Polish Sociologists Research Articles

Dark knowledges and uneven connections: transnational experimental practices of surveillance and imitation among Cold War empires

ABSTRACT This article looks at the transnational and transsystemic spread of a particular Cold War knowledge regime characterized by (neo-)positivistic premises for the calculation and prediction of human action, attitudes and behaviour, as well as its practical use for matters of propaganda and surveillance. The article analyses, thereby, moments of imperial imitation. It focuses on the scientific and state actors of newly emerging experimental spaces and methods, including their shortcomings and dark spots, that accompanied mutual surveillance practices and inter-imperial exchange circuits. Consequently, Cold War empires are analysed as entities that brought into being scientific but also social, economic and political laboratories. The aim of this article is therefore to place scientific exchanges and practices in the fields of sociology, mass communication and public opinion research within the framework of entangled histories of empire. These histories, however, will also be situated against the complex conflations with and paradoxical relations to the global and local (dis)orders, ruptures, alliances and networks of the Cold War. Empirically, the interest of this article lies in tracing the exchanges, taking place under the watchful eye of their respective secret services, of Polish sociologists and social psychologists with their Soviet and US-American colleagues in the late 1950s to 1970s.

Konflikty, kompromisy i rezerwuar międzykulturowości w małżeństwach mieszanych

In this article, I discuss the issues of mixed marriages, referring to research conducted by Polish sociologists, psychologists and educators. On this basis, I try to show possible areas of conflict in this type of relationships, various strategies for working out compromises as well as various relations with the social microstructure. I emphasise problems related to bringing up children in a bi-cultural family environment, in particular aspects of bi-religious home education. My intention is also to identify potential areas of intercultural enrichment and the emergence of new cultural capital in mixed families. I also reflect on PolishJewish marriages by recalling the biography of a representative of the third generation of the Holocaust survivors, married to a Catholic, who has introduced, together with her husband, a model of dualistic education. The research was based on the biographical method, unstructured/indepth interviews. The article presents one of the elements of broader research, which focused on the construction of the socio-cultural identity of the narrators.

Recenzja monografii Kształcenie socjologów w uczelniach publicznych i niepublicznych w Polsce autorstwa Krystyny Leśniak-Moczuk

The subject of the review is a monograph focusing on looking for the causes and determinants of changes taking place in the education system of sociologists in Poland. In the publication, its author presented the results of theoretical analysis and conducted empirical research. The research is in-depth and consistent in a methodological sense, and the approach to the description, diagnosis and interpretation of the most important thematic problems is balanced. The paper presents the leading trends and dynamics of educating Polish sociologists in a comparative aspect, relating to public and private universities. The cognitive and application values of the monograph are the basis for the search for solutions increasing the importance of sociological education in Poland.

Non-memory: Remembering beyond the discursive and the symbolic

Central and Eastern Europe—scenes of brutal genocides in the past century—are dotted with sites of trauma. Only some of those potential sites of memory are currently marked with plaques or memorials. Mnemonic responses to such sites do occur but are not part of an easily readable symbolic system within official culture. They are often contradictory: at once supporting and blocking memory about a given event. The concept of “non-memory” developed by Polish sociologists might be helpful in grasping vernacular memorial activities that do not privilege verbal contact as the norm in the transfer of memory. Non-memory tends to combine dismantled symbolic means and extra-symbolic embodied tools and performative acts. Non-memory therefore takes part in the transmission of an experience of the past in particular when the past turns out to be difficult or impossible to inscribe within available cognitive frameworks.

