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Piotr Sztompka presents a comprehensive theoretical account of trust, explaining its meaning, foundations and functions. Professor Sztompka supports his claims with an impressive empirical study of trust, carried out in post-communist Poland. Trust: A Sociological Theory is a major work of social theory

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- TABLE OF CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Keynote -- Successful Intelligence: An Expanded Approach to Understanding Intelligence -- Foreword -- Ruminations on Sex and Death -- Memory and Value -- Introduction -- 1. Mixing Memory and Desire: Want and Will in Neural Modeling -- 2. On Brain and Value: Utility, Preference, Play and Creativity -- 3. Values, Goals and Utility in an Engineering - Based Theory of Mammalian Intelligence -- Preference -- 4. Stimulus Class Formation in Animals -- 5. Virtual Associative Networks: A Framework for Cognitive Modeling -- 6. Self-Organization of Cortical Information Processing -- 7. The Self-Organizing Map, A Possible Model of Brain Maps -- 8. Pragmatic Approach to Consciousness -- 9. Do All Dynamical Systems Have Memory? Implications of the Systematic Memory Hypothesis for Science and Society -- Utility -- 10. Preserved Semantic Memory in an Amnesic Child -- 11. The Role of Memory in the Brain, Values, and Choice -- 12. Transfer of Value in Simultaneous Discriminations: Implications for Cognitive and Social Processes -- 13. The Experience-Dependent Maturation of an Evaluative System in the Cortex -- 14. The Electricity of Touch: Detection and Measurement of Cardiac Energy -- 15. Readiness For Action -- Creativity -- 16. A Larmarckian Model of Creativity -- 17. Metaphor, Healing, and Creativity: Re-Framing as a Biological Phenomenon -- 18. Values, Agency, and the Theory of Quantum Vacuum Interaction -- 19. On Cognitive Maps, Vicarious Trial-and-Error, and Implusivity -- 20. Role of the Hippocampus in Learning and Memory: A Computational Analysis -- Afterword -- Commentary on J.L. McClelland -- McClelland Reactions to Pribram's Commentary -- Commentary on the Relation Between Value and Amnesia -- List of Authors Cited

The "European Revolution" of 1989 has not only brought about dramatic and far-reaching changes in the social structure of East and West European countries, but also in the social sciences. This volume is an attempt to evaluate how sociology has been affected by this dramatic event and how it has developed in the post-revolutionary period in some selected European countries. Ten eminent representatives of sociology from Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Great Britain, Poland, and Scandinavia were presented with a set of questions which served as a common guideline for their contributions. Their answers can be summarized in the observation of the "interrelated diversity" of sociology in Europe today. The high heterogeneity and fragmentation, typical of contemporary sociological thought in Europe, are interrelated by a high degree of institutionalization and integration of sociology in the European university system. In addition, two prominent scholars from non-European countries, Japan and the US, present their views on sociology in Europe from outside. They declare the end of the period of one-sided flows of reception in sociology and foresee a strengthening of a two-way exchange between European and non-European social scientists in the twenty-first century

"Sociological approaches to social change have evolved in three typical forms: the discourse of progress in the period of classical sociology, the discourse of crisis characteristic for the middle of the XXth century, and the discourse of trauma, which seems to emerge at the end of the XXth century. The concept of trauma, borrowed from medicine, suggests that change per se, irrespective of its content, but provided that it is sudden, comprehensive, fundamental and unexpected, may produce painful shock for the social and particularly cultural tissue of a society. Paradoxically, this applies also to changes which Are otherwise progressive, welcome, and intended by the people. Cultural trauma begins with disorganization of cultural rules and accompanying personal disorientation, culminating even in the loss of identity. This condition is made more grave by the traumatizing events or situations which occur as the effect of major change in areas other than culture, and affect the whole 'lifeworld' of the people. The traumatic mood which spreads in a society is countered by various coping strategies. If they Are successful trauma turns out into mobilizing force for human agency, and stimulates creative social becoming. Such theoretical model is applied and tested with data referring to the radical political, economic and cultural transformations in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. The Analysis of the Polish case suggests that the model of trauma and slow re-consolidation of culture may be an adequate interpretative tool for this unique historical process." (author's abstract)

