Gil Eyal
Biographic Data
| ID | 86233 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gil Eyal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gil |
| FAMILY NAME | Eyal |
| SIGNATURE | EYAL G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7194-3864 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 408 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature: How AI experts and data scientists account for the opacity of algorithms
The opacity of machine learning (ML) algorithms is a significant concern in academic and regulatory circles. An emergent sociology of algorithms, however, argues that far from opacity being an inherent quality of algorithms, it is socially constructed and contingent upon certain choices and decisions. In this article, we show that a valorization of opacity is a key component of the epistemic culture of ML experts. While earlier campaigns for mech…
The Work of Legitimacy
What makes a law or regulation legitimate? This article develops a sociological approach that locates legitimacy not outside the law but in the work performed by a network of actors that cuts across the boundaries of the state. Drawing on Weber, Habermas, and Szelenyi, we suggest that legitimacy should be understood as the element that increases the probability of compliance with legal commands. We argue that this element cannot be a psychologica…
Contested Illness and Alternative Expertise Networks in Global Health: Post-Covid Syndrome in Brazil
Contested illnesses such as long COVID or post-COVID syndrome create heightened uncertainty for patients as they navigate diagnosis and treatment. To lessen this uncertainty, patients in the United States and Europe have relied on patient activism and patient-led research to seek recognition from medical, scientific and political institutions. However, patients in other countries rely on different sets of strategies. Drawing on a survey (n = 144)…
Prediction and explainability in AI: Striking a new balance
The debate regarding prediction and explainability in artificial intelligence (AI) centers around the trade-off between achieving high-performance accurate models and the ability to understand and interpret the decisionmaking process of those models. In recent years, this debate has gained significant attention due to the increasing adoption of AI systems in various domains, including healthcare, finance, and criminal justice. While prediction an…
Making Sense of Expertise: Cases from Law, Medicine, Journalism, Covid-19, and Climate Change
The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics
This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democracies depend for their health and functioning. At the same time, the contributions to this handbook …
Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics
Long Covid requires a global response centred on equity and dialogue
Long Covid, or Post-Covid Conditions, is a global health problem. Yet we know strikingly little about the different experiences of Long Covid patients cross-nationally. To address this shortcoming, we conducted an online survey of Long Covid patients active on social media in the U.S. (n = 334, October to December 2021) and Brazil (n = 144, January to April 2022). Our analysis of short answer responses indicates patient dissatisfaction with medic…
Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge by Daniel A. Menchik
Reviewed by: Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge by Daniel A. Menchik Gil Eyal Daniel A. Menchik. Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021. xvii + 305 pp. $29.95 (978-0-691-22354-4). The central characters in this book are cardiac electrophysiologists (EPs), a special brand of cardiologists who seek to regulate the…
Is your accuser me, or is it the software?’ Ambiguity and contested expertise in probabilistic DNA profiling
What happens when an algorithm is added to the work of an expert group? This study explores how algorithms pose a practical problem for experts. We study the introduction of a Probabilistic DNA Profiling (PDP) software into a forensics lab through interviews and court admissibility hearings. While meant to support experts' decision-making, in practice it has destabilized their authority. They respond to this destabilization by producing alternati…
Long covid and medical gaslighting: Dismissal, delayed diagnosis, and deferred treatment
While we know a lot more about Long Covid today, patients who were infected with Covid-19 early on in the pandemic and developed Long Covid had to contend with medical professionals who lacked awareness of the potential for extended complications from Covid-19. Long Covid patients have responded by labeling their contentious interactions with medical professionals, organizations, and the broader medical system as "gaslighting." We argue that the …
Response to Riccardo Emilio Chesta’s “What Is Critical About the Crisis of Expertise? A review of Gil Eyal’s The Crisis of Expertise (2019, Cambridge: (Polity Press)”
Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America
Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community
The Sociology of Personal Identification
