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Justice sensitivity (or sensibility to injustice) represents an individual characteristic ortrait that permits interpersonal differentiation with respect to the readiness and intensity people respond when acknowledging injustice. The main goal was to analyze the conceptualization and measurement of justice sensitivity over a quarter of a century from the time it appeared in the interdisciplinary research of social justice. The authors identified three distinct periods in the evolution of research on justice sensitivity. For each stage, the essential changes in terms of conceptualization and measurement are highlighted. În the conceptualization of the construct, the evolution in time of a two-dimensional definitional space is identified. This space is framed by the axis of indicators or essential components and the axis of the perspectives of relating to injustice. Regarding the measurement of the construct, the evolution and the reason of a wide measurement variation are shown. It is explained how, from a very long initial instrument, with four components and a single perspective of reporting to injustice, composed of 64 items, it gradually became an ultra-short instrument, containing two components and four perspectives within only 8 items. It is emphasized that, although the measurement scales have changed a lot, the previously accumulated data are compatible with the latest data, only limited to a single reporting perspective. Finally, it is insisted that in the investigation of justice sensitivity it is important to keep in definition and at the level of measurement the affective component, because it is the only one that is essential for understanding and seizing the core of the construct.
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The main objective of the present study was to gain preliminary information and initial insights onto the factorial structure of the Romanian version of Attitude towards Prisoners scale (ATP; Melvin et al., 1985). Data collected from a convenience sample of undergraduate students (N = 192) were analyzed through a convergence use of the EFA, parallel analysis, and network analysis. As expected, the postulated unity of the original scale was infirmed. Instead, in line with the most recent similar use of ATP worldwide, a multiple factors solution proves to be the most adequate. The four-factor solution accounts best for the present data, but these structural results need further confirmation on additional samples. A hallmark of the results consists of the ambivalent nature of the attitudes emerging as structured in multiple distinct or even mixed factors. Apart from their ambivalence, the negative attitudes factors, the positive attitude factors, or the ambivalent attitudes factors show direct moderate correlations. The same pattern was possible to establish as emerging clearly on data from at least two versions of the scale: the Chinese ATP and the Romanian ATP. Further ideas and directions for exploring the structural features of the scale and measuring attitudes toward inmates are formulated.
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Our research addressed the job involvement concept from the perspective of employeeorganization congruence. We assessed the influence of the congruence between perceived individual and collective job involvement on the following variables: job satisfaction, general mental health, work to family conflict, burnout, organizational commitment, turnover intent and professional performance. The participants were invited to evaluate to which extent statements corresponding to the items in Kanungo’s Job Involvement Questionnaire (1982) were applicable to them and also to the other colleagues in the organization. Based on their answers, we calculated an employeeorganization congruence index for job involvement and we placed each participant in one of the following situations: positive congruence (involved employee, working with involved colleagues), negative congruence (uninvolved employee, working with perceived uninvolved colleagues), incongruence – type A: involved employee, working with uninvolved colleagues and incongruence – type B: uninvolved employee working with involved colleagues. The results showed that the congruence between the perceived personal and organizational job involvement influenced burnout, general mental health, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, work to family conflict and performance. It was interesting to discover that the lowest level of burnout was registered for uninvolved employees working with job involved colleagues. We were also surprised to find out that uninvolved employees who worked in uninvolved teams (negative congruence) had significantly better performance levels than the uninvolved employees working with involved colleagues.
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Pseudo-science is a phenomenon that has developed in parallel with science from ancient times to the present day, even by trying to use, through various methods, paradoxically, even the prestige and credibility of scientific discoveries in the epistemological and social. Today, pseudoscience is also propagated through the exploitation of information channels such as mass media, online environment (social networks, discussion forums), but also through academia. In this paper we draw attention to the logical errors speculated by those who propagate various scientifically invalidated therapies, present a system of criteria for recognizing pseudoscientific practices and analyze the particular case of supposedly alternative approach to scientific medicine, namely the so-called German New Medicine. It is often the case that frontier disciplines, such as medicine, clinical psychology, psychotherapy, health psychology, are deeply affected by practitioners resorting to pseudo-scientific theories and practices.
