Tobias Werner

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Tobias Werner is an emerging scholar whose work sits at the dynamic intersection of sociology, technology studies, and human-machine interaction. His most notable contribution, "A New Sociology of Humans and Machines" (2024), has already garnered an impressive 58 citations in a remarkably short time, signaling the field's appetite for fresh theoretical frameworks that grapple with how humans and machines increasingly co-constitute social life. In this work, Werner challenges conventional boundaries between human agency and technological systems, proposing new conceptual tools for understanding the entangled relationships that define contemporary society. His approach draws on sociological tradition while pushing the discipline into urgent conversation with artificial intelligence, automation, and digital infrastructure. The rapid uptake of his ideas among researchers across sociology, science and technology studies, and adjacent fields suggests Werner is helping to shape a new intellectual agenda — one that refuses to treat machines as mere tools and instead interrogates the profound social transformations unfolding as human and machine actors become ever more deeply intertwined. His work is essential reading for anyone navigating the sociological dimensions of technological change.