Systems drawing on databases of personal information increasingly shape life experiences and outcomes across a range of settings, from consumer credit and policing to immigration, health, and employment. How do these systems identify and reidentify individuals as the same unique persons and differentiate them from others? This article advances a general sociological theory of personal identification that extends and improves earlier work by theor…
On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing
Searching under the streetlight: A historical perspective on the rise of randomistas
Trans-science as a vocation
This paper compares Weber's argument in 'Science as a vocation,' with Physicist Alvin Weinberg's discussion of the distinction between science and 'trans-science,' as two contrasting blueprints for boundary-work. It argues that Weber's empirical reasons for separating the scientific discussion of means and the extra-scientific discussion of ends - namely, the thesis of 'disenchantment' - no longer serves as a useful approach to understanding the …
The rise of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in international development in historical perspective
Autism looping
Over the last quarter century, the prevalence of autism in the US has increased from one in 2,500 in 1989 to one in 68 in 2010 (Baio 2012). Explanations for the autism &s;epidemic&s; either suggest that there was a real increase in the number of cases caused by environmental toxicity (Roberts et al.2007), or that it has resulted from a broadening of diagnostic criteria, along with increased public awareness and a greater availability of services.…
Looping Genomes: Diagnostic Change and the Genetic Makeup of the Autism Population
This article builds on Hacking's framework of "dynamic nominalism" to show how knowledge about biological etiology can interact with the "kinds of people" delineated by diagnostic categories in ways that "loop" or modify both over time. The authors use historical materials to show how "geneticization" played a crucial role in binding together autism as a biosocial community and how evidence from genetics research later made an important contribut…
Expertise
The main claim of the essay is that expertise is better understood neither as a set of skills that experts possess nor as a social attribution, but as a historically specific way in which we currently talk about the intersection, articulation, and friction between professions, science and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics on the other. It is shown that talk in terms of expertise is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it is c…
Professors and Their Politics
Two Opposite Ends of the World: The Management of Uncertainty in an Autism-Only School
How do individuals maintain a sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty? In research on medical uncertainty, sociologists often discuss the strategies health practitioners employ to control uncertainties relating to diagnosis and treatment. Over six months of ethnographic field work at an autism-only therapy school, we observed seventy-five students and forty-seven instructors and formally interviewed t…
The trading zone of autism genetics: Examining the intersection of genomic and psychiatric classification
For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic
This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and …
Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism
Using Latour's concepts of “actor‐network ” and “translation,” the authors show that neoliberalism's success in Eastern Europe is best analyzed not as an institutional form diffused along the nodes of a network, but as itself an actor‐network based on a particular translation strategy that construes socialism as a laboratory of economic knowledge. They argue that socialism was made into a laboratory of economic knowledge during the socialist calc…
Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community
Anti-politics and the spirit of capitalism: Dissidents, monetarists, and the Czech transition to capitalism
On Irony: An Invitation to Neoclassical Sociology
This article proffers an invitation to neoclassical sociology. This is understood as a Habermasian reconstruction of the fundamental vision of the discipline as conceptualized by classical theorists, particularly Weber. Taking the cases of Eastern and Central Europe as a laboratory, we argue against the idea of a single, homogenizing globalizing logic. Currently and historically what we see instead is a remarkable diversity of capitalist forms an…
Looping Genomes: Diagnostic Change and the Genetic Makeup of the Autism Population
This article builds on Hacking's framework of "dynamic nominalism" to show how knowledge about biological etiology can interact with the "kinds of people" delineated by diagnostic categories in ways that "loop" or modify both over time. The authors use historical materials to show how "geneticization" played a crucial role in binding together autism as a biosocial community and how evidence from genetics research later made an important contribut…
The rise of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in international development in historical perspective
The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age
