Ralph Schroeder
Biographic Data
| ID | 130514 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ralph Schroeder |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ralph |
| FAMILY NAME | Schroeder |
| SIGNATURE | SCHROEDER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4229-1585 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 94 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 370 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 90 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Can artificial intelligence predict the most important contemporary philosophers? updating and extending Collins’ ‘sociology of philosophies’
Randall Collins’ massive book ‘Sociology of Philosophies’ (1998) is, as the subtitle has it, a ‘global theory of intellectual change’. To explain why certain figures became influential thinkers, Collins puts forward the sociological principles that made their success possible. These include their positions in academic networks and teacher-pupil chains. His book ends in the middle of the 20th century because after that time, the ‘eminent’ (Collins…
“Be like Sweden” (?): Swedish Covid-19 strategy in mainstream and far-right US media
By means of a longitudinal systematic content analysis across six mainstream US news and six US far-right media outlets, we illustrate in this paper how the Swedish COVID-19 approach was refracted through ideologically diverse media outlets in the US. In doing so, we show how the same events can be interpreted through quite different ideological lenses and misconstrued for political purposes. We show how Sweden was championed as a beacon of limit…
Content moderation and the digital transformations of gatekeeping
This essay provides an overview of the current state of content moderation on social media platforms. The question the essay addresses is why there are a number of unresolved issues in tackling dysfunctional content. The argument is that there are two intersecting new phenomena which make effective content moderation difficult: one is that social media platforms lack the gatekeeping of content that was characteristic of traditional news media. Th…
‘Living in a post-truth era’? Online misinformation in everyday life in rural and urban China
This paper investigates everyday information seeking and misinformation among Internet users in rural and urban China. The research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to identify user demographics and categories of misinformation encountered on mobile devices online. The paper makes two contributions: one is to bridge hitherto unconnected research on everyday information practices with the literature on misinformation. The second i…
History and Contrarian Expression: Debating Genocide on Reddit
Social media communities are increasingly considered as spaces where evidence-based information about history is undermined. We combine expert interviews and content analysis of debates about genocide in a popular online contrarian community to understand how to mitigate the spread of misleading information across such communities in the domain of history. We analyse 1725 entries on 10 Reddit forums dedicated to debating and promoting scepticism …
Using AI to model future societal instability
This paper develops a model that aims to pinpoint the future structural constraints facing a number of countries and the instability that may result from these constraints. The model uses existing datasets and extrapolates major patterns several decades into the future based on past patterns. Contrary to predictions of looming crisis in certain states by Turchin and others, the argument is that a more likely scenario is an increasing inability to…
Decolonizing the Past and Confronting Climate Change Futures: Bringing the State Back In
Macro-social theory has been on the wane. There are various reasons for this, but among the consequences of this gap is that an urgent social problem – climate change – has received little attention and is poorly connected to existing theories. This problem, in turn, is tied to the fact that the transition to modernity is no longer central to social theory. Instead, a recent focus has been on how the “rise of the West” is predicated on dominance …
The Shifting Image of Sweden Abroad: Framings of the 2022 Swedish Election in Traditional and Far-Right Online Media from the United States, Germany, India, and China
The 2022 Swedish election saw a radical-right populist party-the Sweden Democrats-gain direct government influence in the country for the first time. This contrasted with the international image of Sweden as a progressive county yet resonated with the country's growing ideological use by foreign far-right actors. This article analyzes the framing of Sweden's image in traditional and far-right online media from the United States, Germany, India, a…
Artificial Intelligence, Rationalization, and the Limits of Control in the Public Sector: The Case of Tax Policy Optimization
In this paper, we first frame the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the public sector as a continuation and intensification of long-standing rationalization and bureaucratization processes. Drawing on Weber, we understand the core of these processes to be the replacement of traditions with instrumental rationality, that is, the most calculable and efficient way of achieving any given policy objective. Second, we demonstrate how much …
Does trust in government moderate the perception towards deepfakes? Comparative perspectives from Asia on the risks of AI and misinformation for democracy
It's All About US vs THEM: Comparing Chinese Populist Discourses on Weibo and Twitter