Pandemic Diaries: The Year in Poland

Pandemic DiariesThe Year in Poland Pawel Rodak (bio) Translated by Alessandro Nicola Malusà The year 2020 was exceptional in Poland—for the obvious reasons, but also because of the autobiographical practices of Poles. In the very first weeks of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, several contests for "pandemic diaries" were announced. They followed a long history of Polish autobiographical writing competitions, which played a significant role in the social and humanistic traditions of the twentieth century. Throughout the twentieth century, well over 1500 diarywriting competitions took place in Poland (Rodak, "Past, Present, and Future"). Among pandemic diary competitions, I will discuss one in greater detail, which was organized by a group of young Polish sociologists and cultural scientists from the University of Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences. The competition was announced on April 7, 2020 with the following statement in Polish, Ukrainian, and English: Życie naszego społeczeństwa w obecnym, szczególnym okresie, wynikającym z pandemii, powinno zostać udokumentowane. Dlatego Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii PAN, Instytut Socjologii UW oraz Instytut Kultury Polskiej UW ogłaszają konkurs na pamiętniki z tego okresu. Zwracamy się do Państwa z prośbą o opisanie, jak wygląda obecnie Wasza codzienność: jak wygląda Wasz dzień, codzienne obowiązki, kontakty z bliskimi i znajomymi, jakie są Wasze rozrywki, jak przebiega Wasza praca zawodowa – o ile pracujecie – i podobne sprawy. A może Wasze życie uległo tylko niewielkiej zmianie? Ważne są także Wasze refleksje i przemyślenia dotyczące otaczającego nas świata w tym niezwykłym czasie. (Pamiętniki Pandemii) Living in our society in this current and specific time, resulting from the pandemic, should be documented. That is why The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Sociology of the [End Page 126] University of Warsaw and the Institute of Polish Culture of the University of Warsaw are announcing a competition for diaries from this period. We would like to ask you to describe what your daily life is like: your everyday life, your daily duties, contacts with loved ones and friends, your pastimes, how your work is going—if you work—and other such matters. Or maybe your life has changed only slightly? Your reflections and thoughts regarding the world around us at this extraordinary time are also important. ("Pandemic Diaries") The deadline for diary submissions was June 15, 2020, and the contest included cash prizes for the authors of the most comprehensive diaries. In total, 403 diaries were submitted, seventeen of which were hand-written journals sent by post (Łukianow et al.). The competition was judged in August 2020, and some of the diaries were published in the Polish online magazine Mały Format. The magazine asked me to comment on this competition and sent me around thirty diaries as digital files. The shortest was about a dozen pages long; the longest was over one hundred pages. Here are some reflections upon having read them.1 First of all, the very nature of the writing practice must be addressed, namely the electronic format of the diaries. Pandemic diaries show that the computer, most often in the form of a laptop, tablet, or even a smartphone, has become the modern equivalent of a notebook—or our private writing space that we are sometimes reluctant to share. The pandemic compelled many people to use home computers communally, which for some contributors led to conflicts and a loss of a sense of privacy, and to the problem of writing the diary itself. For example, one of them, who writes about childbirth during the pandemic, tells us, "Syn ma zdalne lekcje na moim komputerze, więc chyba skończy się pisanie pamiętnika, bo nie mam kiedy i na czym" [My son has remote lessons on my computer, so I guess that diary-writing will come to an end, as I have nothing to write on and no time to write it] (O. G., "Poród w czasach zarazy").2 The electronic format of the diaries is also consequential because of their hypertextual and intermedial character. They often include links to social networks, photos, and screenshots of...

Sport in the time of transformation in Poland. Gdańsk case study

Various areas of social and economic life and their changes during the political transformation after 1989 have been studied and analyzed by Polish sociologists. It seems that one of the areas that has been left out and which constitutes a terra incognita is the world of sport. As in other areas, individual and collective social actors who organized, managed or participated in the world of sport had to come to terms with the new social, economic and political order. That is why the transformation seen through their eyes and what they did, their motivations and ways of coping with changes are interesting and broaden our knowledge about the transformation period. In the article, I present a fragment of my own research on the course and effects of political transformation, based on the example of a multi-sectional Workers’ Sports Club Stoczniowiec Gdańsk (currently GKS Stoczniowiec Gdańsk). I was interested in the struggles of people who organized sport, which they had to face in the period of transformation. I was interested in how they experienced the clash with the emerging new social order. What strategies they adopted in their organizational activities and their practices during the transformation. The case study is treated as a field study and a conceptual pilot study which is a starting point for further exploration. I used two methods: desk research (among others, press articles, club information, official data, statistical data were collected) and in-depth interviews (IDI) with social actors operating in the sports club. The analytical framework for the study consists of three dimensions of transformation, namely the economic, political and legal, and social ones. The theoretical foundations, on the other hand, are the perspectives of new institutionalism, especially the theory of fields by Fligstein and McAdam and the concept of deinstitutionalization by Christine Oliver.

Socjologia II Rzeczypospolitej jako tradycja

The sociology of the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) is presented as a tradition – a part of the heritage that is positively evaluated and transmitted from generation to generation. The tradition of sociology in Poland dates back to the partition period; it developed in the interwar period of independence and was tested during the Second World War and subsequently in communist times. The basic elements of the tradition are identified in the article and illustrated by the life and work of leading Polish sociologists of the pre-war period.