Dangerous liaisons between military intelligence and Middle Eastern studies in Israel
The Utopia of Postsocialist Theory and the Ironic View of History in Neoclassical Sociology
Michael Burawoy offers three thought-provoking criticisms of our book, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe: (1) that we abandon class analysis, (2) that we do not suggest an alternative to the present capitalist order, and, therefore, (3) that our “neoclassical sociology” abandons the critical vision of classical sociology. At this abstract level, we plead not guilty to all t…
Economic Indicators as Public Interventions
This essay argues that the term public intellectual is too narrow for historical research about the public influence of economists and economic expertise. We propose, instead, the concept of public interventions to inform a more comprehensive approach that broadens the analytical frame by multiplying the relevant actors, modes, and targets of intervention yet could still include within it research on public intellectuals narrowly construed. As an…
The Sociology of Personal Identification
Systems drawing on databases of personal information increasingly shape life experiences and outcomes across a range of settings, from consumer credit and policing to immigration, health, and employment. How do these systems identify and reidentify individuals as the same unique persons and differentiate them from others? This article advances a general sociological theory of personal identification that extends and improves earlier work by theor…
Professors and Their Politics
The social composition of the Communist nomenklatura: A comparison of Russia, Poland, and Hungary
Searching under the streetlight: A historical perspective on the rise of randomistas
The discursive origins of Israeli separatism: The case of the Arab village
Making Sense of Expertise: Cases from Law, Medicine, Journalism, Covid-19, and Climate Change
Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America
Two Opposite Ends of the World: The Management of Uncertainty in an Autism-Only School
How do individuals maintain a sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty? In research on medical uncertainty, sociologists often discuss the strategies health practitioners employ to control uncertainties relating to diagnosis and treatment. Over six months of ethnographic field work at an autism-only therapy school, we observed seventy-five students and forty-seven instructors and formally interviewed t…
Contested Illness and Alternative Expertise Networks in Global Health: Post-Covid Syndrome in Brazil
Contested illnesses such as long COVID or post-COVID syndrome create heightened uncertainty for patients as they navigate diagnosis and treatment. To lessen this uncertainty, patients in the United States and Europe have relied on patient activism and patient-led research to seek recognition from medical, scientific and political institutions. However, patients in other countries rely on different sets of strategies. Drawing on a survey (n = 144)…
Prediction and explainability in AI: Striking a new balance
The debate regarding prediction and explainability in artificial intelligence (AI) centers around the trade-off between achieving high-performance accurate models and the ability to understand and interpret the decisionmaking process of those models. In recent years, this debate has gained significant attention due to the increasing adoption of AI systems in various domains, including healthcare, finance, and criminal justice. While prediction an…
Is your accuser me, or is it the software?’ Ambiguity and contested expertise in probabilistic DNA profiling
What happens when an algorithm is added to the work of an expert group? This study explores how algorithms pose a practical problem for experts. We study the introduction of a Probabilistic DNA Profiling (PDP) software into a forensics lab through interviews and court admissibility hearings. While meant to support experts' decision-making, in practice it has destabilized their authority. They respond to this destabilization by producing alternati…
Trans-science as a vocation
This paper compares Weber's argument in 'Science as a vocation,' with Physicist Alvin Weinberg's discussion of the distinction between science and 'trans-science,' as two contrasting blueprints for boundary-work. It argues that Weber's empirical reasons for separating the scientific discussion of means and the extra-scientific discussion of ends - namely, the thesis of 'disenchantment' - no longer serves as a useful approach to understanding the …
Ironie als Methode: Ansätze und Fragestellungen einer neoklassischen Soziologie
The Cambridge Companion to Weber
The social composition of the Communist nomenklatura: A comparison of Russia, Poland, and Hungary
The discursive origins of Israeli separatism: The case of the Arab village
The Theory of Post-Communist Managerialism
The most distinctive characteristic of post-communist social structure in East Central Europe is the absence of a capitalist class. Private property rights are in place, markets in labour and capital exist, these economies are open to world markets, and they have strong relationships with international financial institutions. However