The recent resurgence of populism has led to renewed interest in the phenomenon, but it remains unclear how this phenomenon has manifested itself in non-Western settings like China. This article analyses Chinese populism and provides a systematic categorization of online discourses related to this phenomenon, including ideas about 'the people,' 'corrupt elites,' and 'enemies.' The article is based on a collection of more than 100,000 Chinese onli…
Social Thought from the Global South: A Comparative-Historical View from Xi’s China and Modi’s India
It has been argued that social thought is Western-centric or Euro-centric. This essay argues that there are alternatives that have been put forward from the Global South, though they have been overlooked. Examples can be found in the different schools of thought about development that have emerged in India and China. Non-Western social thought in these two countries borrows from – but also departs from – that in the West, and includes versions of…
Sweden's image in the world: Still a ‘model’
Sweden has long been regarded as a ‘model’ for societal development. Recently, with the rise of an anti‐immigrant party and negative news coverage of crime, the image of a progressive Sweden has frayed. Positive models for societal development have existed in the past and included the United States during the heyday of modernization theory. This paper argues that positive models are useful, partly to crystallize options among the much‐debated var…
The sound, the fury and the silences: The politics of influence in digitalizing India
There is no conflict of interest to declare
Chinese Anti-Westernism on social media
The Chinese Communist Party and its supporters are increasingly using social media platforms to shape China’s public image. This online image is a means of strengthening domestic nationalism and of projecting “soft power” abroad. This paper examines various forms of anti-Westernism that are central to this image-making. It analyzes several recent topics—the Belt and Road Initiative, climate change, the COVID-19 vaccine, the Beijing Olympics, and …
Artificial intelligence and the public arena
The public arena relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to ever greater degrees. Media structures hosting the public arena—such as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube—increasingly rely on AI-enabled applications to shape information environments, autonomously generate content, and communicate with people. These applications affect the public arena’s functions: make society visible to itself and provide spaces for the formation of publics and c…
The effect of information seeking behaviour on trust in AI in Asia: The moderating role of misinformation concern
Public opinion on new technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI), is influenced by media coverage. However, it remains unclear as to what extent seeking news and information about AI on legacy media as opposed to social media can shape trust in AI. A cross-national survey conducted across Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and India investigated the impact of information seeking behaviour on trust in AI, as well as the moderating role of concern…
Is there a link between climate change scepticism and populism? An analysis of web tracking and survey data from Europe and the US
Climate change and populism are two major phenomena in contemporary politics. Recent successes of populist parties and politicians, especially in Europe and in the US, have given rise to extensive debates in the academic literature and beyond. Yet the link between populism and climate change scepticism (henceforth ‘scepticism’), has so far received little attention. This paper examines the link between scepticism and populism by means of a unique…
AI and social theory
In this paper, we sketch a programme for AI-driven social theory. We begin by defining what we mean by artificial intelligence (AI) in this context. We then lay out our specification for how AI-based models can draw on the growing availability of digital data to help test the validity of different social theories based on their predictive power. In doing so, we use the work of Randall Collins and his state breakdown model to exemplify that, alrea…
Globalisation, media trust, and populism: A comparative study of the US and Germany
Globalisation is an area where supporters and non-supporters of left- and right-wing parties disagree, both for domestic and international policies. Populists see metropolitan elites as ‘corrupt’ and oppose policies that encourage globalisation in trade, immigration, and multi-culturalism. Media play important roles in providing pro- and anti-globalisation content, both in traditional and digital media. We use a unique combination of large-scale …
Was the 2019 Indian election won by digital media
Research on the reasons for the unexpected outcome of the 2019 national election in India can be divided into two strands: one strand examines the election without recourse to media, arguing that the appeals by parties to different segments of the population, referred to as identity politics, swayed voters. The other strand has made the case that media campaigns, and digital media in particular, were decisive in shaping the electoral outcome. Amo…
Grassroots information divides in China: Theorising everyday information practices in the Global South
Online disinformation in the run-up to the Indian 2019 election
This essay examines the role of disinformation in the Indian general election of 2019. The findings are presented against the background of previous work on the role of digital media in Indian politics. The essay uses 25 in-depth interviews among ordinary Indians to probe their level of awareness about so-called ‘fake news’. It also examines their behavior in seeking news and sharing political information and their views about the digital campaig…
