Sociological Agenda Research Articles

A AGENDA DE PESQUISA DA SOCIOLOGIA BRASILEIRA DO INÍCIO DO MILÊNIO

Abstract Many works have sought to define the research agenda of Brazilian sociology, its temporal evolution, and other internal and external dynamics. However, the methods employed in the thematic classification of the discipline are still rudimentary. To adress this issue, this article applied text processing techniques, particularly Topic Modelling, to analyze over 3 thousand doctoral theses published at the beginning of the millennium. The results indicate that our “new” sociology is characterized by a relative decline in the importance of traditional themes, such as studies on labor, in favor of more diverse topics, such as violence and gender. These transformations seem to reflect guidelines from funding agencies and changes in public debate, posing new challenges on the horizon of the discipline.

Towards a sociology of emergency. Epidemics, biorisks, and the society of the Coronavirus

Over the last decade, the social agenda has been shaped by a continuous chain of potentially forthcoming future emergencies. Imagined, projected, and expected emergencies and crises have affected political and scientific agendas and redefined the pre-planning for risks at a local, national, and global level. Whilst most of these emergencies took place largely on an imaginary stage and never materialised – at least not with significant effects on global society – the COVID-19 pandemic finally made real the imaginary that had been expected and projected for over a decade. This article claims that within the context of an emergency in the making and the consequent social, economic, political, and material crises, sociology and social analysis need to assume new responsibilities by providing answers and perspective to those social developments that are direct and indirect results of the social and material conditions of a society of emergency. In a world in which the reality of emergencies has started to outrun the prevention of risks, a sociology of emergency is not only a useful but a necessary step in the development of social theory. We suggest that a redefinition of some of those concepts and ideas that marked the sociological agenda of risk society becomes unavoidable. We argue also that reconnection with those issues that had been discarded from the conceptual framework of a society of risk has become absolutely necessary.

Introduction to the special issue – Imagining rural futures in times of uncertainty and possibility: Progressing a transformative research agenda for rural sociology

Historically and now, the rural is frequently relegated to the periphery of broader public and policy debates, and within the discipline of sociology. At this moment in time, where the world needs radical re-imagining for the future, rural perspectives and realities must be visible and addressed. This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Sociology which seeks to articulate how rural sociology is a crucial field of study for (re)imaging rural futures. In this article, we provide an overview of the research included in the collection, which draws much needed attention to some of the specific contemporary challenges encountered in rural places and some of the possibilities for transforming rural futures, and rural sociology. We argue that rural places are a key site where transformative change can, and does occur, and that rural sociologists are ideally positioned to work with and for rural communities in effecting desired change.

Structures and Meanings in the Agenda of The Scientific Community: an Overview of the International Conference

On October 22, 2021, MGIMO University hosted the international scientific conference Risks to the Human Capital of the Scientific Community in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic, organized by the Department of Sociology. The agenda of the conference included a wide variety of topics and issues related to self-identification of the scientific community in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its relevance and importance of the topic attracted participants from Russia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Belarus, Vietnam, Lebanon, Armenia, Brazil, Austria, China, Finland and Israel making it diverse and international. During the plenary session possibilities and boundaries of the use of the terms capital and risks in the sociological discourse were considered. The participants discussed global dilemmas of the civilization of the future, philosophical education in conditions of social turbulence, psychological factors in inflating risks and social instability as well as the demand for longterm humanistic trends to minimize risks for human academic capital in times of the pandemic. There were three sessions. The first one concentrated on the issue of human academic capital transformation in times of the pandemic. Its focus was on the effects of COVID on the sociological research agenda, new risks for social sciences (such as pseudoscientific arguments) and many others. The second session as devoted to digitalization with its influence, paradoxes, challenges, and risks. The speakers made it clear that digitalization today is not only a new research area, but a factor of producing social knowledge. This idea was illustrated by the analyses of advantages and disadvantages of scientometrics. The third session discussed the risks associated with digitalization of education and overall implications of the pandemic for the learning process. Both explicit and implicit, these implications of distant learning need to be considered. The participants spoke about digital competences and digital capital of university lecturers and professors, students’ academic mobility, etc. The sociological academic community welcome new perspectives and ideas, thus graduate students and masters were invited to participate in the conference together with experts. The conference bridged two main sociological trends: structural knowledge and comprehension. The former studies social institutions and structures and their functioning, while the latter investigates social actions and interactions, coupled with the meanings and intentions behind them. The current situation made it necessary to combine both approaches so that qualitative and quantitative methods would help study social structures, nuanced contexts, and values alike.

