American Sociology Research Articles

Approaches to the study of the phenomenon of counterculture: the attempt of typology

In the article the author analyzes the directions of studying the phenomenon of counterculture in Western science. An attempt is also made to typologize these scientific approaches. The term is first encountered in the work of Talcott Parsons «Social System» in 1951. The term is used in the context of a discussion on the ideology of subculture movements and deviant groups. His term sounds like «counter-culture». In a somewhat modified writing, with an expanded description of the term, it is used by American sociologist J. Milton Jinger in 1960. His term «contraculture» in English first encountered in 1960. The term gained its scientific and public popularity in 1969 after Theodore Roszak`s publication “The Making of a Counter Culture”. He used this term to describe countercultural, subcultural movements in the United States of the 1960s, including the hippies, the «New Left». The term also was related to their critical program, as well as to characterizing an alternative society, whose creation was propagated, and partly carried out by the representatives of the movements of the sixties. This approach characterizes counterculture in a narrow sense. In the broad sense, it does not connected to a concrete time period and defines a set of ideas, values, world outlook, which oppose the official basic culture. After investigating the views of scholars on counterculture, since the 1970s the author identifies three different directions, divided by the criterion of relation to counterculture. Among them are apologetic, critical and balanced approaches. To the apologetic approach belongs the work of researchers, which is characterized by a clearly positive attitude to counterculture, social and political aspects of its activities. Often there are some critical remarks but they do not change the general picture of the author’s commitment to the phenomenon. Critical approach include researchers who consider counterculture as a negative social phenomenon and practice. The most radical representatives include Daniel Bell, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter and others. Balanced approach combines the work of many researchers, which combines efforts to investigate counterculture as an objective phenomenon, while taking into account its weaknesses and strengths. At the same time, the authors recognize the importance of existence of the phenomenon, its influence on socio-cultural and political processes. Criticism relates to radical cultural practices, political extremism and excessive interest in psychedelics among representatives of counterculture. The approaches of researchers to this direction vary, from the «pioneer» of research of the phenomenon J. Milton Jinger, and to the researchers who tried to conduct research directly inside of the countercultural movement, in particular Kenneth Keniston, and others.

A debate between Steve Fuller and Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti on ‘scientific progress, human progress and Christian theology’

This piece is the first of new annual feature of the journal, entitled ‘Debate’. Two scholars offer their contrasting reflections on a topic of interest – this year, it is ‘scientific progress, human progress and Christian theology’. The debate is opened by American sociologist Steve Fuller, who briefly presents his thesis on the subject, proposing in the end the Church to be more open to an ‘adventurous approach to nature’ in his opinion more consonant with today’s ‘emerging biometrically oriented genetic science’. In answer, Italian theologian Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti explains that, from a Christian perspective, human progress needs to respect the ‘ontological foundations of creature itself’ in order to avoid the ‘illusion’ of a false progress. Taking these thoughts into account, Fuller replies clarifying his points. The debate is concluded by remarks from the Editor.

The peculiarities of the development of sociology of medicine as the interdisciplinary scientific direction

The article examines the main trends in the development of sociology of medicine as a branch of sociology. As it is pointed out by the author, nowadays sociology of medicine is an actual scientific course about social aspects of health and illness, medicine as a social structure. All these items are important under the modern social development. Based on the analysis of the main stages in the history of sociology of medicine, the author notes the contribution of physicians to this process and practical meaning of early studies. The accumulation of empirical knowledge on health led to the theoretical comprehension, that was done by American sociologists, such as T. Parsons, E. Freidson, E. Goffman, H. Becker, R. Merton, and others. The author pays special attention to the study of T. Parsons “The Social System”, in which a structural and functional analysis of medicine as a social institution was presented. After it became obvious that the sociology of medicine can develop not only as an applied field of scientific research, but also a theoretical one. As A.V. Reshetnikov, W. Cockerheim, S. Bloom note, the process of institutionalization of the sociology of medicine ends in the second half of the 20th century in Europe and America, at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries in Russia. The main trends in studies around sociology of medicine are based on such theoretical approaches of sociology as symbolic interactionism, structural functionalism, social constructionism. In conclusion, the author underlines that, the sociology of medicine, like any field of scientific knowledge, reacts dynamically to the ongoing changes in social reality, its structure, social institutions. As a result of this influence, the research field of the sociology of medicine is expanding. Among the topical issues are social inequality in health, the features of the development of digital health, new practices in health, transformation of the value of health in the post-industrial society, pharmaceticisation, biomedicalization, etc.

