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reveiw of: Dušan Janák et al: Počátky sociologie ve střední Evropě. Studie o formování sociologie jako vědy v Polsku, českých zemích, na Slovensku a v Maďarsku; Praha, Sociologické nakladatelství (SLON) 2014, 279 pp.
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In the last few years, inside the institutional landscape of Romanian social sciences, the history of Romanian sociology has gained a paradoxical position. On one hand, it is present, through a substantial number of people and presentations at any local conference or workshop, and displays a coherence and persistence that seem to be lacking in all other recurrent themes of contemporary Romanian sociology. On the other hand, it is uninteresting for the vast majority of individuals claiming sociological credentials, from universities and research institutes to the more business-oriented parts of the profession. The history of Romanian sociology mostly means, for the right or wrong reasons, the history of the sociology school from Bucharest, the so-called “Gusti School”. The concomitant visibility, and lack of importance of this kind of history for the mainstream Romanian sociology is rooted in the workings of a mechanism for symbolic legitimacy, and historical reconstruction linked to the interwar period. This hallowed period in the history of Romanian culture works as an important source of cultural relevance in today’s cultural fields and arenas. Present day intellectuals are able to create interwar ancestors, lines of continuity are still being built and carefully managed. The legitimizing link to Western culture is gained, safely, in an indirect way. As the interwar period is considered the highest point of cultural integration into European modernity, by constructing a reliable path to the interwar culture, modernity can be reaffirmed and the troubling Communist past can be easily set aside.
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In my article, I will try to find an answer to a question: Is Michel Foucault’s oeuvre still up to date or has it become one of the respected but foregone relics of humanities? I would inscribe Foucault’s thought into the “logic of pharmakon,” that is, a means being, at the same time, both a poison and a cure. I will show, polemically to Ewa Domańska, that Foucault’s thought remains valid nowadays. It allows us to question the subjectivity, status of norms, and normalization in such manner that we can perceive, on the one hand, mechanisms of power and knowledge and, on the other hand, we can give an account of subjects’ autonomy and self-determination, including their impact on norms at work in society.
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The basic purpose of the text is a reflexion on the problems with methodological directives that stem from the works of Foucault. Simultaneously, this voice imprints itself into the general understanding of styles of reception of an idea and Foucauldian concepts of social studies. By the use of the term “method” the author refers both to the varieties of methodological premises present in the literature concerned with methodological social studies and to the strategies of reading they represent. The analysis of the reception of “Foucault’s methodology” leads us to a conclusion that it posits itself between two opposite poles. The first pole attempts to provide precise methodological guidelines allowing a faithful reconstruction of Foucauldian ways, while applying them to a different sphere of inquest (the transcription strategy). Located on the other pole are methodological varieties of different type—transformations, redefinitions of Foucauldian categories, and syntheses of various approaches (the fugue strategy).
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Florentin Smarandache is known as scientist and writer. He writes in three languages: Romanian, French, and English. He graduated the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Craiova in 1979 first of his class, earned a Ph. D. in Mathematics from the State University Moldova at Kishinev in 1997, and continued postdoctoral studies at various American Universities such as University of Texas at Austin, University of Phoenix, etc. after emigration. He did post-doctoral researches at Okayama University of Science (Japan) between 12 December 2013 - 12 January 2014; at Guangdong University of Technology (Guangzhou, China), 19 May - 14 August 2012; at ENSIETA (National Superior School of Engineers and Study of Armament), Brest, France, 15 May - 22 July 2010; and for two months, June-July 2009, at Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, NY, USA (under State University of New York Institute of Technology). In U.S.A. he worked as a software engineer for Honeywell (1990-1995), adjunct professor for Pima Community College (1995-1997), in 1997 Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico, Gallup Campus, promoted to Associate Professor of Mathematics in 2003, and to Full Professor in 2008. Between 2007-2009 he was the Chair of Math & Sciences Department.
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Being a genuine East-Central European intellectual, the interests of Elemér Hankiss (1928-2015) have never been restricted by the institutional and disciplinary borders of scholarship. Working between the worlds of literature, political science, sociology and philosophy, and even between scholarship and politics, Hankiss has always been interested in the great questions of human existence. By the 1980s he was an institutionally acknowledged scholar in Hungary (in 1996-1998 he was director of the Institute for Sociology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences); this was followed by impressive international recognition (he was a professor at Stanford, then at the Bruges and Florence University Institutes).
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Since the turn of the 1960s, Talcott Parsons’ social thought has met with criticism that his image of society is conservative inasmuch as he places consensus and systematic concept formation over and above conflict and ‘sociological imagination’. The hidden agenda in this criticism is political: the charges are that Parsons supposedly disavows democracy in his implicit or explicit knowledge aim, and that his sociology presumably makes society function even at the expense of freedom of the individual. Here the author argues that these accusations cannot stand if archival materials such as lecture notes, correspondence, and unpublished memoranda are taken into account. She claims that Parsons in his sociology conceptualised society from the standpoint of the real world of the day, including the major historical confrontations from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. The first such scenario and the earliest confrontation that his work faced was in the era of the New Deal and the Second World War as the Anglo-Saxon democracies fought the racist imperialism of Nazi Germany; his ‘middle phase’ from the 1950s to the mid-1960s coincides with the Cold War at its height, the standoff between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union; and his ‘late oeuvre’ has yet another agenda, namely the Watergate Affair, but also the struggle for racial equality and university reform in the United States. In his theoretical positions and in his opposition to his critics, Parsons defended liberal democracy against the powerful social and intellectual forces that put it to the test.
