Different people have different perceptions about artificial intelligence (AI). It is extremely important to bring together all the alternative frames of thinking—from the various communities of developers, researchers, business leaders, policymakers, and citizens—to properly start acknowledging AI. This article highlights the ‘fruitful collaboration’ that sociology and AI could develop in both social and technical terms. We discuss how biases and unfairness are among the major challenges to be addressed in such a sociotechnical perspective. First, as intelligent machines reveal their nature of ‘magnifying glasses’ in the automation of existing inequalities, we show how the AI technical community is calling for transparency and explainability, accountability and contestability. Not to be considered as panaceas, they all contribute to ensuring human control in novel practices that include requirement, design and development methodologies for a fairer AI. Second, we elaborate on the mounting attention for technological narratives as technology is recognized as a social practice within a specific institutional context. Not only do narratives reflect organizing visions for society, but they also are a tangible sign of the traditional lines of social, economic, and political inequalities. We conclude with a call for a diverse approach within the AI community and a richer knowledge about narratives as they help in better addressing future technical developments, public debate, and policy. AI practice is interdisciplinary by nature and it will benefit from a socio-technical perspective.

Deepening and digging into the social side of AI is a novel but emerging requirement within the AI community. Future research should invest in an “AI for people”, going beyond the undoubtedly much-needed efforts into ethics, explainability and responsible AI. The article addresses this challenge by problematizing the discussion around AI shifting the attention to individuals and their awareness, knowledge and emotional response to AI. First, we outline our main argument relative to the need for a socio-technical perspective in the study of AI social implications. Then, we illustrate the main existing narratives of hopes and fears associated with AI and robots. As building blocks of broader “sociotechnical imaginaries”, narratives are powerful tools that shape how society sees, interprets and organizes technology. An original empirical study within the University of Bologna collects the data to examine the levels of awareness, knowledge and emotional response towards AI, revealing interesting insights to be carried on in future research. Replete with exaggerations, both utopian and dystopian narratives are analysed with respect to some relevant socio-demographic variables (gender, generation and competence). Finally, focusing on two issues—the state of AI anxiety and the point of view of non-experts—opens the floor to problematizing the discourse around AI, sustaining the need for a sociological perspective in the field of AI and discussing future comparative research.

The paper takes an innovative approach to the study of political participation by combining it with a gender studies perspective, investigating the role of structural and situational constraints in the highly gendered context of Italy. Such constraints channel women’s time away from politics, but neither do they account for the whole difference, which calls for an additional explanation, identified with specific cultural constraints. As expected, there is a remarkable gap between women and men in traditional time-consuming political activities and situational constraints have a negative impact on women’s participation, and surprisingly also have a negative effect on men’s involvement.

Sardex is a B2B electronic complementary currency and mutual credit system. It allows private funding to be endogenously generated within a geographically limited socio-economic context, rather than injected from exogenous sources, leading to a greater level of positive social impact. Sardex promotes stable and constructive integration of market activity with democratic institutions and socio-cultural values, and is hence identified with sustainable development. This paper presents a case study based on 29 semi-structured in-depth interviews of Sardex members. By drawing on monetary theory, sociology and anthropology, the paper argues that Sardex implements a form of self-funded social impact investment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely expected to transform healthcare, yet its adoption in clinical practice remains limited. This paper examines the perspectives of Italian clinicians and medical physicists on the drivers of and barriers to AI use. Using an online survey of healthcare professionals across different domains, we find that efficiency gains—such as reducing repetitive tasks and accelerating diagnostics—are the strongest incentives for adoption. However, trust in AI systems, explainability, and the limited availability of AI tools are major obstacles. Respondents emphasized that AI should augment, not replace, medical expertise, calling for participatory development processes where clinicians are actively involved in the design and validation of decision support tools. At the organizational level, the adoption of AI tools is facilitated by innovation-oriented leadership and sufficient resources, while conservative management and economic constraints hinder implementation. The awareness of regulatory frameworks, including the EU AI Act, is moderate, and many clinicians express the need for targeted training to support safe integration. Our findings suggest that the successful adoption of AI in healthcare will depend on building trust through transparency, clarifying legal responsibilities, and fostering organizational cultures that support collaboration between humans and AI. The role of AI in medicine is therefore best understood as a complement to clinical judgment, rather than a replacement.