This article proposes a conceptualization of middle-range operators — a class of social phenomena insufficiently described in contemporary social theory yet playing a central role in enabling sociological theorization of uncertainty. The analysis critically examines reflexive sociology’s limitations in addressing uncertainty, particularly the “dual hysteresis problem” in Pierre Bourdieu’s crisis theory, which obstructs linkages between micro- and macro-level social realities in contexts of change. This impasse necessitates recourse to reflexive sociology’s peripheral conceptual tools: “inventions” or, more broadly, middle-range operators. Through case studies of Gisèle Sapiro’s “axiological operators” and Nathan Marom’s “spatial distinctions”, the text demonstrates how contemporary reflexive sociology identifies concepts and phenomena structurally fulfilling middle-range operator functions in specific contexts, while neglecting broader systemic characterization of this social category. To address this gap, the analysis engages with modern debates on (quasi)institutional preconditions and effects of social network dynamics, drawing particularly on guanxi scholarship. The concluding sectionoutlines defining characteristics of middle-range operators and introduces the concept of modulation — a theoretical lens revealing previously overlooked processes of resource transformation and recalibration enacted by social actors during structural crises and rapid societal transformations.

This commentary on Stepan Kozlov’s article examines group styles as a type of middle-range operator—mechanisms that mediate between different social orders. The original concept of group style, proposed by Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, describes it as a filter through which groups adapt public culture in their interactions. However, I argue that their operationalisation of group style—through group boundaries, group ties, and rules of speech—leads to its conflation with group identity and structure, limiting its analytical potential, and creating conceptual problems. I propose an alternative approach, analysing group style through strategies for handling uncertainty and interactional breakdowns. Drawing on Tavory and Fine’s (2020) distinction between disruption for and disruption of, I examine two shamanic organisations with contrasting approaches to managing interactional disruptions. In one case, any interactional misalignment is perceived as a violation of order requiring immediate correction, while in the other, it is seen as a moment of potential transformation, enabling the reinterpretation of collective understandings and modifications of ritual practice. This analysis highlights a broader principle: middle-range operators not only mediate between different levels of social reality but also enable its transformation, linking microlevel interactions to cultural and institutional change. This perspective helps explain why some groups remain resistant to change while others utilise uncertainty as a resource for cultural innovation.

This text serves as a commentary on two articles in this issue: Stepan Kozlov’s work, which introduces the concept of “middle-level operators” based on Bourdieu’s texts, and Maria Volkova’s article, which demonstrates the applicability of this concept within a Goffmanian approach to describing group styles. Kozlov describes middle-level operators as tools for managing uncertainty but does not reveal the mechanisms of their impact on the form of uncertainty. Building on this approach, the present text shows how the concept can be extended by drawing on Robert Merton’s ideas and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Examining the experimental nature of middle-level operators enables us to reconceptualize middle-range theories as research tools with both applied and conceptual significance. Drawing on experiments described in STS, the text demonstrates how middle-level operators function under conditions of limited uncertainty and the ways this uncertainty can be constrained during experimentation. The analysis of Russian urban planning reform as a case of complex, long-term experimentation shows how identifying middle-level operators that combine different scales of transformation allows us to recognize the construction of future images as the reform’s primary direction and to identify mechanisms of change restraint that lead to its decline. Thus, the concept of middle-level operators shifts the focus of social research toward empirical cases and serves as a tool for formalizing their conceptual potential.

The article positions the concept of uncertainty as a central element of social ontology. By drawing on the resources of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory, the author argues for the fundamental impossibility of meanings fixation and the resulting radical contingency of the social. To address the limitations of discourse theory in analyzing structural crises, the author turns to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of crisis, which highlights the role of uncertainty in processes of social transformation—both at the level of social fields and in the trajectories of individual agents. Additionally, the article incorporates Gisèle Sapiro’s concept of axiological operators, which underscores the role of discursive elements in Bourdieu’s theory of crises. The author proposes a three-level model of uncertainty, with each level representing distinct abstract dimensions of thinking about the social: 1) The level of individual agents’ perceptions, characterized by uncertainty about the future arising from the mismatch between subjective expectations and objective social positions; 2) The uncertainty of social space as a whole during crises, understood as “open time”; 3) The level of radical contingency, which positions uncertainty as the core of imagining the social as such. The article contends that social inventions act as localized mechanisms for stabilizing meaning and bridging these distinct levels of uncertainty, particularly through the redefinition of axiological operators. The paper seeks to demonstrate that understanding the interplay of these levels of uncertainty—grounded in discourse theory, Bourdieu’s crisis theory, and the concept of axiological operators — is key to developing a more comprehensive social ontology.