Biology and American Sociology, Part I: the Rise of Evolutionary Thinking, its Rejection, and Potential Resurrection

Despite long-standing prejudices against doing so, it is time for sociology to reconnect with its roots in biological and evolutionary thinking. Sociology emerged as a discipline when the notion of evolution was actively used in biology, geology, and emerging social sciences. Throughout the nineteenth century, many of the most prominent early European sociologists examined the social universe from an evolutionary perspective; and this perspective was borrowed in much of early American sociology in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth Century, however, evolutionary analysis was rapidly disappearing in sociology in the United States, and by the 1930s, it was pretty much dead. And for the remainder of the twentieth century, it was viewed with a great suspicion, especially evolutionary approaches that sought to incorporate ideas from biology into the field. Despite the revival of stage models of societal evolution and the emergence of new ecological approaches in the 1960s and 1970s, evolutionary ideas from biology were still rejected by most American sociologists though much of the twentieth century. In this paper, we first present the history of this rejection of evolutionary, with the goal of encouraging sociologists today to recognize the distortions and misrepresentations of Darwinian and Spencerian ideas that fueled intellectual prejudices for so many decades. These prejudices only get in the way of sociology in the twenty-first century, where biological ideas have begun to pervade the social sciences. Thus, American sociologists should now take stock and reconsider how much evolutionary and biological analysis can help sociology and, equally if not more important, how an informed evolutionary sociology can influence those in the other social sciences and even those in the biological sciences.

Stephen Sykes and Anglican Ecclesiology

The English, Anglican theologian Bishop Stephen W. Sykes (1939–2014) used German and American sociology to inform his ecclesiology. He argued that the concepts of power and authority had been insufficiently analysed with regard to their sociological as well as their ecclesiological meaning. Sykes used this dual analysis to critique ecumenical dialogue, in particular the reports of the Anglican – Roman Catholic International Commission (arcic). He was, however, sympathetic to the use of power in papal claims, so long as it was sociologically self-aware. Sykes also developed an apologia for Anglican ecclesiology because he believed that Anglicanism made the role of the ecclesial critic integral to its self-understanding. This article contrasts the earlier arcic texts, criticized by Sykes, with the 2018 publication from arcic, Walking Together in the Way, which is much more aware of the dangers inherent in the use of power.

A desperate French-speaking American sociologist

The situation is every bit as terrible as the editors describe it to be. My own observations are that my Anglophone colleagues are overwhelmingly incapable of reading or writing any other language, French included. They thus know nothing of the work their francophone colleagues publish. As a result, English has become the language of international sociology (via processes scholars as diverse as Stanley Lieberson and Marc Fumaroli have described), and that is a disaster for scholarship and for...

La campaña contra los sacerdotes pederastas (1880-1912): un ejemplo de «pánico moral» en la España de la Restauración

En este artículo se trata de analizar la campaña promovida por la prensa republicana anticlerical de la Restauración española contra los abusos cometidos por sacerdotes «pederastas». A partir de un conjunto aproximado de cuatrocientas noticias sobre el asunto, recogidas de la prensa anticlerical de la época (1880-1912), se ha constatado un total de 151 casos referidos a abusos pederastas perpetrados por el clero. La metodología utilizada se basa en la sociología norteamericana de los «pánicos morales». Después de introducir el problema, las fuentes y la cronología, se delimitan las fases que jalonan ese proceso de construcción del pánico moral acerca de los sacerdotes pederastas. Se pone de relieve el paralelismo existente entre la mencionada campaña periodística y la creciente ofensiva anticlerical entre 1898 y 1912. Por último la cruzada periodística contra los curas pederastas es analizada como un catalizador político de luchas que implicaban al mismo tiempo la dominación de género, de edad y de clase social.