Disinformation and the Structural Transformations of the Public Arena: Addressing the Actual Challenges to Democracy
Current debate is dominated by fears of the threats of digital technology for democracy. One typical example is the perceived threats of malicious actors promoting disinformation through digital channels to sow confusion and exacerbate political divisions. The prominence of the threat of digital disinformation in the public imagination, however, is not supported by empirical findings which instead indicate that disinformation is a limited problem…
The Web as History
The World Wide Web has now been in use for more than 20 years. From early browsers to today?s principal source of information, entertainment and much else, the Web is an integral part of our daily lives, to the extent that some people believe ?if it?s not online, it doesn?t exist.? While this statement is not entirely true, it is becoming increasingly accurate, and reflects the Web?s role as an indispensable treasure trove. It is curious, therefo…
Laser scanning for conservation and research of African cultural heritage sites: The case study of Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa
Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys
Research has shown that citizens with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively, and there is also suggestive evidence that they rely less on established news sources like the legacy press. However, due to data limitations, there is still no solid evidence whether populist citizens have skewed news diets in the contemporary high-choice digital media environment. In this paper, we rely on the selective exposure framework and inves…
Max Weber and the sociology of culture
Digital Media and the Surge of Political Outsiders: Explaining the Success of Political Challengers in the United States, Germany, and China
There has been a recent surge of political actors and groups challenging the legitimacy of established political institutions and mass media. We argue that this wave is no accident; rather, it is driven by digital media. Digital media allow outside challengers to route around social institutions that structure political discourse, such as parties and legacy media, which have previously held a monopoly on political coordination and information dis…
Is bigger better? The emergence of big data as a tool for international development policy
The Dangerous Myth of Populism as a Thin Ideology
The idea that populism is a ‘thin ideology’—unlike other full-bodied ‘thick’ ideologies like conservatism or socialism—has come close to being an orthodoxy among populism scholars. This paper challenges that view and argues that it is at best an open question whether populism meets the criteria of a thick ideology, which should be whether it offers a comprehensive program of political change and whether it has staying power. This argument will be…
Max Weber's 'Science as a Vocation
The populist campaigns against European public service media: Hot air or existential threat
Right-wing populists are gaining ground in Western democracies. Surveys show that they often distrust established media and public service media (PSM) in particular, claiming that they are biased against them. This paper examines how they have challenged PSM and proposes some potential responses to these challenges. The paper is based on an analysis of a number of recent and long-standing surveys of public attitudes towards the media, combined wi…
Personality' and 'inner distance: The conception of the individual in Max Weber's sociology
Artificial intelligence and the public arena
The public arena relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to ever greater degrees. Media structures hosting the public arena—such as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube—increasingly rely on AI-enabled applications to shape information environments, autonomously generate content, and communicate with people. These applications affect the public arena’s functions: make society visible to itself and provide spaces for the formation of publics and c…
Disinformation and the Structural Transformations of the Public Arena: Addressing the Actual Challenges to Democracy
Current debate is dominated by fears of the threats of digital technology for democracy. One typical example is the perceived threats of malicious actors promoting disinformation through digital channels to sow confusion and exacerbate political divisions. The prominence of the threat of digital disinformation in the public imagination, however, is not supported by empirical findings which instead indicate that disinformation is a limited problem…
Digital Media and the Entrenchment of Right-Wing Populist Agendas
Since Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump, news media around the world have given extensive coverage to the issue of disinformation and polarization. This article argues that while the negative effects of social media have dominated the discussion, these effects do not address how right-wing populists have been able to successfully and legitimately use digital media to circumvent traditional media. The article uses the United States…
Emerging practices and perspectives on Big Data analysis in economics: Bigger and better or more of the same
Although the terminology of Big Data has so far gained little traction in economics, the availability of unprecedentedly rich datasets and the need for new approaches - both epistemological and computational - to deal with them is an emerging issue for the discipline. Using interviews conducted with a cross-section of economists, this paper examines perspectives on Big Data across the discipline, the new types of data being used by researchers on…
