Program In Sociology Research Articles

How Intellectuals Perform: Meaning Making and Community in the Czechoslovak Philosophical Underground

This article moves beyond the conventional strictures of the sociology of intellectuals, which is preoccupied with intellectuals’ texts, power struggles and institutional trajectories. Instead, I propose to focus on intellectuals’ situated performances as a way into analysis of the dynamics of their relations and mutual influences. Drawing on theoretical resources from the Strong Program in cultural sociology, I argue that their performances have both social and cultural impact through disseminating ideas, facilitating the emergence of social ties and the production of new social selves in intellectuals’ audiences. I demonstrate the importance of situated intellectual performances in the case of unofficial philosophy in socialist Czechoslovakia.

Michel Foucault as a Forerunner of the 20th Century Sociology of Knowledge

Foucault’s distinctive creativity is elicited as a source of modern sociology of knowledge. His significant influence on the writings of T. S. Kuhn and his partisans, especially on the paradigm-change model, as well as on the strong program of sociology of knowledge (S. Barnes, D. Bloor et al.) is unfolded. It is contended that exactly ‘practice’ epitomizes Foucault’s pivotal notion that underlies his startling impact on the sociology of knowledge.

Synergic Concepts, Lexical Idiosyncrasies, and Lexical Complexities in Bilingual Students’ Translated Texts as Efforts to Resolve Conceptual Inequivalences

The purpose of this study is to draw on the conceptual blending hypothesis from the socio-cognitive approach to investigate the conceptually equivalent translation written in L2—English—of bilingual students via two tasks of translating and defining individual words and translating texts from L1 to L2. Next, the study demonstrates how translation abilities that vary amongst groups can affect students’ lexical density, lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and lexical idiosyncrasies in translated text. The translating process in bilinguals could be interpreted via the lens of the conceptual blending hypothesis and dueling contexts framework to demonstrate that bi/multilingual students do not differ from monolingual ones pertaining to cognitive or linguistic abilities. Rather, the distinctive difference between bilingual and monolingual language users is bilingual speakers’ abilities of the third competence of formulating a synergism across word concepts and utilizing a bidirectional translation between two languages. When a word in L2 is acquired, there is a conceptual blending between the new conceptual information, encoded after each time the L2 word is used in an L2 socio-cultural context and the existing socio-cultural conceptual information in L1. The new concept created after the blending is called a synergic concept. If the synergic is not well developed, the language user selects incorrect or inappropriate words in a context, resulting in lexical idiosyncrasies. Data gathered from 30 English–Chinese bilingual university students in a transnational program in sociology were collected and compared against 15 monolingual American students. The preliminary findings are as follows: (1) regardless of the location of where the English (L2) socio-cultural meaning conceptualization mainly takes place (in China or the U.S.A.), English–Chinese bilingual language users demonstrated a significant difference in connotative meaning knowledge of noun word concepts and idiomatic concepts, compared with English native speakers; (2) the synergic concepts were detected in all experimental concepts and demonstrated the conceptual blending to a varying degree that affects their translating process and its outcomes: the domineering L1 socio-cultural concept, the well-blended L1 and L2 socio-cultural concept that results in a “third culture”, and the assimilating L2 socio-cultural concept; (3) the synergistic blending of two socio-cultural loads embedded in lexical concepts detected in the bilingual students in the U.S.A. was more robust than those in China, resulting in significantly fewer sophisticated words and lexical idiosyncrasies in their English translated essays. The study sheds new light on understanding the dynamism in bilingualism via translation tasks to indicate bilingual learners’ lexical development. Implications for using translation tasks and analysis of word concepts across languages to support bi/multilingual students in language and academic learning are discussed.

Analysing Student Experience in Classroom Environment

ABSTRACT The study aims to analyse student experience in Dewey’s traditional and progressive education. The sample consisted of 39 (n=39) first-year students of the undergraduate program of sociology. A one-group quasiexperimental design was used to measure if any difference exists in the student experience in traditional and progressive education. Data collected was examined using a t-test through SPSS19.0. The investigation revealed progressive education comprising of continuity and interaction of an experience showed an upward trend as its counterpart. Moreover, different aspects of experience such as (1) knowledge construction, (2) subjectively interpreting new knowledge, (3) relatedness with the real world, and (4) conversion of experience into an educational one; seem to differ significantly based on the classroom environment, implying classroom environment plays a major role to play in creating better learning experiences for students.