Historical-Sociological Notes on “Foreword” written by Pitirim A. Sorokin to F. Tönnies’ “Community and Society”

This article presents an introduction to the publication of “Foreword” (1940) — prepared by P.A. Sorokin (1889–1968), a Russian and American sociologist — for the first American edition of “Community and Society” (1887) by F. Tönnies (1855‒1936), a German sociologist. “Foreword” is examined as a standalone theoretical piece in order to complete the historical-sociological facts and circumstances of its creation and publication, the ideological connections of the text in question with any other theories, and above all — with the sociology created by F. Tönnies. In “Foreword”, which is filled with references to ideas by major representatives of Chinese, European and Arab cultures and to the social values in their ideological heritage, P.A. Sorokin established the universal character of the social organization types introduced by F. Tönnies — “community and society” (“Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft” in German) — and stated his ideological affiliation to this dichotomy. Thus, the project for the theory of society and social evolution by P.A. Sorokin has been shown to cover both social forms introduced by F. Tönnies. The identified social values, which constitute an independent foundation for Sorokin’s theory of society and social evolution, help in developing the gnoseological aspect of his sociology. The writing of F. Tönnies, as well as P.A. Sorokin’s “Foreword”, defined their era. They include multiple points for incorporating new ideas in order to expand and evolve the theory of modern society.

Methodological basis of the study of civil identity

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the problems of identity in science. Given the direction of our research, the main purpose of our article was a sociological analysis of civic identity. Currently, among scientists the question of the relationship of different types of identity is of interest. The main direction of the national policy of any state is the formation of national and civil identity. The article analyzes the theoretical foundations of the concepts of “identity”, “civil identity”, the theories of well-known sociologists and mechanisms of formation of civil identity in modern societies. It also examines the study of the main determinants and the relationship of these findings for a long time had a scientific interest in a number of Humanities. In modern society, the problem of identity has not lost its relevance, on the contrary, interest in this problem has strengthened its position. This led not only to a deep understanding of the theoretical foundations of the study of identity problems, but also to the search for new approaches to the study of their important aspects. The article presents the views of well-known Western and American sociologists and social psychologists, globalists, namely Z. Bauman, E. Toffler, S. Huntington, I. Hoffman, E. Erickson, Z. Freud, E. Giddens, as well as Rogers Brubaker, who has recently been known for his views. Key words: identity, civic identity, globalization, postmodernism, individualism. fundamentalism, cosmopolitism.

Purposive Action Is a Genuinely Sociological Perspective

In recent years, the theme of actors and agency has made a notable reappearance in the neo-institutionalist literature, in relation in particular to what has been called institutional entrepreneurship and institutional entrepreneurs. Two recent books by M. Granovetter on the one hand, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam on the other, can be seen as significant examples of this “return of the actor” in American sociology. The troubling conceptual inconsistencies they contain, however, also document the incomplete integration of an action perspective into what basically remains a neo-institutionalist framework, giving epistemological priority to structure over action. This paper aims to highlight the most important of these inconsistencies and sets out to interpret them as a sign of how sociologists position themselves and their discipline in the wider field of social science, and in particular in relation to economics. It concludes by suggesting that in order to go beyond such methodological and conceptual confusion, we need to get away from a substantialist, decontextualized view of the actors’ identities and rationalities, and replace it with a relational conception of the actors’ identities and rationalities, in which their behavior would be considered to be attributes not of the actors, but of the local relational configurations and the stable patterns of transactions maintained by them.

