Sociological Interpretation Research Articles

Max Bonnafous and the “Female Suicide Epidemic” in Istanbul in the 1920s

This paper focuses on Max Bonnafous’ research on suicides in Istanbul between 1916 and 1926 and the formation of the social sciences in Turkey. Max Bonnafous’ survey suggested that there was a marked increase in suicides after 1922, especially among young Muslim women. Bonnafous claimed that these young women had committed suicide anomique, due to the “undeniable impact” of recent social changes that had been brought about by the new regime. His findings and interpretation led to a heated debate in the latter half of the 1920s, since the new political regime with its militant secularism and patriarchal gender regime was deeply offended that this societal contradiction was the sole reason he found for societal despair. Turkey’s state-led “scientific elite” fiercely attacked Bonnafous’ sociological interpretations of suicides and preferred a purely psychological and individual explanation. Not only was Max Bonnafous sent away from the University of Istanbul, but also any Durkheimian interpretation of suicides had to wait for several decades to be discussed in Turkish academia. By focusing on this particular case, this paper delineates the limits of academic freedom in the face of the authoritarianism of a one-party state.

Analýza české institucionální kultury. Proměny hranic mezi soukromou a veřejnou sférou v podmínkách každodennosti a svátečnosti od poloviny 19. století do současnosti

The aim of this article is to propose an interpretation and a critical assessment ofinstitutional culture and its transformation in the Czech historical context. The framework of the analysiscovers four succeeding nation-forming periods, from the mid-19th century up until the present day. Itdraws upon a sociological interpretation of the visual fact depicting a memorial of statehood, whichwas erected in 1919 in the village of Dolní Černošice. The analysis is further based on seven semistructuredinterviews with local councillors (from Černošice), on the quantitative questioner, and onparticipant observation. Silhouetted against the interpretation of the statehood memorial, the articleattempts to answer questions regarding the main determinants of the transformation of institutionalculture by drawing upon the dynamics of the relationships between the public and private spheres, theirconfigurations and implications. The article contends that historically rooted asymmetries between thepublic and private spheres, which were embedded in the emancipation process of modern Czech society,have been greatly strengthened by the Communist period. In the post-communist period, institutionalculture in the Czech Republic has been characterised by a high degree of institutional distrust and publicstigmatisation of politics, as well as by a weakly developed virtue of (cognitive and political) oppositionwhich is imbued with a discernible disrespect for discursive civic culture. A system of civic education isurgently needed if Czechs want to overcome the ominous deficits of their institutional culture.

Giddens e Bauman: as configurações institucionais na contemporaneidade

The study on screen aims to present a brief discussion about the sociological interpretations of Giddens and Bauman regarding modernity. The authors differ in regard to the consequences of modernity in human interactions, for Giddens advanced modernity brought autonomy to individuals; for Bauman, liquidi modernity brought individualism and cooling in interpersonal relationships. The present text will present some theoretical and methodological elements mobilized by each author to characterize the institutional configurations in the contemporaneity.

Shifting Strategies: the Pursuit of Closure and the ‘Association of German Auditors’

Drawing on Weber’s [(1972). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie [Economy and society. An outline of interpretive sociology]. (5th ed.). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck] theories of social stratification and closure, and on Parkin’s [(1979). Marxism and class theory. London: Tavistock] development thereof, this paper contributes a case study of Germany to the literature on closure processes (rather than outcomes), and outcomes falling short of professionalization. It explores the early history of the first German association of auditors, the Verband Deutscher Bücherrevisoren (VDB), founded in 1896. The paper traces how closure was pursued, at various times, by different means and to different degrees, depending on the changing social, economic and political contexts and on changing perception of what would best serve the association’s interest. By thus focusing on the shifting aims and strategies of the VDB, the paper contributes new insights into the dynamics within professions and between professions and their environments, and the dynamics and conditions underlying failed professionalization projects. The paper shows that, while the VDB had a degree of success in creating many of the structure and processes of a modern professional body, its ambition to achieve market and professional closure was not fulfilled.