Ideas of postpositivism in sociology: the reception by J. Berger, M. Zelditch Jr. and D.G. Wagner

J. Berger, M. Zelditch and D.G. Wagner carried out a long-term reception of the ideas of postpositivism in sociology. In the 1970s, these researchers began to apply the concepts of scientific paradigm and research program to studies of the structure and dynamics of theoretical knowledge. They identified conceptual convergences and possibilities of combining various alternative post-positivist approaches in sociological studies. From the mid-1980s, they analyzed the metatheoretical implications of postpositivist ideas in sociology, defined the metatheoretical functionality of paradigms and research programs. In the early 1990s, the basic principles of postpositivism in sociology were systematized (the presence of non-empirical elements in empirical sociological knowledge, all facts are theory-laden, all theories are metatheory-laden). In the 2010s, the functional analogy of paradigms and research programs in sociology was discovered. Theoretical research programs at their local subject level function as universally accepted scientific paradigms and contribute to the theoretical growth of sociology.

Geschäftsbericht

This publication is the first Russian translation of Max Weber’s keynote address at the First Conference of the German Sociological Association (DGS) held at the Academy of Social and Commercial Sciences in Frankfurt, Germany, from October 19–22, 1910. At the first session on the morning of October 20, he delivered the business report of the German Sociological Association that had been founded in Berlin the year before. Weber was given the floor as a chairman of the auditing board immediately after the opening speech The Pathways and Objectives of Sociology by the Association’s president, Ferdinand Tönnies. In the conference transcript, Weber’s presentation is referred to as the DGS “Business Report”, though it is essentially the classic’s attempt to delineate a framework research program for the then-institutionalizing German sociology. At the outset, Weber talks about the principles of the Association’s activity as exemplified in its charter. First of all, he refers to the imperative of value neutrality, a central tenet to all Weberian sociology implying a purely scientific focus, i.e., free from political, ethical and other evaluations of scholarly interest in the subject. Additionally, he emphasizes the pragmatic nature of the DGS, since it is not a purely status-based association of academic “nobility”. In the main part of the paper, Weber discusses the specific clusters of topics that the Association has chosen to study as its priorities, including the sociology of the media, the sociology of unions and public associations, and the sociology of key professions in modern society. The scholar concludes by speaking about the DGS financial situation, and its general dependence on promoting a culture of scholarly sponsorship patterned after the American model.

‘Tornar-se negra, tornar-se branca’ e os riscos do ‘antirracismo de fachada’ no Brasil contemporâneo

ABSTRACT The article is the result of an encounter between a white Professor and a black student during a course about racism and whiteness, in a graduate program of sociology at a Brazilian university. Black students now reach about 50 percent of Brazilian public universities’ student population, thanks to affirmative action policies initiated in the 21st century, challenging white professors and researchers to deconstruct traditional curricula, writing, and teaching practices. That experience in the classroom led the Professor and her former student to construct a collaborative autoethnography, critically elaborating memories about their processes of ‘becoming’ black and white. Both opposed and intertwined, their narratives make it possible to unveil broader dynamics of racialization in course in Brazil. Reflecting on their experiences, the authors outline the notion of ‘the anti-racism façade,’ which they propose as a critical and political tool for the analysis of contemporary movements against racism. They also propose autoethnography as an ideal method to take into consideration researchers’ personal implication in studies on whiteness. With auto-ethnography, anti-racist intellectuals can engage in a more effective and visceral way in the face of the persistent ideology of mestizaje in Brazil and Latin America.

Frenchman, Jew, Positivist

This article investigates German-speaking scholarship’s reception of the programme of scientific sociology that Durkheim presented inThe Rules of Sociological Method. It highlights intra-European historical dynamics and academic hierarchies. References to national, cultural, disciplinary and theoretical frames of reference are clearly discernible in the ways theRuleshave been read and Durkheim has been mapped. First, his reception was embedded in a complex geometry of power between two nation states during a historical period of competitive nationalism. Second, it was affected by the way he was perceived within networks of academics who occupied unequal geo-cultural positions inside and across nation states. At times, the special location assigned to him as a Jewish intellectual played an important role. Third, his positioning as a positivist within the specific epistemological structuring of sociology is key to understanding how he was perceived east of the Rhine.