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This article focuses on Czech sociologists who left Czechoslovakia immediately after the communist coup in February 1948 and their subsequent academic and personal fates in exile. Attention is devoted principally to Otakar Machotka (1899–1970), a prominent figure in both Czech political life and pre-Marxist Czech sociology with strong personal and methodological ties to the Chicago School; this article’s research draws on his correspondence and on other archived sources. Machotka’s special circustances worked to his favour in the United States where he was offered excellent academic positions. However, Machotka was opposed to the sociological mainstream(s) of his time and (unsuccessfully) attempted to establish his own school between sociology and social psychology. After that he accepted a tenured position at a marginal non-research university and failed to gain an audience in wider American or international academia. On a personal level, he preferred to focus on his family and social work rather than to take part in the academic game. In this he was perhaps influenced by the bleak fates of two of his colleagues in exile, František Rouček (1891–1952) and Zdeněk Ullrich (1901–1955), both of whom gave priority to their professional careers, which took them to Africa, where they both met an early death. Members of the youngest cohort of Czech post-February 1948 exiled sociologists, however, enjoyed happier fates, gaining some international academic renown, but only after graduating (anew) from western universities.
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The paper reconstructs how Émile Durkheim viewed space by examining two key notions of his thought: social morphology and social classification. It also traces the ways in which his students and co-workers (the members of the so-called Durkheim school) applied and advanced these concepts. While the concept of morphology focuses on the formal and material aspects of social life, the problem of social classification is located on the level of collective representations. Although neither Durkheim nor the members of the Durkheim School systematically elaborated the connection between these two phenomena, there are some remarks on the basis of which their relationship can be outlined. But this theory of space of the Durkheim school had a peculiar fate. While the theory of classification is cited now and then, references to the concept of social morphology seem to be missing from current theoretical discourse about social spaces. The paper argues that it is a mistake to ignore this theory of social spatiality, partly because its impact was bigger than it might at first appear, and partly because it can still be a source of inspiration for contemporary debates about spatial theory.
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In recent decades Émile Durkheim has taken his rightful position among the classical figures of the sociology of knowledge, and thanks to scholars interested in the social formation of knowledge, but resistant to the heritage of the Geisteswissenschaften, his thought has received renewed attention. However, the mediated but significant Durkheimian influence, which by being filtered through „social constructivism” strongly affects the ideas of the current mainstream of the sociology of knowledge, has so far escaped attention. In their The Social Construction of Reality, a book which became a truly classical work in the last half century, and is known by the widest audience of the social sciences, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann formulated an alternative programme for the sociology of knowledge referring mostly to the thought of Alfred Schütz, proposed as an unwary synthesis of the Weberian and Durkheimian approaches. Contrary to the received view, the authors, both strongly influenced by Durkheim in their individual work, made theoretical decisions in opposition to Schützian principles on some important points, and their offer is another image depicting the successfully integrated society, formulated against Talcott Parsons, whom they challenged on his own grounds. It is no exaggeration to consider the contents of their deservedly successful book as a reformulation of the sociology of knowledge. It is however false to consider the conception, influenced at least as strongly by Durkheim and Mead as by Schütz, as „the phenomenological sociological” proposal for a sociology of knowledge. Although they collected and developed most of Schütz’s fragmented remarks relevant for the sociology of knowledge with great success, they missed the opportunity to extract the alternative of the sociology of knowledge contained in some of Schütz’s unfinished manuscripts, which by marking the boundaries delimiting subjectivity from the sociology of knowledge and fostering a phenomenologically fortified consistent form of methodological individualism could serve as a safeguard against the specific problems of collectivistic and objectivistic theoretical strategies.
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Even if the positivist Durkheim did not imagine sociology as a critical science, his notion of anomie became central for critical theories. The article analyses why this happened and what the broader consequences of Durkheim’s theorizing are for contemporary critical theories. On the one hand anomie is related to the problem of social integration, while on the other hand it is described as the expression of extreme social suffering, potentially leading to suicide. This double embeddedness indicates the relevance of anomie for further critical theories: it expresses distortions of social integration causing the experience of unbearable suffering. Critical theories continuing the path set by Durkheim, such as Habermas’ theory of communicative action or Honneth’s theory of recognition, apply a similar strategy when naming distortions of integration as causes of social suffering manifesting in psychopathology. However, they are more cautious, as they do not connect the extreme case of suicide with dysfunctional integration. The article explores these parallelisms and divergences in order to establish a critical basis rooted in the extremities of social suffering (Sik 2018a, 2018b).