Film and cinema as a subject of sociological study. Between tradition and the present

Relations between sociology and cinema span over a hundred years. The author’s task is to reflect on this fact and, as a result, to present her own theoretical and methodological concept. Constructive framing is done in a historical perspective supplemented with methodological reflections using a variety of existing materials, scientific publications (library query) and the author’s own analyses. The basic research question concerns the state of the subdiscipline: what methodological, empirical and theoretical proposals have been developed; to what extent are they currently up to date or cultivated by scholars? A look at the broad heritage of the sociology of film and cinema allows us to see the gaps to be filled in in the area of empiricism and theory. This article does not address the reasons for this state of affairs in great detail, but merely indicates that an in-depth study of relationships and embedding data in the light of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory or Pierre Bourdieu’s field concept could shed light on the issue from a different angle, in this case – the scope of the sociology of knowledge. One of the conclusions is that the sociology of film has a faint presence in the field of the sociology of art. The author tries to revive the old postulates of the Polish sociologists of culture and film (including A. Kłoskowska, C. Prasek, K. Żygulski), drawing theoretical inspiration from the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and also using experience from her own research. What emerges as a result is a research model proposal (along with a research tool) in the field of the sociology of film/cinema, aimed at the cognition and comparison of images of reality.

РЕЦЕНЗИЯ НА КН.: ZADOMOWIENIE: KONTEKSTY EMPIRYCZNE / POD RED.M. ŁUKASIUK, M. BROSZ [ДОМЕСТИКАЦИЯ: ЭМПИРИЧЕСКИЕ КОНТЕКСТЫ / ПОД РЕД.М. ЛУКАШИК, М. БРОША

В центре внимания коллектива польских социологов находится малоизученный и в отечественной, и в мировой традиции концепт доместикации как «приватизации» человеком пространства, обживания дома и выстраивания с ним эмоциональных связей. Процесс доместикации представлен в виде концентрических кругов, расходящихся от дома как наиболее обжитого пространства к иным его типам, которые человек с различной степенью уверенности и благодаря разным видам социальных действий и связей может считать своим. Дом представлен как необходимое условие чувства безопасности, гармоничной идентичности и сохранности собственного достоинства, источник любви к малой родине и преемственности межпоколенных связей и ценностей.The focus of the team of Polish sociologists is the concept of domestication, which is poorly studied in both national and world traditions, as the «privatisation» of space by a person, habitation of the house and building emotional ties with it. The process of domestication is represented in the form of concentric circles that diverge from the house as the most habitable space to other types of it, which people with different degrees of confidence and due to different types of social actions and connections can consider their own. The house is presented as a necessary condition for a sense of security, harmonious identity and self-preservation, a source of love for the small homeland and continuity of intergenerational ties and values.

Współczynnik humanistyczny Floriana Znanieckiego w nowych kontekstach doświadczeń autobiograficznych

Artykuł podnosi kwestię aktualności refleksji Floriana Znanieckiego, jednego z najbardziej oryginalnych polskich socjologów XX wieku. W centrum rozważań stawiamy jednak współczynnik humanistyczny, który jako jedno z podstawowych pojęć Znanieckiego stanowi inspirację do analiz problemu wielozmysłowości doświadczenia. Zawarte w tekście odniesienia do pragmatyzmu i warsztatowo-źródłowych problemów metody autobiograficznej mają na celu podkreślenie ważności doświadczenia i działania. Doświadczenie, będące cechą tego współczynnika, należy rozpatrywać w perspektywie nowoczesnych obszarów działań twórczych, które, po pierwsze, wymuszają na podmiotach odpowiedni charakter kompetencji. Po drugie, dzięki zakorzenianiu w coraz intensywniej rozwijających się obszarach doświadczeń multimedialnych pomagają trafniej formułować ważne problemy badawcze. Chodzi zwłaszcza o problemy dotyczące tych dziedzin rzeczywistości, w których wielozmysłowość rejestracji doświadczenia pozwala zbliżyć horyzonty potocznych i eksperckich interpretacji. Szansa na to zbliżenie tkwi w pracy nad sposobami powiązań pojęć przeżyciowych i formalnych, stosowanych zarówno w działaniach teoretycznych, jak i praktycznych.

Female directors of contemporary Polish theater and cinema (selected examples)

The issue of artistic careers is rarely tackled by Polish sociologists. The article is an analysis of the work of selected contemporary Polish female film and theater directors. The present study exploits secondary sources (monographs and scientific studies, press and internet publications, interviews with directors) and primary sources: interviews with creators of Polish drama theaters conducted as part of the authors’ own research. Women in Polish theater and film are slowly breakingthe glass ceiling and they are taking their rightful place in the pantheon of artists who have a lot to say about our difficult modern times. Polish directors are true individuals however they raise important social problems. Their creativity is not feminist. They have their own signature style and their sex is of secondary importance.