'A Milestone in the History of Slovakia': Two Narratives about the 2015 Referendum on the Family in Slovakia

This paper examines a discursive controversy that arose in Slovakia after a conservative civic association initiated a referendum to protect 'traditional families' against the supposed encroachment of LGBTI rights. The 2015 referendum represents a tipping point in the formation of a new Slovak conservative political front. In this article, meaning-making among actors civically engaged in the referendum is brought to light by re-constructing the deep cultural structures in which they are immersed. Drawing upon the strong programme in cultural sociology, I analyse the master narratives woven through the discourse of the referendum organisers and boycotters. These narratives are re-constructed from 20 semi-structured interviews with the engaged actors and a corpus of 82 written documents, such as blogs, speeches, and declarations concerning the referendum. The analysis employs the methods of thick description and the structural analysis of narrative genres. It shows that, first, the referendum controversy presents a clash between a narrative of social decline and a narrative of social progress. The narratives serve as moral regulators by deploying emotionally loaded images of nostalgia for 'traditional families' and a utopia of unconditional progress. Second, although both narratives interpret the referendum as a milestone in the history of Slovakia, they do so in different genres with specific implications for action. Using the example of the decision by referendum opponents to withdraw from the pre-referendum debates, I demonstrate how narrative genres as implicit and deep cultural structures have the power to orient action and shape the contours of controversy.

Teaching and Engaging Students in a Public Sociology Program on Gentrification

Teaching and Engaging Students in a Public Sociology Program on Gentrification

Broadening the Collective Turn in Marketing: From Consumer Collectives to Consumption Agencements

Broadening the Collective Turn in Marketing: From Consumer Collectives to Consumption Agencements

Transformations Beyond the Higher Education Public Policy. The Impact of Universidad de Antioquia’s Regionalized Higher Education

The purpose of this article is to present part of the results of an investigation that aimed to assess the impacts that access to higher education had on the lives of a group of graduates of the Sociology program, offered in the eastern branch of the Universidad de Antioquia. To achieve this, a study with a complementary approach was carried out, through the implementation of techniques such as the survey and the semi-structured interview, in order to account for the objective and subjective aspects of the experience. The main finding evidenced that professional training allowed the personal fulfillment of the graduates as the foundation of the constitution of their life project; This caused transformations within their family groups and demonstrated that the scope of public policy for higher education goes beyond guaranteeing the population’s access to vocational training.

Renewal out of the spirit of the own tradition? On continuity and change of nation-specific patterns of the cognitive and social organisation of educational studies

The institutionalisation of Education as an academic field of study just as of the social sciences more generally has occurred/taken place, since the late 19th century, under the conditions of different nation-states, in the context of divergent academic institutions, and in connection with varying academic cultures. The resulting discipline formation patterns have become the subject of analyses carried through by the recent history and sociology of the sciences. Analyses of this kind have come to distinguish between the model of «comprehensive social science» (as represented, e.g., by the Durkheimian programme of sociology in France), of «formalised disciplinary discourses» (as particularly realised in German universities), and of «pragmatically specialising professions» (as observable in U.S. developments). The article takes up such models und investigates the issues of continuity and change of nation-specific patterns of the cognitive and social organisation of educational studies up to the present time, drawing mainly on citation analyses of German, French and (Anglo-)American education journals and encyclopedias.

Pós-graduação em sociologia na Unicamp:

In this article, we analyze the changes and permanences in two graduate programs in Sociology at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), based on empirical research with testimonies given by 11 professors, which was complemented and confronted with statistical and documentary information and bibliographic research. For this, initially, we reconstruct the history of the Graduate Programs in Sociology and in Social Sciences at Unicamp, in order to, in a second moment, outline the teaching career of the professors who work in these Graduate Programs. The analysis of changes and permanences of those programs informs more general changes and permanences of Brazilian graduate, that is, respectively, the injunctions of the CAPES model of evaluation and the inequalities between the sexes in the teaching career.

A pós-graduação em Ciências Sociais no Brasil:

This is an interview with Jacob Carlos Lima, professor at the Federal University of Sao Carlos, president of the Brazilian Society of Sociology (SBS) in the period 2019-2021. In the interview, some aspects of the institutionalization and professionalization of Brazilian Social Sciences are addressed, with an emphasis on the characteristics of the Postgraduate Programs in Sociology, as well as the research funding agencies such as CAPES and CNPq and professional associations such as ANPOCS and SBS. In addition, aspects of the effects of institutional policy on the financing of postgraduate studies in the Social Sciences area, the consequences of the political-sanitary crisis of Covid-19 in the country and an assessment of the participation of the scientific community of SBS are highlighted at the Sociology Forum of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and the holding of the 20th Brazilian Congress of Sociology in the year 2021, both unprecedented events, in its online format.