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The article proposes an explanation of the widespread memory anxieties related to the socialist past in post‑1989 Bulgaria and the role of mainstream historiographical research. It focuses on publications and the public interventions of the independent Institute for the Studies of the Recent Past (ISRP), founded in 2005 to counter alleged tendencies of “tacit rehabilitation of the Communist regime”. My main argument is that the dominant frame of studying and teaching history of socialism, namely through the notion of totalitarianism, and its promotion by mainstream academic research projects such as those of the ISRP, contain unsurpassable contradictions and enhance existing anxieties about social memory and national identity.
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Utopia does not have good fortune in Bulgarian social sciences and humanities: rarely studied, it is often seen as the matrix of all kinds of totalitarianism. In this article I focus on the radical change that the conceptualization of utopia underwent in the 1990s. Until the end of the 1980s utopia constituted – in the wake of Engels (Socialism: utopian and scientific) – an ideological testimony for the struggle of the oppressed against the feudal and bourgeois systems of exploitation. Historians, sociologists and philosophers strove to detach the concrete context of social struggles which gave substance to utopian texts like those of Thomas More or Tommaso Campanella. At the end of the Perestroika, and at the start of the “transition” from “developed socialism” to “market economy”, a fundamental change affects the theme of utopia: the scientific interest shifts from the historical multiplicity of heterogeneous utopian projects to the Utopia as such. Many researchers try – often in a same effort – to identify its theoretical and political core, as well as its destructive essence (ultra‑rationalist or irrational, it depends), in order to analyze the structures of the socialist regime and by this to denounce them as inhuman. In short, George Orwell replaces Friedrich Engels as a figure of reference. In this article I undertake an archeology of this replacement in the field of social sciences and humanities in Bulgaria in transition. More particularly, I analyze the formationof the “positive unconscious” (Foucault) of this historical moment. Although often invisible for the actors, it is nonetheless part of the scientific discourse and organizes its concepts, objects and fields of research. I start from the hypothesis that in the case of utopia, it is this series of non‑articulated presuppositions about its essence that will affect studies of the socialist era by introducing within them the paradigm of “totalitarianism”.
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This article is about the tension between value neutrality and commitment to the social sciences at times of radical transformations of the scientific field – not about tension as such, but about the tension that is around and within us. The problem of science as a vocation as well as of science, which is in danger, and for that reason is becoming dangerous, that is, of the autonomy and heteronomy of the scientific field, has been examined not just by Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. But their conceptions of the scale of values and of the scientific illusio in the sociological field are the starting point for the cluster of meanings of utopias (a term in the title of this text which was written at a time when the scale of values with which we conducted our value‑free research is changing before our eyes) outlined at the beginning of this article. Although my numerous empirical studies, and especially those on think tank institutions and their autonomous‑heteronomous expertise (but of course not “conspiracy”) are the background to this article, it is only an account (an illustrative, not a systematic account) of some old – and not so old – classical debates (between Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu, and between Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim). Latour’s return to the “precursor”, Tarde, is a stake in direct battles in a research field that is undergoing transformation. (Critical sociology, especially that of Pierre Bourdieu, is accused of “confusing social theory with conspiracy theory”.) In a similar way, the famous 1903 debate between Tarde and Durkheim was a clash not just between two opposite views about how we should understand “the fundamental principle of sociology: the objective reality of social facts”, but between two incommensurable views on society at that time. For every classical theory is also a utopia of society, a utopia of the role of universities and of the vocation of scientists. Thus, my hypothesis is that by revisiting these old (and not so old) debates and understanding the classic arguments of the respective incommensurable sociological traditions, one can also gain a better understanding of the present‑day incommensurable notions of expertise and critique, a better understanding of our opposite views on the academic field, which is being just as radically redefined. I have chosen a roundabout way to think of the contradictions of heritage – moreover, not just of scientific legacies but, as it turned out, to think also of the sociological utopias of the society we are yet to live in.