Fake news as a social phenomenon in the digital age: a sociological research agenda

This paper proposes a sociological research agenda for analysing the spreading mechanisms of misinformation in contemporary society. The contemporary fake news phenomenon is approached as an emergent outcome of inter-related technological, economic, socio-cultural and political factors that have made society vulnerable to misinformation. Those factors are understood as generators of various social dynamics rather than as direct causal determinants. In order to better acknowledge the conditions under which fake news is propagated and legitimated in digital society, news should be approached not only as a commodity that functions in a market-driven economy, but also as a social institution that regulates political discourse and public debate. Based on these considerations, the conclusions support the necessity of a more prominent sociological focus on media studies, which could build awareness of the performative role of language in the context of technologically mediated realities.

Crossing boundaries in rural research

Rural places around the world share common issues related to their positioning outside social, political, and economic centres of power. More than simply tyranny of distance, many issues can be attributed to tyranny at distance: that is, the power of distant decision-makers to direct rural development from afar with little knowledge of rural contexts. In response to the challenge to progress a transformative research agenda for rural sociology, this article theorises a ‘cross-boundary’ approach to research for rural development, to address persisting issues of development ignorance. Cross-boundary knowledge production values the multiple, contextualised knowledges of rural people and brings these into dialogue with academic knowledges across disciplines to inform practical rural solutions. Rural sociologists, with their in-depth understanding of rural community dynamics and larger social structures, are ideally positioned to broker cross-boundary knowledge partnerships that equip rural communities to solve old problems in new ways.

What does it Mean to be a Man? Trans Masculinities, Bodily Practices, and Reflexive Embodiment

Confronted with the centrality of the body for trans-masculine individuals interviewed in the United Kingdom and Portugal, we explore how bodily-reflexive practices are central for doing masculinity. Following Connell’s early insight that bodies needed to come back to the political and sociological agendas, we propose that bodily-reflexive practice is a concept suited to account for the production of trans-masculinities. Although multiple, the journeys of trans-masculine individuals demonstrate how bodily experiences shape and redefine masculinities in ways that illuminate the nexus between bodies, embodiments, and discursive enactments of masculinity. Rather than oppositions between bodily conformity to and transgression of the norms of hegemonic masculinity, often encountered in idealizations of the medicalized transsexual against the genderqueer rebel, lived bodily experiences shape masculinities beyond linear oppositions. Tensions between natural and technological, material and discursive, or feminine and masculine were keys for understanding trans-masculine narratives about the body, embodiment, and identity.

A sociological agenda for the tech age.

This article outlines a sociological agenda for the era of “tech,” a period when digital technologies have come to dominate our social lives. It argues that we should break “tech” down into two parts, the production side and the consumption side. The production side concerns the ways in which these technologies are made, the social actors involved on the design, financing, and production side, and the consumption side refers to the ways in which ordinary users make use of these technologies and the ways in which their use is transforming everyday life. The article maintains that this is an area of research to which sociologists need to pay much greater attention if they are to understand the contemporary world satisfactorily.

