Frontiers and crises of the social sciences: Difficulties of cartography

The article by V.V. Radaev, with its detailed discussion of the dynamics of the development of economic sociology and social sciences in general, allows us to think about two interrelated problems, each of which is fundamental. First, what do the "boundaries" of disciplines and the scientific communities look like in modern reality, when it is becoming increasingly difficult to "draw" them (including due to the constant growth in the scale of interdisciplinary research). Secondly, how the fundamental technological changes of our time - for example, the heyday of the platform economy and artificial intelligence - are changing the main provisions of socio-scientific theories. At what point can we discuss about a fundamentally new reality that will no longer be described in the language of previously existing theoretical and empirical tools? In this remark, I will try to consistently analyze the main points of Radaev's article, corresponding to each of these discussions. My main arguments boil down to two propositions. First, it is virtually impossible to describe the boundaries of the social sciences using predetermined criteria in today's reality - indeed, these criteria themselves are rhetorical constructs used by researchers to maintain a monopoly over particular research topics or methods. In practice, the boundaries of the sciences are determined by the interests of scientists belonging to particular communities - and nothing else. Second, it is important to be cautious when assessing the consequences of technological progress for particular social scientific disciplines - these consequences vary greatly depending on the prevailing theories within these disciplines.