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This text aims to discuss training in the humanities and social sciences through the prism of value transformations. The situation in Bulgaria over the last thirty years constitutes the privileged terrain for reflection, although the processes observed in the post‑communist context overlap with global trends towards pragmatic reorientation and economic profitability of university teaching and research. The analysis focuses on the motivations of students in university programs in the humanities and social sciences and aims to show their post‑1989 development through specific values, life trajectories and strategies.
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In this research report we propose a synthetic presentation of the results for the analysis of the political discourse reflected in the written press with reference to the Roma ethnic group. This research was carried out within the European international project PolRom, aiming at identifying and understanding attitudes towards Roma people, as well as the identification of effective methods to combat their discrimination. In this analysis, we were interested in the extent to which the Roma ethnicity is a topic present in the Romanian political discourse and what type of discourse is dominant (hostile, ally, paternalistic or neutral). The method used is the thematic analysis, and the analysed corpus consists of articles from the Romanian online written press in 2018, in which statements of politicians and state authorities with reference to Roma appear directly quoted. Results show that the political discourse on this community is very poorly represented in the Romanian press. The statements of Romanian politicians and authorities regarding the Roma were, for the most part, neutral and circumstantially triggered by international events. The voices of the Roma are absent, and the negative references to them belong mainly to external voices, except for a single statement of a Romanian politician throughout the entire year.
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Ethnic minorities have always been victims of discrimination, segregation, and unjust treatments, with consequences on different aspects such as health, psychological well‑being or income level (Baclija, 2009). The aim of this study was to analyse the interventions that were carried out in Romania in the last 15 years, and had as a scope fighting discrimination of the Romani population, by promoting ethnic tolerance attitudes, fair treatment and respect of the minorities. After data collection, the interventions were classified into three categories, based on a similar Scottish review carried out by McBride (2015). Results showed that the most frequent approaches were the ones based on education, followed by the interactive ones, and the ones based on public events aimed at disseminating to a vast audience the traditions and particularities of the minorities. The study analyses the dominant tendencies in Romania, their degree of efficacy – inferred on the basis of existing theories, but also their main flaws, offering recommendations for future actions.
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In the current study we explored prospective posttraumatic growth outcomes four weeks following restrictive social measures imposed by the Romanian government (i.e., social distancing, self‑isolation, closing schools) in order to contain the novel coronavirus. Our cross‑sectional, mixed‑method study approach included a sample of 237 adults, aged 18 to 68 (M=28.63, SD=11.41, 77.6% females). Our main findings revealed that younger individuals were more likely to consider the possibility of positive outcomes following the pandemic, while older ones instead considered them improbable. The most favorable outcomes were anticipated within prospective environmental improvements (i.e., pollution reduction), followed by interpersonal relationship changes. Younger individuals were more likely to consider positive outcomes related to interpersonal relations, personal power, spiritual change, and pollution reduction. At the same time, older people were more likely to consider pandemic‑related positive outcomes in terms of new possibilities and appreciation of life. Results are discussed within the posttraumatic growth framework, emphasizing their importance in explaining people’s social and psychological responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic.
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Rumors and social influence related phenomena have known over time natural adaptations to the general course of society. Mankind has had to deal with rumors about the barbarity of invaders or the burning of captured cities, with propaganda materials launched during armed confrontations, with posters designed to prevent the spread of military information, with radio broadcasts in the enemy territory, with news based on false information or entire wars started by totally fabricated incidents. In the age of new technologies and constant innovations in the digital environment, the arsenal of influence is based on modern equipment, mobile communication platforms and social networks that have become a real field of confrontation for ideas generated and promoted by competing strategic centers. As periods of crisis, such as the recent pandemic, favor the exponential circulation of rumors, I will present below how this psychosociological phenomenon has adapted to the global digital world. We can talk at this time about the emergence of a new concept, the cyber‑rumor, with distinct features in terms of speed of dissemination, the effects generated for the social networks users and its potential to influence large audiences.
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Bourdieu International
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