Nie tylko „Chłop polski”. Poznańska szkoła socjologii Znanieckiego jako problem socjologiczny i badawczy

Podobnie jak Émile Durkheim w B ordeaux, tak Florian Znaniecki w Poznaniu stworzył własną szkołę socjologiczną. Pojęcie to odnosi się w tym przypadku do dydaktycznej, badawczej, naukowej i organizacyjnej działalności F. Znanieckiego i jego współpracowników w latach 1920–1939 podejmowanej przez nich przede wszystkim w ramach dwóch niezależnych instytucji: Uniwersytetu Poznańskiego i założonego w Poznaniu Polskiego Instytutu Socjologicznego. Poznań stanowił centrum działalności szkoły, jednak jej oddziaływanie było dalece szersze. Przejawiało się w inicjatywach integrujących różne środowiska socjologiczne w Polsce, utrzymywaniu kontaktu z innymi ośrodkami akademickimi w Europie i w Stanach Zjednoczonych, a także w podejmowaniu pracy naukowej lub zakładaniu własnych instytutów badawczych w nowych miejscach w Polsce i poza jej granicami przez wychowanków F. Znanieckiego. Artykuł wskazuje na wybrane najważniejsze cechy poznańskiej szkoły socjologicznej, do których zaliczyć można przyjęcie reprezentowanego przez F. Znanieckiego poglądu na przedmiot socjologii oraz wytworzenie się bliskiej więzi między nim („Mistrzem”) a jego uczniami i współpracownikami. W końcowej części artykuł przedstawia niektóre szczegółowe kwestie, których wyjaśnienie pozwoliłoby lepiej zrozumieć charakter rozwoju szkoły Znanieckiego, a w szerszym ujęciu – socjologii polskiej i jej związków z socjologią europejską i amerykańską.

Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia by Karen Cook Bell

Reviewed by: Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia by Karen Cook Bell John David Smith Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. By Karen Cook Bell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. xii, 161 pp. $39.99. ISBN 978-1-6111-7830-2. In 1903 the great African American historian and sociologist W.E. Burghardt Du Bois took stock of the conditions of life for the rural South's black proletariat. Writing "Of the Dawn of Freedom," Du Bois considered the failure of the U.S. government to confiscate land belonging to the defeated Confederates in 1865 both a broken promise and a missed opportunity. "It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic justice, said some." But no, Du Bois complained bitterly, "the vision of 'forty acres and a mule'—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder," became little more than a pipe dream (The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches [New York, 1903, reprint 2018], 22, 27). Economists, historians, and sociologists have long agreed with Du Bois, keenly aware of the deleterious long-term legacy of the failure of Reconstruction-era governments to compensate the South's freed-people both with land and the means to transform it into productive property. Denied land, most of the freedmen and women ultimately became farm tenants or worked on shares for white landholders. Frequently, black persons became mired in the web of neoslavery—fastened securely to the white man's land by debt, sparse capital, and illiteracy. Without land, the freedpeople lacked opportunities to build communities, to invest capital, and to leave property to their heirs. Over a century and a half African Americans have suffered markedly from generational poverty, leaving black persons at a distinct disadvantage when competing with white persons for education, housing, and jobs. Although "Forty Acres and a Mule" continues as a rallying cry for reparationists and polemicists, numerous scholars, including Edward Magdol and Claude F. Oubre, have made clear that General William [End Page 152] T. Sherman's famous January 1865 Special Field Order 15 never was intended to award land fee simple to the freedpeople. At best it was the general's short-term strategy to alleviate what he considered the military problem of dealing with the burden of thousands of freedpeople in his army's midst. Despite the assertion in Sherman's Special Field Order that freedpeople in what became known as the "Sherman Reserve" would be granted homesteads, the land provision in the March 1865 Freedmen's Bureau Act made clear that the freedpeople could occupy and rent—but not receive as reparation—up to forty acres of abandoned and occupied land for three years. The refugees could purchase the land based on whatever fee simple titles could be secured. Historian Karen Cook Bell's most welcome Claiming Freedom focuses on slavery, emancipation, the government's failed land policy, and the broad meaning of gender, kinship networks, and land ownership in the rice-producing portion of the Sherman Reserve—five counties in the Georgia lowcountry, extending from Savannah to St. Mary's. Drawing on varied sources, including the Southern Claims Commission papers, as well as local deeds and probate records, she examines how black persons in these counties shaped "oppositional communities" and established "complex networks of relations and tensions that were the products of contradictory and competing visions of freedom" (2). The Civil War and its accompanying uncompensated emancipation initiated in Georgia and the other Confederate states "a social, political, and economic revolution," Bell writes, eroding "the tension between slavery, free labor, and modernity" (52). Bell first assesses slavery in the Georgia lowcountry, largely confirming extant interpretations of the institution's complexities, contradictions, and diversity. She credits the task system with offering the lowcountry bondspeople degrees of freedom and an early grasp of the meaning of private property and land-based communities. That said, Bell revises previous scholarship by arguing that slaves who labored at tasks neither were "privileged" bondspeople nor were...