The symbolic interactionists’ focus on the spontaneous aspects of sociality has often been seen by critics as a failure of the perspective to comprehend structure. The article examines this issue through the prism of the problem of social change, that is, the problem of the relationship between order and the process of its transformation. The paper pursues two goals: to distinguish the interpretations of change within the framework of Blumerian sociology; to determine whether interpretations of change provide for the existence of mechanisms to contain them. In order to identify interpretations of change, the theoretical foundations of the symbolic interactionist perspective (self-interaction and non-/symbolic interaction), the Blumerian version of the collective behavior domain (elementary collective groupings of crowd, mass, and public), interactionist macrosociology (the idea of macroorganization as a network of joint actions, fashion theory, and the concept of industrialization as an agent of social change), epistemology (process of concept creation), and ontology (reality as a dialectic of persistence and change) are considered. It is argued that Blumerian sociology exhibits a symmetrical view of the relationship between order and change. Contrary to the cognitivist reading of SI, an important role in Blumerian sociology is played by the complementarity of symbol and affect as mechanisms for maintaining order and initiating change. Symbols and affects can mutually reinforce or block each other’s activity. In all cases, they can act as sources of change and order. The later development of a dialectical ontology of persistence and change captures Blumer’s desire to present the most general and fundamental view of the relationship between order and change. The confrontation of the forces of order and change takes the form of incessant mutual adjustments.

The authors provide a broad overview of the main applications for machine learning methods in political sociology. They describe history of the transition from simple regression models to complex machine learning models. The reasons for and benefits of this transition are discussed. The authors identify the main uses of machine learning models in related disciplines and describe how they have been applied to the task of predicting revolutionary episodes. A cohort of other researchers who have tackled the issue of predicting political instability in their own ways, from using multiple regression models to using machine learning as a classifier for tweets during the Arab Spring, is reviewed. An extended description of the main trends in the field of studying predictor behavior in machine learning models is given. Cases of their application and the limitations researchers may face are discussed. The authors describe different statistical approaches to the task of estimating parameters of machine learning models. Using the example of analyzing models built to predict the probability of revolutionary episodes, they discuss ways of ranking model parameters through the estimation of decision trees and changes in the resulting power of models. The authors show how correlated variables can influence the obtained ranking result, why variables can appear in different parts of the ranking under different systems of calculating their importance. The authors also consider the method of determining the boundary after which the model parameters can be considered statistically significant. The authors provide a method of generalized representation of the direction of association of different variables, taking into account their interaction with other predictors, and give an interpretation of the results obtained using Shepley vectors. Among the substantive results of the tests, it is especially worth noting the identification of an exceptionally powerful effect of revolutionary waves in revolutionary events of the 21st century, given that in the 21st century the effect of global revolutionary waves turns out to be stronger than the effect of regional waves. In general, the tests suggest that the following are particularly strong factors that significantly increase the probability of the onset of unarmed revolutionary uprisings in the 21st century (in addition to the effect of revolutionary waves): a high level of political corruption, the effect of inertia (unarmed revolutionary or powerful protest events in the recent past), anomalies in economic growth, high amounts of aid from the United States (the effect of the “iron cage of liberalism” according to Daniel Ritter), the absence of oil rent, high population, high food inflation, middle-income economy, long incumbent duration and an intermediate type of political regime.