The idea of progress has in recent years increasingly been put into question. The key experience contributing to disengaging the idea of progress from the idea of rationality has been the ecological crisis. This crisis has made modern culture look like it fosters a way of organizing social life that is self- destructive. The crisis has nourished cultural movements counter to modernization. There are groups and discourses, everyday ones and intellectual ones, that plead for reenchantment as opposed to disenchantment. Modern culture has started to react to this experience by putting into question its key concepts: rationalization and rationality. Modernization based on rationality appears to be only one of many alternative ways of organizing modern social life. It appears to be nothing but the social form forced upon the majority of societies in the world by a dominant European culture and its American and Russian derivatives. Modernity is a cultural force that has imposed upon us a form of social evolution that cannot control its own consequences. New, alternative ideas and movements are increasingly being directed against this type of modern rationality. These counterprocesses are not adequately described as antimodern or traditionalistic regressions. Instead, they represent another type of rationality and rationalization within the legacy of modern culture. The increasing concern with nature that we experience today is symptomatic of a fundamental cultural cleavage within the culture that underlies, accompanies and regulates the development of highly complex societies in European-type modernization processes. This cultural cleavage is traceable to the Semitic and Greek origins of modern culture. Two conflicting traditions, one of bloody sacrifice and one of unbloody (vegetarian!) paradise, still define the cultural universe within which we live. Expanding the notion of cultural traditions constitutive for the European experience of modernization and conceptualizing it as the manifestation of competing codes of modern culture, we are able to identify not one but two types of relationships with nature in modern society. Thus we arrive at two types of rationality encountered in modern culture: utilitarian rationality and communicative rationality, and at two types of culture within modern culture: culture as profit and culture as communication. Ultimately, we have the outline of a new theoretical notion of progress. It is one that puts into question any social theory premised on its own progressiveness in terms of the European version of progress. The current ecological crisis has destroyed the last bastion of the belief in natural progress, the mastery of nature. Social theory should continue the task of de-illusioning this self-ascription, of disengaging European-style progress from the notion of modernity.

"This paper aims to trace the development of the main strands of sociological thought in Austria, to present characteristic research conducted by Austrian sociologists and to provide an answer to the question which European schools have influenced sociology in Austria and, if this is found to be the case, which Austrian ideas have possibly prevaded European sociology." (excerpt)

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"--And on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the

Im Oktober 2001 und Januar 2002 fand im "Collegium Budapest" eine internationale Konferenz statt, in der die Situation der Sozialwissenschaften in Mittel- und Osteuropa aus dem Blickwinkel von Soziologen, Politologen und Ökonomen diskutiert wurde. Der Autor möchte in seinem Aufsatz über die Bedingungen der Soziologie in Ostmitteleuropa einige Hauptlinien der Debatte skizzieren, die Fragestellungen systematisieren und eine vorläufige zusammenfassende Bilanz ziehen. Wesentliche Fragen der Debatte waren z.B.: Sind die Soziologien in den ost- und mitteleuropäischen Ländern gleich oder unterschiedlich? Wie weit sind sie von den Kontexten der europäischen Soziologie entfernt? Und wie werden sie durch die fortschreitende Internationalisierung der Soziologie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung beeinflusst? Der Autor erörtert einige allgemeine Probleme der Disziplin und regionale Probleme, die unter den Soziologen von postkommunistischen Ländern diskutiert werden, sowie spezifische Fragestellungen nationaler Soziologen, bei denen ideosynkratische historische oder kulturelle Erfahrungen und die besondere gegenwärtige Situation in den postkommunistischen Ländern im Vordergrund standen. (ICI)