Political Participation and Motivation: The Heuristic Potential of Sociological Concepts of Donatella Della Porta and Drew Halfmann (comparative analysis)

The aim of the article is to demonstrate the potential of sociological concepts by Italian political scientist and sociologist Donatella Della Porta and American sociologist Drew Halfmann, to analyze political participation and motivation for it, to determine a new perspective for understanding the essence of political participation, the factors by which political involvement can be transformed. Within the framework of the analysis of D. Della Porta’s concept, the features of the organization of social movements and the mobilization of their participants in the information society are outlined, based on the emergence of horizontal ties between the participants of social movements based on the formation of identity, solidarity, collective actions and democratic innovations. The features of citizens’ political participation and the process of opinion formation in connection with the functioning of communicative spaces with high discursive quality are described. Attention is drawn to the D. Della Porta’s concept of political consumerism, which defines heuristic possibilities for studying political participation through the lens of political consumption and demonstrative behavior, as well as identifying factors influencing political participation (belonging to a group, hedonism, demonstration of a certain way of life, etc.). Within the framework of the analysis of the concept of D. Halfmann, the specificity of the implementation of social policy and its influence on citizens, the success of social movements depending on the political context are considered. D. Halfmann’s argument regarding the conceptual advantages of using the term “political context” to identify institutional conditions and factors conducive to political participation is outlined, and the author’s position on the expediency of using the term “political opportunity” is indicated, taking into account the institutional, structural and dynamic factors of the political system. The tools that can facilitate the mobilization of social movement participants, in particular the grotesque proposed by D. Halfmann and meme as its counterpart in modern society, are considered.

Sociology of Family and Childhood in the Work of James Bossard

This article is a review of the academic works of American sociologist James Bossard. During his life he wrote a vast number of articles and books on family, marriage, childhood and parenting, using a variety of methods for collecting and analyzing information. Despite his active academic and social life, James Bossard is very little known in the Russian-speaking environment. James Bossard creates his own set of approaches towards studying family, which should cover all significant aspects of the latter. Said set is based on approaches that can be divided into three main categories, which will be discussed in the review: family rituals, family heterogeneity and family as a field for change. Meanwhile he also described other issues: happiness and unhappiness in the family, the differences between large and small families, the role of children in the family, rites of passage, the impact of war on families. James Bossard is also worthy of interest as a productive researcher with unconventional approaches to working with material, as well as a peculiar sign of the time. The main goal of the author of this review is to draw attention to this sociologist’s legacy, since many of his works are also relevant in modern Russia.