Knowing through feeling: the aesthetic structure of a novel and the iconic experience of reading

Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a “literary turn” to recognize literary texts “as relatively autonomous cultural entities” with their own agency. This article is part of a larger project connecting cultural sociology with the sociology of literature and literary theory to develop a strong program in the sociology of literature. Instead of approaching literary fiction as an object of analysis, sociology and literature can contribute to social knowledge in a symmetrical way, where fiction is not devalued vis-a-vis social scientific inquiry. Just the opposite: recognizing the specificities of literary communication, we can access textures of social life that are only hardly graspable by sociology. A crucial step is to examine how social knowledge comes into existence when reading a fictional text. Embracing the structural aesthetics of Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský, I modify the concept of iconicity to capture the iconic experience of reading through which literature mediates social experience that is iconic of broader social phenomena. I demonstrate my approach by analyzing the Czech novel Bliss was it in Bohemia by Michal Viewegh (Bliss was it in Bohemia, Jantar Publishing, London, 1992). Building on social aesthetics, I discuss implications of my model for sociological theory, textual representation, and sociological explanation in general.

The Sacred and Profane of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Myth: On the Cultural Logic of Framing and Overflowing

Any policy requires a ‘frame’ and, by the same token, entails an ‘overflow’, externalizing a certain part of the world as irrelevant. This mundane business of policy framing and overflowing became an urgent matter of concern in Japan in March 2011, as the Fukushima nuclear disaster exposed how the existing frame of nuclear safety had permitted the fatal overflow of severe accident management. In fact, despite the creation of the new regulatory agency in September 2012, the post-Fukushima frame of nuclear safety continued to externalize off-site evacuation planning – a key component of severe accident management – until March 2015. To explain such persistence of the overflow, I borrow the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ from the policy-oriented strand of science and technology studies and infuse it with hermeneutical rigor of the strong program of cultural sociology. Specifically, I illustrate how the trajectory of Japan’s nuclear safety was decisively shaped by the pacifist imaginary and the safety myth, organized around the binary opposition ‘sacred = civilian use = safe vs. profane = military use = dangerous’, without reducing this deeper cultural logic of framing and overflowing to the political economy of nuclear energy or the global isomorphism of nuclear technology.

Readymade Solutions and Students’ Appetite for Plagiarism as Challenges for Online Learning

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of online learning has increased. Inherently, the stakes of a sustainable approach to the challenges raised by the wide access to the Internet, the use of readymade solutions to meet didactical tasks, and students’ appetite for plagiarism have become higher. These challenges can be sustainably managed via a procedure aimed at constructively converting students’ appetite for plagiarism (SAP conversion) into a skill of critically approaching relevant materials that are available online. The solutions proposed by the specialized literature concerned with the problem of plagiarism can be grouped into five categories: better trained students, more involved teachers, the use of anti-plagiarism software, clear anti-plagiarism policies, and ethical education of the youths. The SAP conversion procedure is a solution targeting increased involvement on behalf of teachers. Its partial application in the case of the disciplines included in the undergraduate educational program of Sociology conducted by the Transylvania University of Brasov, where students’ evaluation is based on essays, has considerably decreased the amount of student plagiarism.

Analysis of research programs: a sociological perspective

The origins and content of the methodology of scientific research programs of I. Lakatos are considered taking into account the problems and tasks of the history of sociology. The reception of the methodology of research programs in sociology can be explained by the relevance of the analytical model of the structure and dynamics of the research program in the analysis of sociological knowledge. Within the framework of sociological knowledge, metatheoretical, theoretical and empirical structural levels are analytically distinguished. Certain structural analogies are observed: between the “hard core” and “negative heuristics” of the research program, on the one hand, and metatheory, on the other; between the “protective belt” and the “positive heuristic” of the research program, on the one hand, and theory, on the other; between the empirical content of the research program, on the one hand, and the empirical basis of sociology, on the other. One can observe a number of analogies in the dynamics of functional connections between the structural components of the research program, on the one hand, and the dynamics of functional connections between metatheorizing, theorizing, and empirical analysis in sociology, on the other.

How to Sell a Friend: Disinterest as Relational Work in Direct Sales

Economic sociologists agree that monetary transactions are not necessarily antithetical to meaningful social relationships. However, they also accept that creating 'good matches' between the two requires hard work. In this article, I contribute to the relational program in economic sociology by examining a common but understudied type of work in which one party to a relationship stands to benefit from it financially. I identify in these highly commercialized contexts a particular style of relational work anticipated, but not fully developed, in Pierre Bourdieu's writings: disinterest. I argue that the disinterested style is manifest by economically implicated individuals who downplay their objectively apparent economic interests in order to preserve or encourage good feelings about a relationship that is meaningful to them. Drawing upon data from the direct selling industry, I show how distributors use disinterest to navigate their work.