European Sociology Research Articles

Sociology as a Science of Reality: A Logical Foundation for the System of Sociology

The Centre for Fundamental Sociology (HSE University, Moscow) and Vladimir Dal Publishing House (St. Petersburg) have initiated the Russian translation and publication of Sociology as a Science of Reality: A Logical Foundation for the System of Sociology (1930), a key work of the famous German philosopher and sociologist, Hans Freyer. In the early 1920s, Freyer, who became the first full professor of sociology in Germany, published several seminal works covering a wide range of topics in social science and political philosophy. The Introduction to the thinker’s first work on sociology in its proper meaning, published here, has the characteristics of a program manifesto outlining the basic principles for comprehending the discipline and its subject matter as a social and historical phenomenon. Freyer argues that sociology as a scholarly discipline emerges in a society that is being detached from the state; now, instead of an obvious and stable order, an insecure, precarious and unpredictable society arises, becoming a problem for itself. Consequently, alongside the formation of sociology, its object emerges; it is a heterogeneous “society” that has gained autonomy from the state while sharply divergent from that same society regarding the principles of the organization of social life. Meanwhile, the distinctive feature of European sociology is not simply its embeddedness in history, but its immediate substantial connection with the preceding philosophical tradition. This enables Freyer to raise the question of the philosophical basis of sociology as a scientific system. He also formulates the task of defining the forms of this system and outlining its primary lines. The structural and methodological comparison between the European sociology version and the American version of the discipline is particularly interesting from the perspective of the academic history.

Remembering Esti Webman (1947–2020)

We were taken by surprise when we heard about the sudden death of Esti Webman on June 16. Esti was a friend and a scholar of antisemitism. She had been a core colleague in the European Sociological Association Research Network 31 on Ethnic Relations, Racism, and Antisemitism, and had given papers at a number of its meetings and conferences over the years....

Investigating the Internationalisation of State Nobilities: A Reflexive Return to Double Game Strategies

Abstract In the second part of this interview, Yves Dezalay – an Emeritus cnrs researcher who spent much of his professional career at the Centre of European Sociology in Paris – takes us even deeper into his trajectory as a scholar. In situating the institutional-intellectual spaces in which he circulated, Dezalay brings to life the inter/intra-disciplinary boundaries he regularly crossed and even forced open in his quest to understand the complexity of interconnections between the national and the international, the professional and the political, as well as the law and the state in overlapping processes of globalization. Speaking about his long-term collaboration with professor of law Bryant Garth, Dezalay also elaborates a collaborationist methodology of transversal, multi-sited research.

PİERRE BOURDİEU'DA EPİSTEMOLOJİK BİR TAVIR OLARAK DÜŞÜNÜMSELLİK VE DİN SOSYOLOJİSİNE YANSIMALARI

In the last quarter of the 21st century, especially in European sociology, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a pioneer name with his radical criticism he has made to existing sociological traditions. Bourdieu, who tries to analyze the society with the science of praxis, opposes any existing epistemological and methodological dualities; in this context he subjects all dualities to a dialectical relationship. While sociological practices are being practiced, with the motto of social is in everywhere, he strongly advocates that the sociologist also belongs to a social universe. Accordingly, the sociologist, a product of both the social and intellectual universe, subjects to the risk of reflecting the common sense, assumptions, emotions and thoughts categories of these universes to the object of research. Considering that issues, adopting reflexivity as an epistemological attitude will enable eliminating the risk at issue and so sociological practice will gain a more objective status. Within this framework, while the construction of the research object takes place, it is necessary to constantly test the object and the researcher’s relationship with the object and at the same time be aware of the scientific evaluation categories of the researcher. Accordingly, this study will focus on the phenomenon of reflexivity, which is the main postulate of Bourdieu sociology and the reflections of reflexivity in the field of sociology of religion, a sub-branch of sociology. With the scope of these reflections Turkish sociology of religion will be sociologically analyzed.

The 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association - with personal insights

The 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association - with personal insights