Should we Maintain or Break Confidentiality? The Choices Made by Social Researchers in the Context of Law Violation and Harm

Confidentiality represents a core principle of research ethics and forms a standard practice in social research. However, what should a researcher do if they learn about illegal activities or harm during the research process? Few systematic studies consider researchers’ attitudes and reactions in such situations. This paper analyzes this issue on the basis of in-depth interviews with Polish sociologists and anthropologists who conduct qualitative research with vulnerable participants. It discusses the experiences and opinions of researchers concerning the maintenance or breaking of confidentiality in the context of knowledge about illegal activities and harm. It also examines the ways in which the researchers justified their decisions. Most of my interviewees respected confidentiality in spite of knowledge of crime or harm, and referred to their epistemological perspectives regarding the role of the researcher, implicit consequentialist ethical reasoning and personal values. Where researchers did break confidentiality, this owed to their personal values and willingness to protect their informants, especially in cases of minor levels of harm as opposed to serious crime. Therefore, their experiences indicate the failure of both obligatory unconditional assurances of confidentiality and the requirement for researchers to assure confidentiality to the extent permitted by law. I argue that researchers do not need constrictive and potentially punitive rules about confidentiality, but rather sensitizing frameworks about how to contemplate and anticipate the many complexities and moral shadings of situations in the field.

SPOŁECZNY OBRAZ PRAWA. OPIS OBSZARU BADAŃ I WYNIKI PILOTAŻU

Celem niniejszego artykułu jest prezentacja wyników badania pilotażowego, przeprowadzonego wśród studentów nauk społecznych, którego celem było zidentyfikowanie ich podstawowych intuicji i ocen dotyczących prawa i polskiego systemu prawnego. W Polsce od lat 70. XX w. do dzisiaj prowadzone są badania mające zidentyfikować podstawowe cechy popularnej kultury prawnej, a jedną z tez obecnych w literaturze przedmiotu jest twierdzenie o jej antylegalistycznym charakterze. Pierwsza część pracy poświęcona jest rekonstrukcji dotychczasowych badań nad świadomością prawną społeczeństwa polskiego z uwzględnieniem najważniejszych czynników wpływających na jej kształt. Postawy wobec prawa to niewątpliwie jeden z najważniejszych obszarów badań empirycznych prowadzonych przez przedstawicieli współczesnej socjologii prawa. Druga część artykułu to prezentacja zrealizowanych przez autorów pilotażowych badań nad popularną kulturą prawną studentów. Jednym z głównych celów badawczych jest identyfikacja najczęściej pojawiających się skojarzeń z terminem „norma prawna” oraz generalnych ocen polskiego systemu prawnego. Badania, choć przeprowadzone jedynie w celach eksploracyjnych, pozwoliły na wstępne odniesienie się do obecnej w literaturze przedmiotu hipotezy o antylegalistycznym charakterze polskiej kultury prawnej.

“Bricolage” as a Strategy of Pursuing Beauty in the Social Reality of the Polish People’s Republic

In 2013, the authors participated in the international research grant titled “Towards the Comparative Sociology of Beauty: The Transnational Modelling Industry and the Social Shaping of Beauty Standards in Six European Countries”, which was carried out in Amsterdam, at the Institute for Social Science of Research (University of Amsterdam), under the direction of Professor Giselinde Kuipers. Some of the respondents in Poland were women, whose early adulthood took place in the times of the Polish People’s Republic and the subsequent regime change. After the research had been concluded, the authors decided to devote more attention to them, and conducted additional interviews with women over fifty, with tertiary education, living in large or medium Polish cities. In this article, strategies of pursuing beauty in the context of the shortage economy of the Polish People’s Republic are presented. Based on in-depth interviews, the analysis is framed in terms of bricolage, a term coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as of homo eligens and homo egens, which are concepts developed by Polish sociologists. The aim of such applications is to systematise studieson lifestyles.

Otwarty marksizm i odrodzenie socjologii: rola Juliana Hochfelda i Zygmunta Baumana

In 1956, political liberalization in Poland resulted in the revival of sociology, previously banned from Polish universities. Julian Hochfeld (1911–1966), previously a leading Socialist politician and currently professor of the University of Warsaw, played an important role in this process by (a) initiating the debate on the revision of Marxist social theory in the spirit of „Open Marxism”, and (b) establishing the chair of political sociology at the University of Warsaw. His closest associate and successor was Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2107) until his politically motivated dismissal from the University of Warsaw and emigration in 1968. Academic interests of Hochfeld’s school focused on (a) reinterpretation of Marxist social theory and its confrontation with main trends in contemporary sociology, (b) empirical research on political life in Poland, and (c) comparative cross-national study of politics. This tradition is now continued by the new generation of Polish political sociologists.

