Journal Overview

Structure & Sense: A Journal of Meaning, Organization, and Technology is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing social-scientific and humanistic research on how technological and organizational systems shape meaning, work, and life in modernity. The journal’s aim is to understand how large-scale processes—automation, bureaucratization, datafication, and the rationalization of institutions—reorient human experience and transform the conditions of understanding itself.

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions from across the social sciences and humanities that engage the intersection of structure and sense: how social orders organize perception, action, and purpose. Topics of interest include the transformation of work and occupations, automation and artificial intelligence, the organization of expertise, the moral and emotional consequences of rationalized systems, and the changing foundations of human well-being in an increasingly technical world.

Why This Journal

The intersection of structure and sense is not a niche concern. The pace of technological and organizational change has made the relationship between rational systems and human meaning-making one of the defining problems of the present moment — and one that existing venues address only partially. Journals organized around organizational sociology, science and technology studies, or the sociology of culture each capture part of the problem, but none takes as its primary object the relationship between rationalization and meaning as such.

Structure & Sense was founded to provide a venue for work that takes this relationship seriously on its own terms — empirically rigorous, theoretically ambitious, and willing to cross the boundaries that disciplinary journals necessarily maintain. Our goal is to provide a venue for work that addresses the existential and interpretive dimensions of modern life with empirical rigor and sociological depth.

The journal actively solicits work from early career scholars. We believe that new voices are particularly important at a moment when the phenomena under investigation are themselves rapidly evolving, and when established frameworks are under genuine pressure. Submission from scholars at all career stages is welcome, but cultivating the next generation of researchers working on these problems is a deliberate editorial priority.

Structure & Sense is a new journal. We are building something, and we invite scholars who share these concerns to be part of that from the beginning.