Elena Esposito

Elena Esposito is one of the most original and influential sociologists of her generation, and the scholar who has done most to provide a rigorous theoretical framework for understanding what digital technology actually does to society. Her work spans three decades and ranges from the sociology of memory and fashion to financial markets and algorithmic prediction, always asking not what technology is but what it does and how it changes the way social systems operate, communicate, and generate meaning.

Her most distinctive and influential contribution is the concept of artificial communication, developed most fully in her 2022 MIT Press book of that name. Where most analysts ask whether artificial intelligence can replicate human thought, Esposito reframes the question entirely: what algorithms produce is not intelligence but communication — the ability to participate in social exchanges without understanding them. This distinction is both theoretically precise and practically illuminating. It explains why large language models are simultaneously impressive and unreliable: they are optimised for communicative plausibility, not truth. It explains the uncanny quality of human-AI interaction: we are evolved to treat communicative competence as evidence of understanding, and that intuition is now routinely confounded. And it opens up a research agenda for every domain – law, medicine, finance, science, politics – in which algorithmic systems are becoming participants without being understood.

This framework is the product of a sustained intellectual programme rather than a single intervention. Esposito trained under Niklas Luhmann at Bielefeld University, where she has also held her chair for many years alongside a professorship at the University of Bologna, and she has developed the most important application of systems theory to digital technology in the literature. Her work is unusual in combining theoretical ambition with empirical engagement: her European Research Council Advanced Grant, one of the most competitive research awards in European science, has funded a programme of research applying her framework to algorithmic prediction in finance, medicine, and public policy, producing a substantial body of empirical as well as theoretical work.

Esposito writes with equal fluency in Italian, German, and English, and her influence extends across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries in ways that few social science scholars achieve. She represents the tradition honoured by the Balzan Prize: sustained, rigorous, independent scholarship that changes how we think about fundamental questions – in her case, the question of what it means for machines to participate in human social life.