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The aim of this paper is to show current understandings of solidarity rethinking the frameworks of Durkheimian concept of solidarity. To do so, first, I shortly highlight what Émile Durkheim and his contemporaries understood by solidarity to make visible the differences to current solidarity; or to current understandings of solidarity. Because to understand solidarity was not made easier by time. Though current theories are discussing weakening and transforming of solidarity, labelable by “multiple solidarity”, this paper focuses on appearing and working solidarity. Then, it means that there will be a possibility to adopt some Durkheimian conceptions in a late modern context. E.g. mechanical and organic solidarity, normative commitment and interdependency, specialising and similarity and their role in framing solidarity. Lastly, this will help to conceptualize a few thoughts on the so-called reflexive solidarity, generally admitted to late modernity, with the help of some recent and significant theories.
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Response rates, survey costs, and the motivation of the interviewers can all be affected by the length of a questionnaire. Nevertheless, the effect of interview duration or interview speed on data quality is a rarely discussed problem. It is assumed that there is an optimal speed of an interview for every respondent, and that any deviation from that speed may lead to measurement error. Previous studies analyzing data of the European Social Survey (ESS) have already found a link between the speed of interviews and data quality, but the main focus of those studies was the role of interviewers rather than data quality. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between interview duration and data quality in more detail by using more complex data quality indicators. We use data from the 9th round of the ESS from 2018. We found a weak, but significant association between interview duration and data quality in nearly half of the countries even when controlling for sociodemographic variables. Careless responses (high item-nonresponse rates and straightlining) were associated with too fast an interview speed, whereas socially desirable responses were associated with too slow a speed. Our results highlight that monitoring interview duration is important, and the training of interviewers needs to emphasise how to handle such negative respondent behavior and follow the optimal speed during interviews.
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Jejunal diverticulosis is a rare condition which can be manifested in different ways. The majority of patients have no symptoms at all. In our case multiple diverticulosis of the jejunum was an incidental finding during an operation performed due to a strangulated Richters hernia.
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The following conceptual writing interweaves lines from canonical texts (in the public domain) by Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, whom I chose as two immensely popular writers from the same period focused on social theory. The introduction briefly reviews my initial graduate school experience reading primary source material in social theory, with feelings of being lost in a sea of words where sense-making seemed impossible, then tantalisingly deferred. Reading such work required meeting the author on their own terms and gradually developing a conceptual and disciplinary schema to achieve hard-won knowledge and expertise. The text I then assembled here reveals a similar sense of immersion in unknown meaning, an ongoing search for something that makes sense, that can be summarised and that can provide scaffolding for future understanding. The process of meaning-making here, though, is diverted, undermined and played with, revealing a multi-layered process where reading (perhaps) always seems at one remove from meaning.
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Sociology, a discipline nearly 200 years old, dates back to 1914. The year that sociology was started to be taught in Dârülfünun is very significant for the institutionalization of sociology. However, sociological thought began penetrating the Ottoman world with the Tanzimat Era. Sociology, which was seen as an important tool in the solution of social problems in the disintegration of the Empire, was quickly adopted; circles of intellectuals that adopted different sociological perspectives emerged. Among these circles, the group formed in Thessaloniki between 1910 and 1912 made important contributions to the emergence of the discipline of sociology in terms of methodical knowledge production about society. Although Thessaloniki was a significant place in the development of Turkish sociological thought, it has not been adequately discussed. In this context, the study first reveals the social, economic, and political features that make Thessaloniki an intellectual center, discusses the intellectual milieu in the city, and then focuses on the sociological interest of The Thessaloniki Circle, and lastly evaluates the sociological thoughts that emerged in this context.
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Scientific misconduct is on the rise with the increasing emphasis on research by many academic institutions. A review of the literature shows various reasons behind this trend, from the difficulty of publication to the constant pressure to publish in academia. Further, lack of systematic reporting standards is one of the major contributing factors towards misconduct and unethical practices in scientific research. In this analysis, the authors will provide a detailed narrative on scientific misconduct, along with possible strategies to address this common unethical practice among social science researchers. This article will define and discuss the practices of falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism along with suggestions about how to avoid them.
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Sociology in today's world often seeks to internationalise research and globalise problem solving. However, the so-called ‘global sociology’ is far away from being actually global as it involves in the discussion only specific regions and communities. The voice of other regions, as a rule, is not heard in the established system of connections and positions, and the regions themselves act as passive objects of (re)positioning, which is determined by the needs of specific research carried out by the nominally ‘global’ sociological community. The goal of the current study is to position one of the excluded sociological communities – post-soviet sociology – in global sociology using the North-South analytical framework that is frequently applied in discussions of global academic inequalities. The findings suggest that post-soviet sociology is positioned closer to the Global South, though significant country-based differences are observed. Post-soviet sociology functions as fragmented and disconnected, and this is facilitated by its orientation towards the ‘northern’ standards of knowledge production, which is professed even to the detriment of originality and independence.
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