SOCIOLOGY OF COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN PESIMISM AND MODERNIZATION

Communication today in both classical and new media has changed not only its way and access to interpersonal communications, but also in social relations. The world today, more than ever before, is in a struggle between classical communications, always overwhelmed by the pessimism of social developments, with new or modernized communications. Many scholars have put forward theories that testify to this war, even in the social context, that they make comparisons or connections of communicationbetween two sides of the Atlantic. The first one is on the sociological plane between European sociology and the second one onAmerican pragmatism. These relate in particular to the claims of the American empirical school and the Frankfurt school as well as to Habermasian and post-Habermasian theories of public space.This paper attempts to highlight this "war" that has a profound social impact on our lifestyles, approaches to various problems, combating misinformation or even harmful political decision-making. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to move away from the negative effects stimulated by this communicological transformation, to show that public action is not merely a passive conformism, to show that society is rational and dynamic, and that there are no externalities or absolute superiority of intellectuals. In addition, the paper will not eliminate the critics of negative phenomens whether they are consequences of shallow thoughts or low interests, or due to the lack of legal regulations in the Balkans and specifically in the Republic of Northern Macedonia, which would condemn the inclusion of negative innovations, misguided, and as consequence harmful to society.The paper will have a positive approach to today's technological developments that affect communication and social life in general. It will be an alarm case for intentional or unintentional deviations, which give alert for wrong decisions that result from sociological deviations in communication. The point of this paper is to presents a basis for study or concern, for this global transformation where local institutional issues have already taken on broad transnational character. In this context, caring for communication, especially its regular social development, would contribute to raising new dimensions of its true ideals of ethnic, political or even religious pluralism, and would represent the true ideal of not abandoning the vision of an open, multidimensional world. These are some of the most sensitive issues in the world, especially the Balkans, which will be approached with a positive and progressive look.This paper will be conducted through the survey method, and the content analysis. The public, especially the educated and critical public in the Republic of Northern Macedonia, as well as some of the traditional media and news portals in RMV, are subject of observation. In addition to the problematic rise that we claim to be world-specific but Balkan-specific, the work will extend to the communicational and sociological reality of the Republic of Northern Macedonia.

DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY IN TURKEY FROM ITS EMERGENCE TO THE 1960S

This study is a theoretical examination of the progress of Turkish sociology from its emergence to the 1950s and 60s. Many studies have been carried out for presenting the development of Turkish sociology and the stages that it has passed in terms of putting forward social knowledge for Turkish society. Although there is a rich literature about it, internationally and particularly, there is not much study in English. Therefore, the aim of this study is to present the development of Turkish sociology from its emergence in Turkey and its relationship with European sociology during its development to the 1960s in order to introduce Turkish sociology to other societies’ sociologies.Turkish sociology has a large literature, it is, therefore, quite difficult to exhibit in this study from its emergence to today. Consequently, during the study, it has been attempt to analyze the characteristics of Turkish sociology and its development periodically until the 1960s.

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.

In Search of a New Model for Russia’s Modernisation: Letters and Notes to the Authorities in the Second Half of the 1850s

Referring to the analysis of letters and notes written by representatives of the Russian public and addressed to the emperor and other representatives of the supreme authorities, the author considers one of the forms in which the government and society interacted during the preparation for the Great Reforms between the 1860s and 1870s. Theoretically and methodologically, the research is based on the historical and sociological theories of European sociologists and philosophers and approaches to the new intellectual history. These can help us comprehend the goals the Russian public sought to attain while creating their journalistic texts and letters and take into account the influence of sociocultural and political processes on their content. The second half of the 1850s was characterised by a rise in social consciousness and another stage in modernization. In this situation, letters and notes addressed to the authorities were an important means for expressing the public’s reaction to the changes, turning them into an instrument of social “expertise” that pointed out the need to alter the government’s foreign and domestic policy. The first years of Emperor Alexander II’s reign were characterised by unique conditions which made it possible for the Russian public to discuss the most relevant issues and let the authorities know about its perception of the changes, while the authorities were ready to listen to the public’s opinion and take its suggestions into account when working on the ideological foundations of modernisation. Letters and notes addressed to the authorities testify to the expansion of public life in Russia and the formation of a new model of interaction between the authorities and the public as part of subject-to-subject relations. These were characterised by the need of both sides to take each other’s interests into account in the context of reform.

From Philosophy to Process Sociology

This paper traces the early influences that shaped Norbert Elias’s thought during his formative years in Breslau. Norbert Elias, a major figure of twentieth-century European sociology, built a unique research tradition known today as process sociology after rejecting philosophy at the beginning of his career and polemicized with the dominant social scientific schools of his time throughout his long life. This paper, examining Elias’s less known early writings and particularly his doctoral thesis in philosophy disputed by his supervisor, Richard Hönigswald, argues that to better understand, value and utilize Norbert Elias’s unique processual approach to sociology one must better understand the relationship between the neo-Kantian movement, a today neglected, but once a highly influential continental philosophical movement of the second half of the long nineteenth century, and the thinking of Elias’s rebel generation in interwar Germany. This paper also intends to search for a common ground between the philosophical and the sociological traditions.

