Pierre Benz

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Faculté des arts et des sciences

The past decade has been marked by a series of global crises, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship between science and politics. The biological sciences are instrumental in understanding natural phenomena and informing policy decisions. However, scholars argue that current scientific expertise often fails to account for entire p...

Scholarship demonstrated the major role of inheritance and kinship for elite’s power reproduction, particularly among noble families. In the absence of monarchic and court structures, ruling classes that enjoyed privileges and engaged in social closure could become the functional equivalent of a nobility. In this paper, we examine the evolution of...

In the resurgence of elite sociology, formal (organizational-based network resources) and informal (non-organizational relations) social capital have garnered attention, but their mutual dynamics remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap, examining how both forms intersect among urban business elites, focusing on their roles on corporate...

This article suggests a comparative field analytical approach to fields of cultural production. Combining concepts from field analysis and focusing on homology with topic modeling and multiple correspondence analysis, we compare four scientific disciplines and show homological structures along both internal and external principles of differentiatio...

Benz, Pierre, Araujo, Pedro, & Rossier, Thierry (2024). The Role of Research Topics on Securing Funding and Careers for Swiss Sociologists. Bulletin 165, SGS/SSS, 37-45. The decentralized structure of the Swiss academic landscape grants research organizations significant autonomy, hence fostering competition among scholars and heightening their re...

Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased toward English‐language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised com...

Numerous studies have focused on wealth elites' housing, including their spatial and social exclusiveness. The insertion of the power elite in urban space has, however, largely been left unexplored. By combining positional and residential information on over 7,400 urban elites, we study how academic, economic, and political elites' residential patt...

Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased towards English-language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised co...

Topic Modeling has become a prominent tool for the study of scientific fields, as they allow for a large scale interpretation of research trends. Nevertheless, the output of these models is structured as a list of keywords which requires a manual interpretation for the labelling. This paper proposes to assess the reliability of three LLMs, namely f...

This article focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of topic modeling for the social studies of science. For about a decade, Natural Language Processing opened new research avenues beyond traditional bibliometric approaches, such as co-citation, co-authorship, and co-word analysis. Among these, the most prevalent are Latent Dirichlet Allocation (L...

Cet article s’intéresse au cas peu étudié des savants-patriciens à Bâle et Genève. Dans la première moitié du 20e siècle, les pratiques d’héritage, de transmission de fonctions académiques entre générations, mais aussi les alliances entre familles, vont de pair avec l’occupation de fonctions de pouvoir académique et des exigences de formation, nota...

Numerous studies have focused on wealth elites’ housing, including their spatial and social exclusiveness. The insertion of the power elite in urban space has, however, largely been left unexplored. By combining positional and residential information on over 7,400 urban elites, we study how academic, economic, and political elites’ residential patt...

Qui règne sur les grandes villes suisses ? Les partis de gauche, les dirigeant ·e·s des principales banques, ou plutôt les anciennes familles patriciennes ? Cet ouvrage aborde ces questions dans une perspective longue en offrant de nouvelles et stimulantes perspectives sur l’histoire des élites. En ouvrant la voie à une histoire transnationale des...

This special issue calls for a critical, historically grounded, and interdisciplinary perspective on international circulations and inequalities in the social sciences. It emphasizes the importance of considering the social sciences as a whole and in relation to broader power dynamics. To address inequalities in the production and dissemination of...

Cet article considère l’interdisciplinarité des requérant·e·s de projets de recherche comme un vecteur potentiel de crédibilité. L’interdisciplinarité est observée au niveau biographique comme autant de mobilités disciplinaires réalisées au long d’une carrière d’obtention de financements. Ces mobilités, plus ou moins fréquentes, plus ou moins longu...

Within the Social Studies of Economics, research has been dominated by case-oriented approaches. In this article, we propose and demonstrate the value of adding a quantitative, field-theoretical approach. Specifically, we outline a perspective for studying economics as a social field, focusing on the homology between research topics and the resourc...

During the last decades, economics has gained influence and power in many countries and several social contexts. The relationship between power and knowledge production is a complex phenomenon that accounts for the special role of economics in contemporary societies. This chapter provides an overview of various aspects related to economics as an ac...

Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte – Revue d’histoire (ISSN 1420-4355), Band 2022/2. Cet article aborde les transformations de la biologie en Suisse au 20e siècle sous l’angle de l’évolution des chaires professorales, de la distribution des financements accordés pour la recherche et de la représentation disciplinaire dans les rectorats des unive...

Cet article aborde les transformations de la biologie en Suisse au 20e siècle sous l’angle de l’évolution des chaires professorales, de la distribution des financements accordés pour la recherche et de la représentation disciplinaire dans les rectorats des universités. Il montre comment l’expansion de la biologie fonctionnelle dans la seconde moiti...

This article focuses on (inter)disciplinary collaborations through the co-application to research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the main provider of research funding in Switzerland. We suggest that interdisciplinarity is a potential mode of distinction and that its frequency and the disciplines involved may be associated...

Extended abstract submission (1,000 words + bibliography): November 15th, 2021 Notification of acceptance: December 21st, 2021 Preliminary paper submission (ca. 3,000 words + bibliography) to be discussed during an online workshop by the guest editors and the other contributors to the special issue: April 2022 Full paper submission: August 31st,...

Over the recent decades, the turn to managerial governance has thoroughly transformed the European university systems and, by extension, the careers of university professors. Scholars postulated that professors’ careers have undergone an increasing formalization, that disciplinary careers have been hybridized, and that new modes of selection and re...

The original version of this article unfortunately requires correction with respect to the names of the authors. Instead of Benz Pierre, Bühlmann Felix, and Mach André, the names should read Pierre Benz, Felix Bühlmann, and André Mach.

Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledg...

Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledg...

Economists often argue that economics is a “pure” and “autonomous” discipline. In contrast, the relatively dense institutional and interpersonal networks owned by economists show how the discipline stands at the edge of several social fields and thus can be particularly heteronomous. These networks provide a certain volume and form of social capita...

Economists often argue that economics is a “pure” and “autonomous” discipline. In contrast, the relatively dense institutional and interpersonal networks owned by economists show how the discipline stands at the edge of several social fields and thus can be particularly heteronomous. These networks provide a certain volume and form of social capita...

Cette thèse porte sur les élites académiques de la biologie et de la chimie en Suisse au XXe siècle. Elle a été menée dans le cadre du projet FNS «Academic Elites in Switzerland: between Autonomy and Power» (2013-2017) et s’appuie largement sur les données prosopographiques de la base «Elites suisses au XXe siècle»exploitée dans le cadre du projet....

As a scientific discipline and profession, law has been for centuries at the heart of social and political power of many Western societies. Professors of law, as influential representatives of the profession, are important powerbrokers between academia, politics and the corporate world. Their influence is based on scientific reputation, institution...

In Switzerland, the panorama of scientific research is deemed to be deeply affected by language barriers and strong local academic identities. Is this impression confirmed by data on research projects? What are the factors that best explain the structure of scientific collaborations over the last forty years? Do linguistic regions (Switzerland is d...