Making capitalism without capitalists: Class formation and elite struggles in post-communist Central Europe
"This investigation of the post-Communist societies in Eastern Europe since 1989 provides new insights into the functioning of modern capitalism. Whilst classical social theory has devoted considerable attention to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Making Capitalism Without Capitalists is the first book to consider the transition from socialism to capitalism." "Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley argue that the origins of those in charge of bu…
Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience
Intellectual Pursuits: Toward an Understanding of Culture
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 What is an Intellectual? A Brief look at the Confusion Chapter 3 Culture and Intellectual Pursuits Chapter 4 Intellectuals as Idealogists Chapter 5 The Structure of Culture: The High and Low Problem and Intellectual Pursuits Chapter 6 Cultural Tension and Conflict in the Academy: Scholars and Scientists Versus Ideologists and Reformers Chapter 7 The Conceptual Clarifications Made in This Book and Why They Are Impo…
Anti-politics and the spirit of capitalism: Dissidents, monetarists, and the Czech transition to capitalism
The Cambridge Companion to Weber
The Utopia of Postsocialist Theory and the Ironic View of History in Neoclassical Sociology
Michael Burawoy offers three thought-provoking criticisms of our book, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe: (1) that we abandon class analysis, (2) that we do not suggest an alternative to the present capitalist order, and, therefore, (3) that our “neoclassical sociology” abandons the critical vision of classical sociology. At this abstract level, we plead not guilty to all t…
Understanding Nationalism
Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism
Using Latour's concepts of “actor‐network ” and “translation,” the authors show that neoliberalism's success in Eastern Europe is best analyzed not as an institutional form diffused along the nodes of a network, but as itself an actor‐network based on a particular translation strategy that construes socialism as a laboratory of economic knowledge. They argue that socialism was made into a laboratory of economic knowledge during the socialist calc…
Dangerous liaisons between military intelligence and Middle Eastern studies in Israel
Ironie als Methode: Ansätze und Fragestellungen einer neoklassischen Soziologie
On Irony: An Invitation to Neoclassical Sociology
This article proffers an invitation to neoclassical sociology. This is understood as a Habermasian reconstruction of the fundamental vision of the discipline as conceptualized by classical theorists, particularly Weber. Taking the cases of Eastern and Central Europe as a laboratory, we argue against the idea of a single, homogenizing globalizing logic. Currently and historically what we see instead is a remarkable diversity of capitalist forms an…
The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State
In this historical study, Gil Eyal argues that before the formation of Israel, Jewish experts participated in constructing the Orient as both a metaphor for the rejuvenation of the Jewish nation, and an enchanted space populated by hybrid figures that mixed Jewish and Arab elements. But following the creation of the state, these experts took up a new role: creating boundaries (both external and internal) between Jews and Arabs, purifying the hybr…
Ethnographies of Reason
The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age
Spaces between Fields
Why do we say that ‘changes to the DSM were secondary and derivative’: A reply
Economic Indicators as Public Interventions
This essay argues that the term public intellectual is too narrow for historical research about the public influence of economists and economic expertise. We propose, instead, the concept of public interventions to inform a more comprehensive approach that broadens the analytical frame by multiplying the relevant actors, modes, and targets of intervention yet could still include within it research on public intellectuals narrowly construed. As an…
For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic
This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and …
The trading zone of autism genetics: Examining the intersection of genomic and psychiatric classification
New modes of understanding and acting on human difference in autism research, advocacy and care: Introduction to a Special Issue of BioSocieties
Expertise
The main claim of the essay is that expertise is better understood neither as a set of skills that experts possess nor as a social attribution, but as a historically specific way in which we currently talk about the intersection, articulation, and friction between professions, science and technology on the one hand, and law and democratic politics on the other. It is shown that talk in terms of expertise is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it is c…
Professors and Their Politics
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Politics (15 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Social science (11 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works)