Abstract
This paper addresses the following research question: what shaped the emergence of sociological research during the period of late socialism in Albania? The second aim of the paper is to reveal the causal mechanism by which a liberalised cultural policy brought about a shift. The traditional role of the socialist intelligentsia lessened in importance while the role of social scientists emerged. In the very final years of the state socialist regime, in 1989 to 1990, these latter were pitted against Party cadres and representatives in defending a limited yet free academic practice. In order to explain the intricate, early process of the emergence of sociology under state socialism in Albania, this paper utilises a layered theoretical framework that tries to capture the interaction between stages of regime development, the coexistence of various competing modes of legitimation, and the transformation of the heteronomous sector of cultural production into an emergent field of cultural production.
Highlights
Introduction Most EastCentral European countries had a pre-war tradition of sociology either centred on a particular school of social research, as in Poland or Romania (Bosomitu 2017; Szacki 1998), or instrumental to public discourses of modernisation enunciated by intellectuals
This paper addresses the following research question: what shaped the emergence of sociological research during the period of late socialism in Albania? The second aim of the paper is to reveal the causal mechanism by which a liberalised cultural policy brought about a shift
This paper has argued that the emergence of sociology in state socialist Albania can be explained by constructing a theoretical model that takes into consideration the stage theory of the evolution of the state socialist regime, its different modes of legitimation, and the increasing role of the cultural intelligentsia at certain critical junctures
Summary
During the first stage of its rule, the state socialist regime exhibited its transformative goal, which pitted the Party against unreformable society. By scrutinising official party documents delineating regime policies on the role of cultural producers and the objectives of particular sectors of the social sciences (as presented by their leading representatives), the socialist intelligentsia’s subordinate position in regard to the party bureaucracy and its rule becomes clearer. In the late 1960s certain scholars at the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies suggested that the “methods” of “bourgeois” sociologists of the West and of “revisionist” sociologists in the socialist camp should be used instrumentally to study public opinion (officially called “social opinion”) (Avdia 1969: 177) The use of these methods borrowed from “bourgeois” sociologists was linked to the actual practice of the political mobilisation of the masses and the expansion of workers’ control in factories and state enterprises. / 126 STANRZECZY [STATEOFAFFAIRS] 2(13)/2017 over, the status of the social researchers in the 1960s and 1970s differed from the role and status of the socialist intelligentsia during the inclusive phase of the state socialist regime in the late 1980s
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