Sciences sociales et postcommunisme. La sociologie polonaise des élites politiques (1990-2000)

In: Revue d'études comparatives est-ouest: RECEO, Band 31, Heft 2, S. 49-100

Abstract

The meeting between a political phenomenon (the role played by political elites in forming the new regimes in central Europe) and a sociological one (the extent of sociological studies of elites in this region) calls for reading this literature in connection with the political processes that sociologists claim to observe from the outside. Centered around Poland, this critical review of all writings on elites in sociology and political science reports on the emergence of this topic as a surprising new paradigm in scientific inquiry, even though its theoretical underpinnings and methodology run back to the Communist era. Two main kinds of studies are distinguished by the author : "sociographies" of political personnel and qualitative research ; but they share characteristics such as an ambiguous use of certain theoretical resources and focalization on the national dimension of political phenomena.