Network Effects on Rhythms of Scientific Publications

Abstract Studies based on bibliometric records have introduced the idea of ‘rhythmicity’ when it comes to the publication of research articles. However, the main approach of this particular topic was to analyze journal specific data on rates of manuscript and review submissions. This study takes another path, by analyzing aspects of publication rhythmicity based not on individual, attribute data, but taking into account the fact that publication of research results and the efforts leading to a certain manuscript are often collective endeavors. Thus, co-authorship ego networks are interpreted through the theoretical lenses of ‘social time’ (for temporality), and ‘homophily’ and ‘preferential attachment’ (for network characteristics). For this article, the same data analyzed by M.-G. Hâncean and M. Perc in their 2016 article, Homophily in coauthorship networks of East European sociologists, were used. The data was based on Web of Science bibliometric records for three populations of academic sociologists, from Poland, Romania and Slovenia, and their co-authors. The purpose was to see if the publishing rhythm of an author (i.e., ego) is influenced by the publishing rhythm of her co-authors (i.e., alters) and by the structural characteristics of her ego-network. Rhythmicity was measured as the sum of standard deviations from the mean for the number of articles published between 2006 and 2016, resulting in a score which characterizes egos and alters as constant or irregular in their publishing activity. Results suggest that the structural features of the co-authorship networks can give us certain insights for the rhythmicity of publications. Mainly, structural features of network size, density and node betweenness explain more the variation of egos’ constancy or irregularity in (non)publication than the rhythmicity of their co-authors.

THE LABOR DIVISION AS THE ARCHETYPAL SOURCE OF SOCIAL INTEGRATION, SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND SOCIAL TENSIONS IN THE EUROPEAN PUBLIC SPACE

The article presents analytical sociological approach that is oriented to the scientific research of the division of labor as the archetypal source of social integration, social conflicts and social tensions the European public space. Devoted that the division of labor archetype is the fundamental transcultural stimulus for the resource development in the contemporary societies and is the important determinative factor for supporting and strengthening integrative foundations of public space in these societies. The specialized conceptions of social and public space, which have been elaborated in the European sociology for explanation the conflict-and the risk manifestations of the division of labor in the individual and collective labor practices were analysed by the author. Argued that in the globalized multicultural public space of the contemporary European societies take place the constant reproduction of the different intercultural conflicts which are the functional manifestations of the of division of labor between individual and collective actors of social life. Substantiated that the social foundation of these intercultural conflicts are the different forms of social tension which reflect the concrete circumstances of social inequality, violence, social exclusion, deprivation, protest behavior in the system of the labor practices and also in the different models of employment of the working population. Proved the necessity of further development of the fundamental and applied scientific researchers of the new intercultural conflicts and the forms of social tensions in the labor activities that are reproduce in the multicultural European public space. Such scientific researchers would be the important stimulus for the development of the theory and methodology of the public management.

Serbian sociological association, member of the European Sociological Association (ESA)

Serbian sociological association, member of the European Sociological Association (ESA)

The English Catholic New Left: Battling the Religious Establishment and the Politics of the Cold War

In the 1960s there appeared in England a group of young university educated Catholics who sought to merge radical Catholic social teachings with the ideas of Karl Marx and the latest insights of European and American sociologists and literary theorists. They were known as the English Catholic New Left (ECNL). Under the inspiration of their Dominican mentors, they launched a magazine called Slant that served as the vehicle for publishing their ideas about how Catholic theology along with the Social Gospels fused with neo-Marxism could bring a humanistic socialist revolution to Britain. The Catholic Leftists worked in alliance with the activists of the secular New Left Review to achieve this objective. A major influence on the ECNL was the Marxist Dominican friar Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe, O. P. Slant took off with great success when Sheed and Ward agreed to publish the journal. Slant featured perceptive, indeed at times brilliant, cutting-edge articles by the Catholic Left’s young Turks, including Terry Eagleton, Martin Redfern, Bernard Sharratt, and Angela and Adrian Cunningham, among others. A major target of the Slant project was the Western Alliance’s Cold War strategy of nuclear deterrence, which they saw to be contrary to Christian just war theory and ultimately destructive of humankind. Another matter of concern for the Slant group was capitalist imperialism that ravaged the underdeveloped world and was a major destabilizing factor for achieving world peace and social equality. Despite their failure to achieve a social revolution “baptized by Christianity,” the English Catholic New Left broke new ground in terms of showing how a traditional religion with a highly conservative and sometimes reactionary history had the capacity to offer new paths forward and remain an inspiration to progressive thinking Christians trying to navigate the shoals of a post-modern world.

