Emmanuel Lazega – författare

When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume explores the social representations and significance of technological developments – especially AI and human enhancement – that have started to transform our human agency. It uses these developments to revisit theories of the human mind and its essential characteristics: a first-person perspective, concerns and reflexivity. It looks at how the smart machines are used as agents of change in the basic institutions and organisations that hold contemporary societies together, for example in the family and the household, in commercial corporations, in health institutions or in the military. Its main purpose is to enrich the ongoing public discussion of the social and political implications of the smart machines by looking at the extent to which they further digitalise and bureaucratise the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity.

When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume explores the social representations and significance of technological developments – especially AI and human enhancement – that have started to transform our human agency. It uses these developments to revisit theories of the human mind and its essential characteristics: a first-person perspective, concerns and reflexivity. It looks at how the smart machines are used as agents of change in the basic institutions and organisations that hold contemporary societies together, for example in the family and the household, in commercial corporations, in health institutions or in the military. Its main purpose is to enrich the ongoing public discussion of the social and political implications of the smart machines by looking at the extent to which they further digitalise and bureaucratise the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity.

Highlighting the role of social networks in supporting social resilience, contributions from experienced and innovative thinkers across the social sciences encourage readers to think in network terms about issues of social change and survival in situations of vulnerability. Chapters apply innovative social network thinking and analyses to a diverse range of existential societal challenges, including marginalized communities, emerging labour markets, governments, food systems, educational establishments, online social media, and the environment. The book further advances critical research frontiers that will inform the building of more resilient societies and ecosystems and ultimately strengthen our capacity to project ourselves into the future.

Combining network-based critical analysis with in-depth knowledge of policy design and intervention, this dynamic Research Agenda will be an essential tool for postgraduate students carrying out research in the social sciences. Its provision of state-of-the-art research agendas in eighteen vital domains of social life will benefit analysts and consultants designing, implementing, and evaluating policy in these areas.

Lazega focuses on how organizations use and combine logics of bureaucracy and collegiality, deploying and developing the analysis of multilevel networks to explore how these logics coalesce and interact in organizational settings and stratigraphies. Revisiting sociological knowledge on various phenomena, such as coopetition in science, markets and government, the creation of new institutions in political economy and elite self-segregation, this book advances our perception of the changes introduced in the contemporary ''science of organizations'' by the digitalization of society.

Offering new theoretical insights into organizations, this book is crucial for sociologists of organizations and management scholars, as well as postgraduate students, in search of an innovative understanding of the trajectories of contemporary organizations. The analysis of multilevel networks will also benefit practitioners and analysts working in the field.