Disenchantment and its Discontents: Weberian Perspectives on Science and Technology
Weber's ideas about science and technology have largely been neglected by comparison with his views of modern politics and economics. Yet his notion of disenchantment is central to his conception of modern society and to his comparative studies of the rise of Western rationalism. This importance is underlined by the use to which Weber's ideas have been put by two contemporary thinkers. Ernest Gellner extends the notion of disenchantment in his ac…
The Sacred and the Virtual: Religion in Multi-User Virtual Reality
This paper explores the social interaction among participants in a church service in an online multi-user virtual reality (VR) environment. It examines some of the main features of prayer meetings in a religiously-oriented virtual world and also what sets this world apart from other virtual worlds. Next, it examines some of the issues of research ethics and methods that are raised in the study of online behavior in virtual worlds. The paper then …
Big Data and the brave new world of social media research
The recent Facebook study about emotional contagion has generated a high-profile debate about the ethical and social issues in Big Data research. These issues are not unprecedented, but the debate highlighted that, in focusing on research ethics and the legal issues about this type of research, an important larger picture is overlooked about the extent to which free will is compatible with the growth of deterministic scientific knowledge, and how…
Mobile phones and the inexorable advance of multimodal connectedness
The aim of this article is to put mobile phones and uses of other new media into the broader context of cross-cultural comparison. The article focuses on two countries (Sweden and the USA) and on leisure and sociability. A problem with studies narrowly focusing on mobile phones is that the mobile’s uses cannot easily be separated from uses of other information and communication technologies (ICTs), as when ICTs compete for time spent or when key …
Making it Open and Keeping it Safe: E-Enabled Data-Sharing in Sweden
This article focuses on data-sharing - a central aspect of an ambitious e-Science programme recently embarked on in Sweden. Data-sharing has become a powerful and promising direction in e-Science in general, even though fraught with difficulties. Sweden has a unique position in relation to data-sharing: a world-unique set of social science and medical data collections, a well-established tradition of regulations concerning data protection, a wide…
Max Weber: From History to Modernity
Weberian perspectives on science, technology and the economy
Several disciplines have contributed to the understanding of the relationship between science, technology, and economic change. Weber's perspective on this relationship, however, has not been properly explored. In the first part of this paper, we give an account of Weber's perspective. In the second part, we critically assess Weber's ideas, indicating those that are useful and those that deserve to be abandoned. We also confront a revised Weberia…
Even in Sweden? 1: Misinformation and elections in the new media landscape
The Swedish national parliamentary election of 2018 took place amidst considerable concern over the role of misinformation. This paper examines the role of digital media during the election against the background of the Swedish media system. It focuses on the role of bots and how they supported the Sweden Democrats, whose agenda was also promoted by anti-immigrant alternative news websites. This article reports on a study of Twitter that used com…
E-Sciences as research technologies: Reconfiguring Disciplines, Globalizing Knowledge
This article examines recent e-science initiatives through the lens of the concept of `research technologies'. It has been argued that e-science research, which makes use of advanced computing tools to share distributed resources via networks, changes the disciplinary nature of research towards greater interdisciplinarity and paves the way for the increasing globalization of research. However, these claims need to be instantiated in concrete rese…
Activeworlds: Geography and social interaction in virtual reality
Cyberculture, cyborg post-modernism and the sociology of virtual reality technologies
Durkheim and Weber on the social implications of new information and communication technologies
Max Weber and Emile Durkheim made an important contribution to our understanding of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). While they did not discuss ICTs in their work, they provided conceptual tools at the macro-, meso- and micro-social levels that help us understand the use of ICTs. We examine how Weber’s iron cage and Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity and ritual present a coherent account of how ICTs sustain cohesion and also e…
Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments
This is a brief essay, we call "think-pieces", designed to stimulate a discussion on a particular topic. The topic for this series of essays is "defining virtual worlds"
Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction
Max Weber's 'Science as a Vocation
Personality' and 'inner distance: The conception of the individual in Max Weber's sociology
Max Weber and the sociology of culture
Virtual reality in the real world
Cyberculture, cyborg post-modernism and the sociology of virtual reality technologies
Disenchantment and its Discontents: Weberian Perspectives on Science and Technology
