On the Sociology of our Region

Abstract

It is difficult to decide, whether it facilitates or makes the job of the reviewer more difficult if the author reflects upon practically all the critical approaches to the given work in the preface or postscript of the volume to be presented. This is the situation with the collection of papers edited by Eva Kovacs and entitled What Is the News in the East-Central European Sociology?, exploring the condition of sociology in the region in the 90s, therefore it is worth giving the word to the Editor for a moment: “Our starting point was that the scholarly discourse of sociology is ‘produced’ and controlled primarily by universities and periodicals, therefore the main trends and changes can be identified in classrooms, in the themes of theses and doctoral dissertations, and in professional periodicals. It was stressed further on, that the changes of sociology as a discipline were put in focus, therefore institutions dedicated to public opinion polls and market research, using the methods of applied sociology, were not included in our sample (...). Thirdly, though it is known that the condition of our discipline most frequently materializes as an identity problem in papers dealing with the issue (where is the place of sociology and of the social scientist in the East-Central Europe of the turn of the millennium?), we did not intend to put this question directly.” (9) Consequently the papers approach their topic by quantitative and qualitative methods. Some of the authors included in the volume analyzed the themes of the major periodicals that is two of each of the countries surveyed (in the order of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia) with the help of content analysis, trying to find an answer to the question of which topics and to what extent preoccupied the social scientists of the different countries in the 90s. Curiously however, not every one of the authors of the volume availed themselves of this method, which doubts whether it was effectively the most popular of themes and methods that had constituted the subject of the study in these cases. At the same time the individual papers (without an exception) analyzed the sociological discourse articulated in the columns of the chosen two periodicals. For the interested reader getting acquainted with the scholarly efforts of the sociologists of the region, and what is more, even with the social scientists may offer