David Martin\u2019s Forbidden Revolutions

This article finds its focus in David Martin’s Forbidden Revolutions: Pentecostalism in Latin America and Catholicism in Eastern Europe, a short but prescient book published in 1996. In it, David explores the failure of sociology to appreciate forms of religion that transgress Western expectations. Not only does he reveal their importance for the sociological agenda, but underlines their significance both in the lives of countless individuals in Latin America and in the transformations of Eastern Europe in 1989. The final section of the article places the book in a longer trajectory of Martin’s publications.

The Sociology of Education in Brazil Today

The field of sociology of education in Brazil is marked by a deep institutional fragmentation, being developed both in the Postgraduate Programs in Social Sciences/Sociology and in Education. With the expansion of higher education and other transformations in education systems, Sociology of Education has expanded and gained space in the research agenda of Brazilian sociology. In this article we analyze its development in a recent period, considering the research areas of the postgraduate programs in sociology, as well as its academic production in journals in the last four years. We observed the solidification of education as an area of research in the field of Brazilian sociology, as well as a growing interest in research involving primary and secondary educati on.

Multiple dynamics of financialization in the automotive sector: Ford and Hyundai cases

Abstract: The financialization process in the automotive sector is growing and has affected the automakers in different ways. In this paper, we propose to study the different dynamics that involve financialization in the automotive sector by comparing Ford and Hyundai cases worldwide. To do this, we used indicators that aim to concretize the economic concept of financialization. They are the following: a comparison between sources of profitability; composition and shareholder acquisitions; business leaders; compensation payments to executives; dividend payments to shareholders; salaries and level of employment. These indicators showed a tendency of financialization in both automakers, but with different incidences in each one of these indicators. They have shown, for example, that while Ford's financial sector is more profitable than its productive sector, Hyundai's two sources of profitability are much more balanced showing significantly smaller differences than Ford's. The employment level indicator showed that while there has been a huge drop in the number of jobs at Ford in recent decades, at Hyundai there has been a reverse movement of expansion and hiring. The aim of this article is to discuss the financialization indicators in these two automakers, contributing to better knowledge about the automotive sector and collaborating with the research agenda of economic sociology and finance.

CONTEMPORARY WORLD CONTEXTS OF RURAL SOCIOLOGY IN THE RUSSIAN RURAL LIFE REALITIES

This article critically introduces the sociology of rural areas through rethinking and reinterpreting contemporary world contexts of rural sociology and factual representation of the Russian rural life, applying qualitative methods of analyzing in-depth interviews with Tyumen Region’s south residents. The authors employ theoretical and methodological approaches, mainly used in classical and modern academic literature on rural realities. The scientific approach of this article, alternative to the popular perspectives of political economy and sociology of postmodernism, is based on compounding the interactionist theory and social constructionism with economic sociology, and relies on the growing status of qualitative methods used not only in rural sociology, but also in social geography. The case studies on contemporary rural life problems provide the foundation for discussion and criticism. This article also presents the first results of 2020 field research within the framework of a project aimed at studying institutional factors and forms of Tyumen Region south rural areas development. The authors prove the importance of assessing current problems and functioning prospects of the two most important Russian countryside social institutions — the local (municipal) government and business/entrepreneurship, which are considered through the dominant scenarios of their interests’ interaction with reproduction, preservation, and sustainability of rural areas. The authors’ conclusions are drawn from theoretical and empirical results of generalization and conceptualization of rural life peculiarities, considered through the prism of sociological theories of the countryside and world contexts of this scientific field. This article focuses on illustrating rural areas adaptability and versatility to many external shocks, as well as on contributing to the discussion of the current challenges, problems and opportunities that are opening for rural sociology in the realities of modern Russian rural life. Recommendations, stemming from the current world agenda of rural sociology, propose a relatively new concept of rural politics, displaying the “placed-based” paradigm. The paradigm is to reduce the inequality and inefficiency in agricultural production by removing barriers and seeking opportunities in given locations (villages and small towns), especially those which lag behind more dynamic territories in key resources. In other words, these are the “territories of growth” (an increase in population density and yield, expansion or small reduction of farmland); “territories of stagnation” (a decrease in population density, farmland and yield); and “territories of contraction” (a decrease in population with a significant reduction in farmland and yield). However, even for these highly generalized socio-spatial characteristics, there is only approximate information that does not allow classifying the scenarios of rural regions reproduction. Spatial dimension indicates the diversity principle of economic change and development. Adaptation of programs to eliminate disadvantages and enhance strengths of territories is likely to help achieving a high return on investment in rural policy through grants, loans, subsidies, subventions (State Program 2020-2025). Placed-based policies should have the greatest impact on lagging regions, reducing regional inequalities, facilitating regional convergence of rural areas. The concept of “territories of growth — stagnation — contraction” is not yet verified by large studies. Theoretical grounding of placed-based policies, originates from economic concepts, broadening them with spatial, cultural, social and institutional dimensions. There is evidence that the placed-based strategy will advance lagging regions and boost the country’s economy. A social policy based on this concept can be a tool for rural areas development, ensuring the complementarity between efficiency and equity. The scientific novelty of this research lies in the development of a conceptual-categorical scheme that demonstrates the interaction of various branches of government, agricultural actors of different levels and entrepreneurs as a result of their interests coordination. The interaction is presented in a form of impact that macro-actors have on micro- and meso- subjects at the local level, which is very important for tracking the formal-informal ratio in rural residents’ lives.