Weber's ideas about science and technology have largely been neglected by comparison with his views of modern politics and economics. Yet his notion of disenchantment is central to his conception of modern society and to his comparative studies of the rise of Western rationalism. This importance is underlined by the use to which Weber's ideas have been put by two contemporary thinkers. Ernest Gellner extends the notion of disenchantment in his ac…
Max Weber: From History to Modernity
The Structures of History
From the Big Divide to the Rubber Cage: Gellner’s Conception of Science and Technology
Networked Worlds: Social Aspects of Multi-User Virtual Reality Technology
This paper examines two aspects of multi-user virtual reality (VR) systems; the socio-technical shaping of these systems and the social relations inside multi-user virtual worlds. The paper begins with an overview of the history of networked interactive computer graphics and examines the main factors which are currently shaping networked VR systems. The second part explores the social relations between users inside virtual worlds and makes compar…
From Weber’s Political Sociology to Contemporary Liberal Democracy
This chapter will present an analytical overview of Weber’s political sociology and consider some contemporary extensions of his ideas. The problem with an all-encompassing overview is that Weber did not produce a systematic or complete political sociology. Instead, his writings contain a number of essays on a variety of topics which belong to what he called ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’, or the sociology of domination. Nevertheless, I think that we ca…
Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization
Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction The Concept of Democracy in Weber's Political Sociology S.Breuer Democratization in World-Historical Perspective R.Collins State Formation and the Disciplined Individual in Weber's Historical Sociology R.Axtmann Max Weber and Plebiscitary Democracy S.Eliaeson The Nation-state, the Protestant Ethic, and Modernization S.Whimster From Weber's Political Sociology to Contemporary Liberal Democracy R…
Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences. Fritz Ringer
Intercultural Communication in Virtual Environment
In this paper we explore and describe aspects of intercultural communication in an Internet based virtual environment. In spite of a massive Anglo-American dominance, the Internet share of non-English language use and of participants from non-English speaking countries is steadily increasing (cf Flydal). Our study is based on observing spontaneous text-based communication in a potentially multilingual and multicultural setting, the Active Worlds …
Max Weber, Democracy and Modernisation
Weber and economic change
Activeworlds: Geography and social interaction in virtual reality
The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments
Virtual reality technology has been developed commercially since the early 1990s but it is only recently, with the popularity of the internet, that it has become feasible to link many users simultaneously in shared virtual environments. This raises a number of interesting questions such as: what is the difference between face-to-face and avatar-to-avatar interaction? What patterns govern the formation of virtual communities? How does the appearan…
Weberian perspectives on science, technology and the economy
Several disciplines have contributed to the understanding of the relationship between science, technology, and economic change. Weber's perspective on this relationship, however, has not been properly explored. In the first part of this paper, we give an account of Weber's perspective. In the second part, we critically assess Weber's ideas, indicating those that are useful and those that deserve to be abandoned. We also confront a revised Weberia…
The Consumption of Technology in Everyday Life: Car, Telephone, and Television in Sweden and America in Comparative-Historical Perspective
This essay examines the consumption of technology in everyday life by considering three major technologies - car, telephone, and television. The argument attempts to go beyond technological determinism, which is typically not grounded in the study of everyday life, as well as beyond social shaping/social constructivist views that are tied to particular times and places, and thus unable to recognize broader and more long-term patterns of change. T…
Anyone Speak Spanish: Language Encounters in Multi-User Virtual Environments and the Influence of Technology
In this study we investigated how people using different languages interact and communicate in an internet-based virtual environment, Active Worlds. The focus was on situations where a new language is introduced in a conversation held in another language. With this we wanted to establish an understanding of: (1) the intentions of introducing a new language; (2) the response to this language introduction; (3) the consequences of language introduct…
Introduction: The Iemp model and its critics
This volume brings together essays that critically assess Michael Mann's sociology. The major works discussed here are The Sources of Social Power, Volume I: A History from the Beginning to 1760 AD (1986) and Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (1993). We shall have to wait for Volume III, which will take us to the present day, because Mann has concentrated for the last decade on another project: two volumes which have jus…
Bibliography of Michael Mann's Writings
Sociology (72 works) · Political science (54 works) · Computer Science (48 works) · Law (38 works) · Politics (35 works) · Social science (29 works) · Social Media and Politics (27 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · World Wide Web (23 works) · Philosophy (20 works)