. The «outside of any party» is not only a spatial outside, but the unpredictable part which, in the perspective of hospitality, allows us to reexamine urban security policies.

EPFL2022

How Smart is the Grid?

Luc Girardin, Ermanno Lo Cascio, François Maréchal

Ancient Romans called urbs the set of buildings and infrastructures, and civitas the Roman citizens. Today instead, while the society is surfing the digital tsunami, urbs and civitas tend to become much closer, almost merging, that we might attempt to condensate these into a single concept: smart grid. Internet of things, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and quantum cryptography are only a few of the technologies that are likely to contribute to determining the final portrait of the future smart grid. However, to understand the effective sustainability of complex grids, specific tools are required. To this end, in this article, a new taxonomic framework has been developed starting from a general analysis of the emerging solutions, identifying intersectoral synergies and limitations with respect to the ‘smart grid’ concept. Finally, from the scenario portrayed, a set of issues involving engineering, regulation, security, and social frameworks have been derived in a theoretical fashion. The findings are likely to suggest the urgent need for multidisciplinary cooperation to address engineering and ontological challenges gravitating around the smart grid concept.

2021

Modelling Urban Transitions: A Social Practice Theoretic Approach to the Urban Metabolism

Franziska Meinherz

Urban growth and the increase of the human environmental imprint has led to a growing interest in urban sustainability, a field mainly addressed by urban ecology and urban metabolism studies. The realisation that the urban material and energy flows are mainly driven by household activities resulted in the acknowledgement that to understand the drivers of urban metabolic trajectories, it is necessary to include social factors into the onceptualisation of the urban system. However, so far no satisfying and operationalisable conceptualisation of the urban system as a nexus of social, technological, geographical and environmental factors exists. The aim of the present research is to develop an approach to overcome this gap. This research starts with the assumption that the household processes driving the urban material and energetic flows are key to understanding urban metabolic regimes and trajectories. It thus attemps to study urban transitions from a social practice theoretic approach. This methodological choice is motivated by the ambition of social practice theory to analyse the formation, reproduction and transformation of practices - nested sets of routinised activities - as parts of a system of things, technologies, skills, social structures, meanings, the environment etc., and in general by its focus on understanding the mechanisms behind social change. However, social practice theory has been struggling with the operationalisation of its concepts, due to the nestedness of practices and the resulting difficulty to delimit the field of analysis, and the lack of a general theory of how the different elements of which social practices consist are related. To overcome these challenges, this research proposes to model urban trajectories and transitions as the emergent behaviour of a socioechnological-environmental system, of which the different components drive the formation, reproduction andtransformation of social practices and thus the urban metabolic flows. For this, a mixed-method approach of agent-based and system dynamics modelling informed by sociological theories and qualitative field work is to be developed. Firstly, urban trajectories and patterns are identified. Secondly, models are used as a tool to test different theory-based explanatios for the emergence of such patterns. More specifically, the aim is to replicate long-term patterns and trajectories of specific practices - such as nutrition or commuting - across different urban contexts based on different theories regarding social change and the formation of social practices. The model hypotheses are to be developed based on theories and qualitative data, and tested with participatory approaches.

2017

Modelling Urban Transitions: A Social Practice Theoretic Approach to the Urban Metabolism

Franziska Meinherz

2017