“Gavroche Outside”: Street Capital(ism) and the Ethnobiography of a French Thug

This article presents the ethnobiography of a thug, thief, drug addict, and heroin dealer named Gavroche, who built up his “street capital” on the French punk and zonard scene. The text gives pride of place to Gavroche’s own words and as such is a firsthand document providing direct access to the meanings he gave to his own actions. Firmly grounded in these narratives of experience, the sociological interpretation that accompanies them examines the idea that the principles of capitalist entrepreneurship are reflected in criminal activities and shows that Gavroche’s life can be viewed as an existential paradigm of “street capitalism,” which reduces competitive relationships to their most violent and crude expression. In this article, ethnobiography therefore comes face-to-face with the “grand realities” of Capitalism, Entrepreneurship, Competition, and the Violence of the Marketplace but, as Clifford Geertz would put it, it “takes the capital letters off” these concepts, focusing instead on the intense details contained in the space of one life lived on the street and through illegal dealings.

Punishment in the frame: Rethinking the history and sociology of art

Images of punishment have featured prominently in Western art and this article explores what might be learnt from studying such pictures of suffering. It seeks to develop an approach to the visual that avoids both the essentialism of art history and the reductionism of sociology by offering a rethinking of the relationships between the two. It begins by setting out the current state of the sociology of art, before discussing ‘new’ art histories that are inspired by social analysis. It then concentrates on how images of punishment have featured in Western art. This substantive material provides a rich resource to understand the force of representation and offers an opportunity to develop an aesthetic sociology that avoids some of the problems identified in the article. The approach developed in the second part is one that seeks to elaborate an aesthetic sociology that combines a historical sensitivity to images with the analytical concerns of social science. It strives to extend the art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings toward more sociological interpretations of visual analysis.

Sociologies of Everyday Life: From Alienation to the Production of Meaning

This paper analyses the concept of everyday life as formulated in relational sociology. It shows that Pierpaolo Donati’s historical analysis of the dualist nature of everyday life is similar to that of Alvin Gouldner but that the two authors’ approaches differ in terms of the possibility of overcoming this dualism. From the perspective of relational sociology, sociological interpretations of everyday life can be traced to two paradigms. The first is the Marxist paradigm, in which everyday life is primarily characterized by forms of alienation. The second is the phenomenological paradigm, in which everyday life primarily consists of producing meaning. The first paradigm examines stories and cultures of subordinate social groups, and denounces domination and alienation in everyday life. The second paradigm examines the common-sense world, and how it is taken for granted, structured, and inter-subjective. Relational sociology seeks to overcome these two paradigms by highlighting their aporias, and considers alienation to be the outcome of a deep division between the ultimate meaning of life and the culture of everyday life. While in order to overcome this dualism, Gouldner offers an immanent reading of everyday life, relational sociology tries to show how in everyday life the relationship between social practices and culture may give rise to a new form of secularism that is accepting of non-fundamentalist aspects of religious belief.

解釈法社会学の構図 (課題研究 解釈学的社会学理論の犯罪社会学への応用)

解釈法社会学の構図 (課題研究 解釈学的社会学理論の犯罪社会学への応用)

Эпидемия ВИЧ: социальная проблема или новая моральная паника? (Социологическое обоснование)

Эпидемия ВИЧ: социальная проблема или новая моральная паника? (Социологическое обоснование)

Amongst the disciplines: Anthropology, sociology, intersection and intersectionality

The history of relations between anthropology and sociology in the UK might at best be described as ‘studied indifference’. And yet, they have shared disciplinary interests in many respects, including the concepts of belonging and identity. This article resists disciplinary boundaries and ‘thinks together’ sociological interpretations of intersectionality and anthropological notions of intersection. The authors argue that whilst intersectionality offers a frame to think about the co-constitution of ethnic, racial, class, sexual and gendered identities and the production of social inequalities, anthropological approaches to intersection draw on a cultural form and social logic encountered during ethnographic fieldwork that emphasise ideas about interrelatedness, belonging, place, temporality, connection and disconnection. In juxtaposing these two approaches, the authors seek firmer traction to better articulate the shape and scope of the ways in which scholars in both fields might develop new ways of explaining the lives and the concerns of the people they work with.

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Mastering the devil: A sociological analysis of the practice of a Catholic exorcist

This study takes the documented growth in the ministry of exorcism within the Catholic Church as a significant challenge to some accounts of secularization. After clarifying how, according to Catholic doctrine, the devil can operate in people’s lives, this study offers a sociological interpretation of exorcism. This interpretation is illustrated and tested by a sociological analysis of data collected, over a period of 10 years, by a well-established Catholic priest in Italy who himself was well trained and well grounded in philosophical analysis. This sociological case study offers fresh insights into the contemporary social significance of exorcism and provides challenges for future research. In the analysis of the data, it was discovered that only 5% of the initial consultations lead to a ritual of exorcism and that a rapprochement with rituals of deliverance is found for the large majority of the cases.