Place-by-proxy: Care infrastructures in a foundling room

The concept of place has become fertile ground for sociological investigations, yet it is still undertheorized and in need of further development. Its most advanced employment is to be found within a sociological agenda on materialities of care and health architecture. In this article, we build on this work to conceptualize ‘placed care’ and to show how ecologies of care are produced and maintained through care infrastructures. The article investigates the case of an illegal baby foundling room in the Netherlands, where one may abandon one’s infant anonymously. We conceptualize this place, continuously produced through its care infrastructures, as ‘place-by-proxy’: a place that allows, by virtue of simply being there, for the animation of infrastructures around it. With this concept, we advance discussions on places as bounded and open, pointing to the work and consequences of ‘binding’ place and opening up the concept for further application to various sociological concerns, particularly in healthcare.

Teachers and teacher education: a call for a renewed sociological research agenda

ABSTRACTThis article provides an overview of the main sociological approaches applicable to the study and analysis of teaching, teachers and teacher education. Analytical perspectives from sociology are then compared to research on teachers from two other disciplines, education economics and educational psychology, which have produced the lion’s share of recent research on teachers. In the article’s final section, recent results are reported from surveys of student teachers and teachers in two Nordic countries, Denmark and Finland, to exemplify the importance of institutional and other contextual variables for the study of teachers and teaching. The article ends with a plea for a renewed sociological research agenda that studies teachers and teacher education.

Professional Misconduct in Healthcare: Setting Out a Research Agenda for Work Sociology

In the light of its surprising absence in extant literature in the domain of the sociology of work, specifically within the journal Work, Employment and Society, this article represents a ‘call to arms’ for research focused upon professional misconduct in healthcare. Specifically, interrogation of four dimensions of professional misconduct in healthcare is called for: a broader definition of professional misconduct; antecedents of professional misconduct that recognise the effect of context; professional response to regulation of misconduct; and the hierarchical and affective challenge to frontline professionals blowing the whistle on professional misconduct.

Professional Misconduct in Healthcare: Setting Out a Research Agenda for Work Sociology

In the light of its surprising absence in extant literature in the domain of the sociology of work, specifically within the journal Work, Employment and Society, this article represents a ‘call to arms’ for research focused upon professional misconduct in healthcare. Specifically, interrogation of four dimensions of professional misconduct in healthcare is called for: a broader definition of professional misconduct; antecedents of professional misconduct that recognize the effect of context; professional response to regulation of misconduct; and the hierarchical and affective challenge to frontline professionals blowing the whistle on professional misconduct.

Youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes: Towards a new research agenda for youth sociology

In recent decades, youth sociology in the antipodes has paid inadequate attention to social class and the question of privilege. We critique narrow and utilitarian ways that social class has been analysed in the antipodes, arguing that the primary focus on the marginalised has overlooked the significance of privilege in perpetuating and maintaining social reproduction. While there is some evidence of a growing interest in the subjective experiences of class, we propose a new research agenda for youth sociology in the antipodes which includes a much more explicit focus on class and approaches that recognise its complex, longitudinal and intersectional nature, and its relationship with privilege. As an example of how such a research agenda could be developed, we conclude by drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how his theoretical tools can provide deeper insights into how privilege operates through institutional and intergenerational processes

Social and Health Inequalities in Rich and Developed Countries: The Role of Sociology and Suggestion of Future Sociological Agendas

In the early 1840s, Friedrich Engels and Rudolph Virchow argued that the “mode of social organization” was a lens through which the social patterning of disease could be understood (Scambler, 2012: 131). Virchow was reluctant to attribute disease to individual behaviour, and asserted that illness belonged to the discipline of social science (de Maio, 2010: 20). In the late 20th century Richard G. Wilkinson, a British social epidemiologist and a professor at University of Nottingham, echoed Engels and Virchow, postulating that Emile Durkheim, if he remained alive, would analyse suicide based on the modern burden in developed societies (Wilkinson, 1996: 15). This article addresses the discourse on how the imbalanced distribution of class, income and social capital contributes to the poorer physical and psychosocial health conditions among socially disadvantaged cohorts, based on the arugments made by key scholars from the field of sociology and health. This article also examines the future sociological agendeas to better examine social and health inequalities, in accordance with ideas suggested by a variety of scholars, especially Graham Scambler. The article is review-based, prompting the understandings of the contemporary debates about social and health inequalities, and what roles should sociology play in such debates.

Capitalism goes care

PurposeThe starting point of the paper is the meteoric rise of care and care work upon the societal and sociological agenda. Referring to Polanyi, the authors argue that this is the manifestation of a new phase of capitalist societalisation (Vergesellschaftung) of social reproduction in the form of an economic shift. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the societal organisation of care and care work and questions of inequality and justice.Design/methodology/approachThe first part of the paper illustrates some facets of the economic shift in the field of care and care work. The second part reconstructs the societal organisation of care and care work in the private sector, state, third sector and private households from the mid-twentieth century in the context of questions of inequality and justice. The third part draws on the institutional logics perspective and French pragmatic sociology and the own case studies on home care agencies (HCA), residential care communities (RCC) and early child care (ECC) in Austria and Germany and shows how conflicting demands give rise to new questions of justice. The paper ends with a short conclusion.FindingsThe paper shows how the commodification and de-commodification of care and care work have changed over time and how the economic shift – illustrated in the case of HCA, RCC and ECC – is accompanied by conflicting demands and questions of justice.Originality/valueA Polanyian perspective on the relation between market and society is combined with the neo-institutionalist and pragmatic idea that orientations rooted in the “logics” of the market, the state, the family and the profession influence how conflicting demands in elder and child care are dealt with and how questions of inequality and justice arise.

Who Needs the Sociology of Health and Illness? A New Agenda for Responsive and Interdisciplinary Sociology of Health and Medicine

Health and medicine are key areas of sociological specialisation, but in the face of rapid global challenges, they are changing. The need for change is becoming more and more urgent and the relevance of some of the traditional approaches, frameworks and theoretical perspectives should be evaluated. The aim of this article is to reflect on this issue and to explore what could be done in response to scientific and societal developments. We argue that more innovative approaches and better research questions would guide us to be more responsive as medical sociologists. In particular, we think that interdisciplinary and translative work hold untapped potentials for our field.