Present and Future of European Sociology (Review of the 13th Conference of the European Sociological Association)

Present and Future of European Sociology (Review of the 13th Conference of the European Sociological Association)

Social Research in the Light of the German Sociologist Georg Simmel in Comparison with Chinese Sociology

The German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is internationally known as the founder of Formal Sociology. I take the centenary of his death as a welcome opportunity to remember the beginning of modern social sciences. The current state of European and American relational sociology can be interpreted as a revival of Simmel’s method and principles of social research directed to a phenomenology of genesis. From the genetic point of view Simmel considers individuality, creativity, fragmentation and conflict the typical characteristics of modern society. Consequently, his Formal Sociology should be called “Genetic Sociology” instead of Relational Sociology. This paper has the aim to make Simmel’s legacy known to Chinese sociologists and cultural philosophers. Concluding, I highlight the essential differences between the German and the Chinese way of seeing the world of social life, and I propose issues for change.

Death and the experience of dying in Magdalena Sokołowska’s research conceptions

One of the many research passions of Magdalena Sokołowska, regarded as the founder of Polish and cofounder of European medical sociology, was sociothanatological problems in the broad sense. Magdalena Sokołowska’s version of “socio-thanatology” presented at the end of the nineteen-seventies and the early eighties consisted first of all in sociodemographic considerations. The deontological and ethical-moral problems, as well as individual existential experiences associated with the process of dying, being disregarded during the period in question, appeared in M. Sokołowska’s research conceptions and papers in the nineteen-eighties. She was particularly concerned with the patterns of dying in medical institutions, conceptions of dying trajectories, processes of “waiting for death”, mechanisms of the institutionalization, commercialization and medicalization of dying, differences between the conditions and context of dying at home and in the hospital, consequences of “slow dying” for the range of social roles performed by the doctor and the nurse, the scope and character of changes in the function and structure of the family in the course of the process of dying and as a result of the death of one of its members, analysis of social behaviors after death in the institutional and noninstitutional context (hospital, hospice, home), etc. The analysis of Magdalena Sokołowska’s “socio-thanatological” achievements allows us to notice a clear evolution of her conception: from the “epidemiological-demographic” approach, oriented towards analysis of mortality, to a preference for “qualitative” interpretations based on the investigation of “subjective emotions” that accompany dying persons.

Specific Features of Secularization in the Modern Western Culture

The article focuses on the features of the secularization processes in the modern Western culture. It analyses the inconsistency of the assessment of the religious situation in the Western Europe and he USA. While the European sociologists insist on the increasing secularization, their American colleagues state the increasing religiosity. The authors of the article suggest explaining of these different approaches to understanding the essence of secularization. Hence, both the American and European sociologists agree the spread of religious individualism, but, unlike American, European researchers consider this process as the evidence of secularization.Thus, the researchers attempted to formulate a holistic view about this complex phenomenon. The authors show that the with regard to specific features of the secularization in the modern Western culture is not only the autonomy of the culture regarding to religion and the church, but modernization of Christianity. According to this analysis of secularization they establish a correlation between the secularization level of the Western culture and Western Christianity, because free interpretations of the Christian values by the representatives of the churches are fully consistent with the new value orientations in the XX-XXI centuries.As the results of the research of the secularization processes in the modern Western society, the authors of the article come to conclusion that both the Catholic and Protestant churches legitimized increasingly the hedonistic values of the consumer society.

Book Review: The New Social Division: Making and Unmaking Precariousness, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology

Book Review: The New Social Division: Making and Unmaking Precariousness, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology

Sociology of Social Structure and Sociologists Working in Totalitarian and Post-Totalitarian Regimes in Central Europe, 1945–1989

The model of society put forward by Marxist theoreticians as descriptive of a post-revolutionary society had a quasi-constitutional status in countries that claimed to adhere to Soviet-type socialism, particularly those of Eastern Europe. As the model’s main function was to legitimise the actions of those who wielded power, it acquired doctrinal significance. In the Eastern European countries, the history of the sociology of social structure and stratification clearly illustrates the conservative nature of official doctrine. However, the real mechanisms of society, in so far as they deviated from the official paradigm, upset doctrinal stability and may consequently have led, if not to a revision of the official dogmas, then to the acceptance of a certain degree of flexibility. In order to understand the development of the theoretical analysis of social stratification and social inequalities (the most sensitive area of debate) in totalitarian and post-totalitarian Soviet type societies, it must be noted that post-war sociology has reflected a continuing effort by sociologists to create an independent scientific framework for their discipline. This is why we try, in this article, to combine evaluating the attitudes of different Eastern European sociologists from across the political spectrum with the evolution and adaptation of their theoretical approaches and creativity.