Emergence of consensus as a modular-to-nested transition in communication dynamics

Online social networks have transformed the way in which humans communicate and interact, leading to a new information ecosystem where people send and receive information through multiple channels, including traditional communication media. Despite many attempts to characterize the structure and dynamics of these techno-social systems, little is known about fundamental aspects such as how collective attention arises and what determines the information life-cycle. Current approaches to these problems either focus on human temporal dynamics or on semiotic dynamics. In addition, as recently shown, information ecosystems are highly competitive, with humans and memes striving for scarce resources –visibility and attention, respectively. Inspired by similar problems in ecology, here we develop a methodology that allows to cast all the previous aspects into a compact framework and to characterize, using microblogging data, information-driven systems as mutualistic networks. Our results show that collective attention around a topic is reached when the user-meme network self-adapts from a modular to a nested structure, which ultimately allows minimizing competition and attaining consensus. Beyond a sociological interpretation, we explore such resemblance to natural mutualistic communities via well-known dynamics of ecological systems.

Greetings: Their Genesis and Cultural Significance in a Civilised Society

Social interaction forms the unit of social analysis since the turn of sociological analysis from positivism to interpretive sociology. Most interactions begin with a light form called greetings. While there are more serious interactions that take into account the questions of one’s social and historical position in society, greetings are rather less immersed in such considerations. That does not mean that greetings do not involve elements of hierarchy and other cultural norms. The whole idea of manners within civilisation as expounded by Norbert Elias seems to be coded around norms of interaction based on the particular position one holds within the cultural setting. Styles of greetings not just depend on social status; in fact they are also determined by the time of the day and occasion. Thus this paper is an attempt to scrutinise various nuances of greetings in human civilisation.

Научно-технологическая карьера: социальное измерение и социологическая интерпретация

The article provides the definition of science and technology careers and emphasizes such characteristic as innovation orientation. It characterizes the social dimension ofthe young professionals’ career. On specific material, their career development path as well as the conditions, which are conducive to it are reviewed. It provides a support program of the modern science and technology careers from state and business structures. Measures are proposed for the introduction of an educational tax on manufacturing companies and diversification of funding sources, providing balanced career development path of innovation implementers in high technology industries. This will allow meeting the “great challenges” of modern social and economic development, ensuring success of the import substitution strategy, creating optimum conditions to recognize and use science and technology potential in complicated circumstances of the global competition, as well as the human resource assets of the country. In this regard, it is important to study development trends in science and technology, as well as the characteristics of social dimension of the modern career, giving them sociological interpretation. It is emphasized that the conditions conducive to the career development path through the stimulation of innovation activity, particularly important for enterprises, are focused on the functioning and implementation of advanced technologies on the on hand, and universities and higher education institutions, offering their inventions, on the other hand. The regulation of science and technology (especially with an innovation characteristic) careers suppose the reformatting of the staff turnover system taking into account the need to overcome such diverse barriers on the way toward realization as consequences of the “demographic gap” during the staffing of innovative enterprises and bureaucratic limitations during the career development path of innovation implementers, and also stimulation of breakthrough innovation due to measures of advanced material and moral incentives. Innovation is defined by nonlinearity and throw-in efficient surprises that set new challenges to the system of their capture and fixation.

Научно-технологическая карьера: социальное измерение и социологическая интерпретация

The article provides the definition of science and technology careers and emphasizes such characteristic as innovation orientation. It characterizes the social dimension ofthe young professionals’ career. On specific material, their career development path as well as the conditions, which are conducive to it are reviewed. It provides a support program of the modern science and technology careers from state and business structures. Measures are proposed for the introduction of an educational tax on manufacturing companies and diversification of funding sources, providing balanced career development path of innovation implementers in high technology industries. This will allow meeting the “great challenges” of modern social and economic development, ensuring success of the import substitution strategy, creating optimum conditions to recognize and use science and technology potential in complicated circumstances of the global competition, as well as the human resource assets of the country. In this regard, it is important to study development trends in science and technology, as well as the characteristics of social dimension of the modern career, giving them sociological interpretation. It is emphasized that the conditions conducive to the career development path through the stimulation of innovation activity, particularly important for enterprises, are focused on the functioning and implementation of advanced technologies on the on hand, and universities and higher education institutions, offering their inventions, on the other hand. The regulation of science and technology (especially with an innovation characteristic) careers suppose the reformatting of the staff turnover system taking into account the need to overcome such diverse barriers on the way toward realization as consequences of the “demographic gap” during the staffing of innovative enterprises and bureaucratic limitations during the career development path of innovation implementers, and also stimulation of breakthrough innovation due to measures of advanced material and moral incentives. Innovation is defined by nonlinearity and throw-in efficient surprises that set new challenges to the system of their capture and fixation.