The strategy of demagoguery in Donald Trump’s thankful speech

The article is focused on identifying local and speech strategies (tactics) that are subjected to the global strategy of demagoguery in American political discourse. The article concerns analysis of the definitions and synonyms of the term demagoguery. Such analysis confirmed the appropriateness of considering demagoguery as a specific strategy of political discourse. The results of the research ascertain that the term demagoguery is perceived differently in Ukrainian and English linguistic cultures. Ukrainians perceive demagoguery as a tool for deceiving and manipulation, while Englishmen think of it as of a method of leading a political game and broadening the voter base. The recipients of demagoguery in Ukrainian linguistic culture are uneducated groups of people, while in English linguistic culture the recipient is the people as a whole. Demagoguery as a specific strategy of political discourse is mainly used to influence the electorate through appealing to the feelings, instincts, and prejudices and through forming required political views and preferences. The analysis of the American sociologists’ works enabled us to identify the main features of demagoguery. They are the following: the focus on broadening the audience, using propaganda for manipulating the masses and entertaining character. Analysis of empirical evidence, Donald Trump's thankful speech, which was given at the Republican national convention in 2016, allows us to single out local strategies of demagoguery. The local strategies of demagoguery, which are typical for American political discourse, are the following: populism, manipulation, subjectivation, fascination, and information simplification. Moreover, the article identifies and describes speech tactics that are typical for each local strategy. Among them, there are tactics of empty promises, lies, accusing, ridicule, using slogans, vulgarization, intimidation, and a tactic of finding a scapegoat. The research also concerns analysis of the linguistic means used for the realization of every local strategy and speech tactic. The most frequently used linguistic means are usage of expressive language with positive and negative meaning, repetition, anthroponomy, and subjectivation.

Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race, and the “Professor Test”

This paper documents and estimates the extent of underrepresentation of women and people of color on the pages of Wikipedia devoted to contemporary American sociologists. In contrast to the demographic diversity of the discipline, sociologists represented on Wikipedia are largely white men. The gender and racial/ethnic gaps in likelihood of representation have exhibited little change over time. Using novel data, we estimate the “risk” of having a Wikipedia page for a sample of contemporary sociologists. We show that the observed differences (in academic rank, length of career, and notability measured with both H-index and departmental reputation) between men and women sociologists and whites and nonwhites, respectively, explain only about half of the differences in the likelihood of being represented on Wikipedia. The article also enumerates both supply- and demand-side mechanisms that may account for these continuing gaps in representation.

Трансформація візуальних практик у контексті первинної урбанізації

The article is devoted to the study of the process of primary urbanization as a context of transformation of visual practices. This implies a long- term perspective of studying the city as a mediator of the great tradition. Folk culture in the process of formation of civilization was differentiated into rural and urban one. The city has become a space for formation of new cultural strategies: comprehension, ordering and management. This required changes in the anthropological model. If visual practices of small traditions were included in the de-differentiated structure of sensual orientations of small culture, the big tradition of urban culture supposed inclusion in the space through contemplation. Thus, the spectacle has received the function of subordinate management, and visual practices have been pulled out of the substratum of human capabilities and received a privileged status in the hierarchy of sensual orientations. For this perspective, methodologically significant is the understanding of the opposition of the city as a village/city, which was formulated as the basic American sociologist R. Sennett. It was he who edited the anthology of the classic essay on urban culture, which offered a classification of the German and Chicago Schools of Urban Studies. This classification itself has become widely recognized and does not cause controversy. Our work will focus on this body of work, which not all are known to domestic researchers of the city. Particularly basic in this context will be the work of representatives of the Chicago School of R. Redfield and M. Singler. The purpose of the article is to study the transformations of visual practices in the process of primary urbanization. The dominant of visual practices of urban space is torn from the unity of sensory orientations of folk culture with its ritualized way of self- government and becomes a way of ordering and managing in the situation of primary urbanization as the basic process of formation of civilization in general. In the process of primary urbanization, the city becomes a medium between: governors and subordinates, man and state, culture (as a small tradition) and civilization (as a large tradition).

