Mark Wittek

Social processes are at the center of his work. He investigates segregation, stratification, and the emergence of social categories across various domains—for example, in schools, science, and art. His research is informed by theories from relational sociology, network theory, cultural sociology, action theory, (neuro)phenomenology, and field theory.

Methodologically, he uses traditional statistics, network analysis, and large language models (LLMs). These tools help him capture social processes and study how they evolve over time.

The combination of theory and methods allows him to identify general mechanisms and recurring patterns in different social systems. Examples of his work include studying how elites centralize resources and recognition, and how cultural content diversifies or narrows over time. He also examines how social processes are shaped by context, history, and institutions.

He is currently investigating how long-term changes in competition among scholars affect novelty and topical diversity within scientific fields. Additional ongoing research projects explore how historical changes in the Hollywood film industry influenced the distribution of recognition among filmmakers. Looking ahead, he plans to develop and test an integrative theory explaining how social processes centralize human attention and how this, in turn, influences social structure, cultural phenomena, and individual life outcomes.

Within the European Research Council project Social Integration and Boundary Making in Adolescence, he contributed to research on interethnic relationships among adolescents and studied the emergence of ethnic labels in adolescents’ peer ecologies between 2018 and 2022. His doctoral thesis focused on contextual antecedents for the emergence of status orders across different empirical domains, including schools, science, and cultural fields.

From January 2024 to April 2024, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Afterward, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart until starting at CEU in September 2024.