The Centre for Social Ontology is an international research centre that aims to produce inter-disciplinary research of the highest standards in the social sciences. It is currently based at the University of Padua (Italy, EU). Over the years, it has been based at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) (2010-13), the University of Tromsø (Norway) (2013-14), the University of Warwick (Coventry, England, UK) (2014-15), Cardiff University (Wales, UK) (2015-18) and Grenoble École de Management at Grenoble Chamber of Commerce (France, EU) (2018-2024). It is distinctive both in terms of its approach to the social sciences and in the way it organises the research and publication processes.

The CSO aims to address issues that are of relevance across the social sciences, whether theoretical, methodological or both. This makes the CSO unique as it is not a plea for ‘inter-disciplinarity’ per se. Instead, anyone working in the field of social science necessarily makes assumptions about the nature of social reality, thus social ontology is relevant in each discipline. Scientific rigour is sought in terms of the coherence of arguments’ scope and methods of investigation with the nature of the social objects being studied. This approach lends itself to studying vast and significant social phenomena for which there is ample but confusing evidence, or for which there exist contradictory accounts. In such cases the challenge is less to accumulate data as it is to make sense of what is going on and to grasp its significance in terms of social justice, human flourishing and realistic possibilities.

But the CSO’s research and publication process is also quite distinctive. The Centre’s activities are mainly organised around the production of collective book series on a broad theme (e.g., morphogenic society). Every year, the CSO’s active members gather for a week-long research workshop in which they discuss the draft chapters they have prepared for the next volume. This way of proceeding fosters interdisciplinarity, not only because it gathers experts drawn from various disciplines but also because each author discusses (and influences) others’ contributions to the forthcoming volume while having read their chapters in past volumes. However, so to broaden its readership as well as to support early-career researchers in post-Covid academia, the centre is reemphasising the publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as Organization, Globalizations, International Sociology, the International Review of Sociology, the Review of Political Economy, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, or the Journal of Critical Realism, to name a few.

Although membership has never been conditioned on allegiance to any particular ontological stance, most authors are conversant, to varying degrees, with the philosophy of critical realism advocated by our founder Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, or Tony Lawson. Most papers acknowledge, explicitly or implicitly, the worth of both social justice and human flourishing while considering society as an open system whose future may be influenced by sociological awareness and purposeful collective action.

To date, the CSO has researched the topics of morphogenic society (five volumes with Springer, 2011-17) and of post-human society (four volumes with Routledge, 2017-21). It has received the 2017 Cheryl Frank memorial Prize and c. £1,000,000 in funding, mainly from the Independent Social Research Foundation to which we are extremely thankful.