Socjologia pracy w Polsce: Społeczno-gospodarcze i polityczne problemy instytucjonalizacji subdyscypliny

W artykule podjęto problem wzajemnych relacji pomiędzy instytucjonalizacją socjologii pracy, kontekstem politycznym i problemami rozwoju społeczno- -gospodarczego w Polsce po II wojnie światowej. Podstawą przeprowadzonych badań są zarówno materiały źródłowe, jak i wywiady narracyjne z nestorami socjologii pracy w Polsce, tj. naukowcami posiadającymi istotny wkład w rozwój socjologii pracy w Polsce. Ich analiza prowadzi do wniosku o współistnieniu uniwersalnych (ponadlokalnych, podzielanych ze „starymi” krajami kapitalistycznymi) i swoistych (lokalnych/regionalnych, częściowo podzielanych z innymi krajami realnego socjalizmu w Europie Środkowo- -Wschodniej) aspektów rozwoju subdyscypliny. Do uwarunkowań uniwersalnych należały powiązanie rozwoju socjologii pracy z zapotrzebowaniem przemysłu na nowoczesne metody zarządzania, znacząca rola inspiracji amerykańską socjologią i psychologią pracy oraz związek rozwoju subdyscypliny z polityką gospodarczą państwa. Cechami swoistymi były natomiast rosnące rozdarcie między nauką rzeczywistą i pozorną w warunkach realnego socjalizmu, słaba obecność ujęć krytycznych, pęknięcie pomiędzy socjologią akademicką i socjologią zakładową, a także wyraźne podziały w obrębie środowisk akademickich na tle stosunku do ustroju społeczno-politycznego. Rozdarcie między nauką rzeczywistą a pozorną przyspieszyło procesy deinstytucjonalizacji subdyscypliny, których początków szukać można w okresie „karnawału Solidarności”. Procesy te zostały dodatkowo wzmocnione po 1989 roku między innymi w wyniku identyfikacji socjologii pracy z marksizmem, ekspansji nauk o zarządzaniu oraz przemian samego świata pracy. Twierdzimy jednak, że nie są to tendencje nieodwracalne, o czym świadczy współczesny renesans zainteresowania socjologią pracy w Polsce.

„Epistemological modesty“ of Peter L. Berger: Against orthodoxy

In this paper author enquire sociology of Peter L. Berger through the concept of „epistemological modesty“. It is considered that Peter L. Berger is one of the few sociologists who, in his „epistemological modesty“, was willing to give up some of the strategically important hypotheses on which modern sociology has been built for decades. In this sense, „epistemological modesty“ has served as a struggle against sociological orthodoxy of various kinds. Also he never belonged to the main streams of American sociology, and to the university establishment in particular. He rather belonged to marginal lines of European „immigrant“ sociology, but Berger and his co-authors were children of their time. This paper also emphasizes those fundamental hypotheses which Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann never gave up, and these hypotheses are found in The Social Construction of Reality.

Edelberto Torres-Rivas, la Sociología Histórica y la Nocion de Dependencia

El referente mas importante de la sociologia centroamericana hasta el momento es Edelberto Torres-Rivas. Uno de los momentos fundacionales de su vida academica transcurrieron en Chile, cuando participo de un grupo de estudios, en el Instituto Latinoamericano de Planificacion Economica y Social de la CEPAL, que encabezaba Fernando Henrique Cardoso y del que surgio el libro mas importante del dependentismo: Dependencia y desarrollo en America Latinade Cardoso y Enzo Faletto, publicado en 1969. Como resultado de esa experiencia Torres-Rivas publico Interpretacion del desarrollo social centroamericano, tambien en 1969. Este ensayo pretende analizar dicha obra de Edelberto Torres-Rivas y ponerla en dialogo con la obra de Cardoso y Falleto, para iluminar los puntos de contacto de una verdadera sociologia historica latinoamericana fundada al calor de los fructiferos debates en los anos sesenta