The Disciplinary Identity of Sociology: Profiles of Construction (Sociology in Poland, Russia and Bulgaria in the 1950s and 1960s)
The Disciplinary Identity of Sociology: Profiles of Construction (Sociology in Poland, Russia and Bulgaria in the 1950s and 1960s)

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the development of sociology from the perspective of the trajectories followed by its disciplinary project not simply on a given national territory, but in “encountering” a subject different from the one that initiated the establishment of sociology as an autonomous science. The empirical frame of reference is the postwar development of sociology in Polish, Bulgarian and Soviet society, which are also used as case studies to verify the hypothesis of the different models of construction of the disciplinary identity of sociology in the relatively similar sociopolitical, ideological and structural-organizational conditions of the communist party-state. The focus is on the 1950s and 60s, the period of formation of the cognitive and institutional frameworks of each national sociology that would largely determine the future of the latter’s disciplinary project. The specific trajectories of production of scientific knowledge of society given the dominant position of Marxism are generalized in three metaphorical figures. The creation of “islands” of research practice led to the establishment of a specific “sociological archipelago” in Poland. The differentiation of empirical surveys from the purely theoretical and methodological problems of the discipline ensured a “diffuse development” of sociology in Russia without an explicitly formulated disciplinary project. The local conceptual innovations in Bulgaria both “reinvented and set in motion the wheel” of sociological practice. Those cognitive choices determined not only the autonomy of the discipline, but also the resources of its development in the next decades.

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