Czas społeczny w okresie przemian, czyli o nowych zróżnicowaniach społeczeństwa polskiego

The author draws attention to the appearance of a new source of differentiations in Polish society at the beginning of the 1990s—the clearly perceptible and subjective sense of an uneven distribution of time. She uses the varying lifestyles and associated temporal orientations observed by Polish sociologists in the 1970s as a reference point: the conservative style, looking to the past; the innovative style, or susceptibility to change; and the ‘today’ style, that is, an orientation toward the present moment, which is systemically conditioned and predominates in various segments of society. The systemic transformation brought major alterations in attitudes to time and change. A deficit of time became more common, and yet as society accelerated sociologists were surprised to observe an increase in groups of people suffering from too much free time. This was a sign of deep social polarization: a division between successful people, who were keeping up with the changes, and were oriented toward the future—planning, and valuing time as a necessity for the realization of those plans—and marginalized people, who were not actively participating in the changes and had too much time on their hands. For both groups, the change in the distribution of time could have negative consequences. For one group, in spite of the satisfaction of achieving goals, there was fatigue, lack of family time, limited participation in cultural activities, and lack of time for reflection. For the other group, there was unused time as a cause of apathy, passivity, and a sense of social marginalization.

Physical Culture Patterns in the Lifestyle of the Polish Society

Abstract Society's lifestyles, influenced by the evolving preferences of values of subsequent generations, are subject to gradual changes. This variation in lifestyles requires a reflection on the patterns of physical culture and values amongst the youth, adults and the elderly. Patterns of physical culture shaped in the European tradition are also present in the contemporary lifestyles of all generations. People's choices concerning physical culture depend on the type and level of their physical activity, attitudes towards of the body, age, gender and education. In the classic physical types distinguished by Polish sociologists we can identify positive traits conducive to human development, traits inducing controversial attitude, and clearly negative ones that are health-threatening. In conclusion the paper puts forward a question about the direction of the development of physical culture patterns in future and the level of recognition of particular values by different generations. Some of the contemporary lifestyles arouse concerns of educators.

The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights

Between the World Wars, Polish sociologists gathered thousands of autobiographies by workers, peasants, and other "ordinary" people. The resulting body of "social memoir" can be read as an argument about social rights: authors simultaneously drew on Enlightenment ideas of subjecthood to press for enfranchisement and portrayed the limits of liberal citizenship, insisting on the embodied experience of poverty. While World War II heightened the urgency of life-writing in Poland (e.g. as testimony), however, postwar personal narratives came to be embedded in new, transnational rights discourses, through which they lost traction as arguments about specifically social rights.

How to Exit the Conspiracy of Silence?

On the subject of the Polish-Jewish postwar relations, this paper deals with the pathology of public discourse known as the “conspiracies of silence” phenomenon (see Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life , 2008). The concept in question may be applied to the Polish historic conditions. It helps to problematize the circumstances in which social conspiracies were accumulating around the Polish-Jewish relations in the postwar period so as to pave the way for analysis of the current difficulties in researching the title issues, particularly those that emerged while using a quantitative and qualitative approach to research Polish attitudes toward Jews. The resulting polemical analysis is made on the basis of a text by one of the most renowned Polish sociologists, Prof. Antoni Sułek. His lecture titled “Ordinary Poles Looking at Jews” was delivered at the University of Warsaw, Poland, on 17 December 2009, within the cycle “Ten Lectures for a New Millennium.” It summarises the Polish twenty-year poll-based researches of Poles’ attitudes towards Jews.

The Social Roles of Polish Sociologists after 1945

Abstract In this article I discuss the social roles of Polish sociologists in the period between 1945 and 1989. Sociologists in Poland are assumed to have constituted a heterogeneous group representing various attitudes towards the political system. Over time, they defined their intellectual role in public discourse differently. This picture remains incomplete without consideration of some crucial aspects: whether there were ways in which sociologists neutralized their participation in building the regime; and the techniques used for evasion and “legal criticism” of the system. The analysis is based on my comments of well-known sociologists published in the press and in books. Issues discussed include the function of sociology, the role of sociologists in a socialist country, and the position of sociology among other sciences and political doctrines.