This report examines breaches in coordination between members within an activity where embodiment is the primary source for the practical treatment of actions by fellow others. The perspicuous activity under scrutiny is passing the ball in association football; the practical phenomenon is the misplays between teammates who fail to complete the pass, not because of a lack of technical skill, but rather because of a breakdown in coordination between them. Prior findings suggest that competent members of a practice manage to coordinate their courses of action within collaborative activities by anticipating and projecting the actions of their fellow members. The machinery behind this relies on the ability of members to recognise the trajectory of actions and relate to it through their own contributions. Practical competence is crucial in this respect, as it enables members to “read” actions-in-progress and complement them accordingly. This report treats coordination as a methodic interactional achievement. It extends prior analysis by focussing on the moments in interaction when practical competence is insufficient to establish and maintain mutual understanding of an ongoing situation between members. The findings reveal that the source of misunderstanding between members are the moment-to-moment shifts in the relevance of particular details of an ongoing situation, as multiple courses of action unfold simultaneously. Members display their orientation towards emerging problems by adjusting their actions according to the course of action, projected by their fellow member. The data for this report consists of video fragments taken from televised broadcasts of elite level professional association football.

The article is devoted to the study of perceptions of the labor market by employers and civil servants responsible for solving personnel problems in the region. Based on the reconstruction of the narrative within expert interviews conducted in 2024 in the Republic of Khakassia, three components of the conversation about the personnel shortage are identified: discrete present, continuous past, and active future. The discrete present describes the situation of personnel shortage, which is recognized by all informants; the continuous past reveals the complex of reasons that caused the shortage; the active future contains forecasts and sets of necessary actions to overcome it. It is concluded that one of the most urgent solutions is the normative consolidation of space for economic entities and government officials at the regional level to implement their actorship. Only by encouraging the initiative of regional actors in developing solutions to personnel problems, the criticality of incoming orders, autonomy in their implementation while maintaining responsibility does it become possible to take into account regional specifics and most effectively adapt general directives to local conditions. Interviews with regional employees reflect their agentic perception by federal officials, who often treat regional officials exclusively as executors — but not as equal colleagues capable and willing to use knowledge of the regional context to adjust unified directives coming from above. In reality, we observe a constant alternation of the modes of “agency” and “actorship” among the same leaders, and it is the proactive activity of regional officials in developing measures of state support for employers and personnel policy, adaptation, and nuanced orders depending on regional specifics that becomes the key to their success.

The article focuses on studying metaphorical concepts in Russian political discourse that transfer phenomena from the domain of technology to politics. Using the tools of cognitive metaphor theory, the paper describes the reasons for the popularity of technocratic metaphors in political explanatory models in contemporary Russia. Techno-optimism of late Soviet culture, which influenced the formation of the modern Russian political lexicon, is identified as one of the main factors. At the same time, the anonymity of such metaphorical concepts is noted: it is extremely difficult to determine who and when proposed such terms in Russian political science. In the absence of a specific author and any control from scientific institutions, the same term can often take on opposing meanings and moral evaluations. Using “political technologies” as an example, the article demonstrates, on the one hand, the entrenchment of such metaphors in the language of political analysis and, on the other, the low level of scientific reflection surrounding these concepts. To overcome this contradiction, it is proposed to reconstruct the course of scientific discussion around this and other technocratic metaphors that have become established in the language of Russian political sciences. In the spirit of mapping controversies, it is necessary to determine whether a substantial debate about their meaning has actually taken place. Depending on the results of these investigations, it will be possible to judge whether technocratic metaphors make political reality more comprehensible or, conversely, are empty signifiers requiring broad discussion among specialists and consistent reconceptualization. Such work could make the language of Russian political science clearer and, as a result, more capable of accurately reflecting the complex political phenomena of contemporary Russia.

Bourdieu’s theory offers several concepts to analyze crises. In the first part of this article I study what Bourdieu calls « reproduction crises », which unfold on a long- or medium-term basis, but can provoke an endogenous political crisis, like that of May 68. In the second part, Bourdieu’s theory of the state as monopolizing symbolic violence and the notions of «politicization» and «phase harmonization» he uses in his analysis of the May 68 “critical moment” are combined and applied to other types of political crisis, resulting from exogenous factors such as coup, war, military occupation, or colonialism, in order to understand how they affect individuals, groups and fields. The case of the French literary field during the German occupation serves as an example of the phase harmonization of a social field with the political field, through its politicization. Common to all these types of crises, beyond their differences, is the occurrence of ideological struggles around the monopoly of symbolic violence. In the conclusion, the concept of axiological operators is proposed to study those symbolic struggles that intensify in conjunctures of crisis.