Historical Fiction as Sociological Interpretation and Philosophy: on the Two Methodological Registers of W. E. B. Du Bois' <em>The Black Flame</em>

Historical Fiction as Sociological Interpretation and Philosophy: on the Two Methodological Registers of W. E. B. Du Bois' <em>The Black Flame</em>

Понимающая социология внешней политики: «агентная» модель поведения государства на международной арене

The article revisits the utility of sociological theories for the students of international relations. The failure of IR scholars to predict Ukrainian crisis revealed the limits of realism, which still remains most influential IR theory. These limits make rethink the prospects of convergence of IR and sociological theories. Pros and cons of holistic constructivist theory are examined. The article results in making an “agent-focused” model composed of the concepts of Max Weber’s interpretive sociology, Graham Allison’s typology of models of decision making and Mark Haas’s model of ideological origins of great powers’ politics. In doing so, it also revisits the concept of identity as a mean to understand “social facts” and their influence on foreign policy. The emphasis on the “agent” though not the “structure” is approached as an alternative to holistic constructivism of Alexander Wendt and his epigones. The “agent” model is supposed to be more capable for studies of great powers’, which play an active role in setting up the “structure’s” parameters. Three different approaches to “agent” are considered - “agent” as a state, as a bureaucratic body or structure within the state and as decision-makers and their staff. The model is designed for further empirical research of the Russian foreign policy.

Корпоративная сплоченность профессионального сообщества в условиях нестабильности рынка труда промышленного региона

The article examines the phenomenon of corporatism, which under the adverse external environment can be used by the professional community to improve the effectiveness of organization. The authors define corporatism of the professional society as a combination of homogenous interests, attitudes, traditions and values; and provide a sociological interpretation of the corporate unity through its organizational and behavioral parameters. The former consists of the perception of the organization reliability, the staff’s confidence in the future, satisfaction with the financial situation (static features), estimates of the innovative capabilities of the company, and the willingness to develop (dynamic features). The behavioral parameters include staff’s values and patterns of behavior that can contribute to the consolidation of the professional community. The authors believe that for corporate management vertical social ties are less important that the horizontal ones, such as the rule of law and honesty, and the team unity under the unstable external environment. The sample of the study conducted by the authors in 2015 consisted of various types of settlements typical for the Sverdlovsk Region: mono-towns and mono-settlements (Nizhny Tagil, Serov), towns and villages with the differentiated economic activities (Ekaterinburg, Irbit). The results of the empirical study of corporatism among different professional societies - industrial workers, social services’ and business organizations’ staff, individual entrepreneurs and authorities - revealed the internal resources that can reduce tensions on the labor market. The research data can be useful for the comparative analysis of corporatism in different regions of Russia (not only industrial and similar to the Ural Region, but differing from it by significant social and economic parameters).

Gender Abuse in Intimate Relationships: From Structural Coupling Theory to Emergence of Couple System

Is love predictable in its choices? Linear Determinism, Randomness or Complexity? By applying theoretical coordinates of current sociological interpretations of intimacy and conceptual categories of New General System Theory, the paper reflects on one-factor and linear determinism implicitly underlying mate selection processes in Structural Coupling Theory and its implications for Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). Assuming personality structure as the predictor of partner choice as well as victimization risk, SCT circumscribes victimization risk just to one category of women (insecure/avoidant women coupling with ambivalent partners). We propose that adaptive complex system and non-banal machine concepts are more effective to understand the mate selection process than linear deterministic approach, which appears too mechanistic for a process that exhibits an inextricable dimension of uncertainty and unpredictability. Research results on a sample of 100 victims of IPV do not corroborate the linear one-factor determinism underlying Structural Coupling Theory neither its implications. Rather they go in the direction of Complexity.