The purpose of this article is to analyse institutionalised paralogisms, social and economic inequalities, and frustrating consequences arising from decades of symbolic and real war and post-war violence against the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The historic background of this paper is the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), as presented in the reports of the United Nations and documents produced during international and national trials concerning war crimes. The analytical basis is a literature review of various studies from the domains of war sociology, criminology, and sociology of knowledge. Immanent antinomies, contradictions, and political, legal, and criminal perpetually institutionalise and reproduce the identitary references to war vocabulary. For this reason, creation of publicly responsible programs is necessary to evaluate the prescriptive impact of the domination of cultural and identity differences between peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The genocide of Bosnian Bosniaks in the war against the Bosnian–Herzegovinian multicultural society urges the creation of a completely different description, prescription, logic of naming, and explanation strategy to achieve transitional change. The article criticized globalisation as a form of new colonisation and natural-science quantative emphasis. In the spirit of the analysed scientific literature, future scientific analyses should focus on the criminal, social, economic, ecological, anti-educational, sociopathological, and anomic consequences of the (catastrophic) impact of decades of symbolic and real war and post-war violence against the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. ; (Conference canceled)
This chapter briefly reviews and analyzes the key contributions on organized violence within historical sociology. It explores both the macro- and micro-level studies that have influenced recent debates within the field. The first section looks at war and warfare, the second section analyzes the clandestine political violence, the third section explores the revolutions, and the final section engages with the scholarship on genocides. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published
Sociology is the study of human social life. Human social life is complex and encompasses many facets of the human experience. Because of the complexity, the discipline of sociology subdivided over time into specialty areas. The first section of this book covers the foundations of sociology, including an introduction to the discipline, the methods of study, and some of the dominant theoretical perspectives. The remaining chapters focus on the different areas of study in sociology. This text is a wikibook, available at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology This webpage also has links to additional materials, such as videos and PPT slides. If you adopt this textbook, the authors request that you record it at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology/Course_Adoptions ; http://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/file/d2dc6098-15e7-a69f-3058-9c61987de846/1/Introduction_to_Sociology-v2.0.pdf ; SYG 000 - PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY ; ryantcragun@gmail.com ; Diagram, Figure, Narrative text, Other, Textbook ; Ryan T. Cragun, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Tampa , Deborah Cragun, MS Human Genetics, Piotr Konieczny, PhD student in sociology, University of Pittsburgh ; Adobe Reader ; Community College, Higher Education ; Expositive ; Sociology is the study of human social life. Human social life is complex and encompasses many facets of the human experience. Because of the complexity, the discipline of sociology subdivided over time into specialty areas. The first section of this book covers the foundations of sociology, including an introduction to the discipline, the methods of study, and some of the dominant theoretical perspectives. The remaining chapters focus on the different areas of study in sociology. This text is a wikibook, available at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology This webpage also has links to additional materials, such as videos and PPT slides. If you adopt this textbook, the authors request that you record it at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology/Course_Adoptions ; Electronic reproduction. ; Mode of access: Internet.
The development of the sociology of work in Finland occurred in two phases: (1) the development of the welfare state (1945–1980s) marked by the consolidation of the sub-discipline, and (2) the rise of the competition state (late 1980s–present) when the scope of the sub-discipline was widened. Although the Finnish sociology of work has been equally influenced by positivist, reformist and critical approaches, it has maintained its fundamentally consensual nature. Critical paradigms have never assumed a central role. There is a considerable 'reformist' tendency in the SoW producing solutions to societal problems, and in many cases in the form of action-oriented research and developmental projects. This reflects the overall pragmatic nature of Finnish policy-making and close social distance between the government, labour market organizations and academia. ; Peer reviewed
Cycling: a Sociology of Vélomobility explores cycling as a sociological phenomenon. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, it considers the interaction of materials, competences and meanings that comprise a variety of cycling practices. What might appear at first to be self-evident actions are shown to be constructed though the interplay of numerous social and political forces. Using a theoretical framework from mobilities studies, its central themes respond to the question of what is it about cycling that provokes so much interest and passion, both positive and negative. Individual chapters consider how cycling has appeared as theme and illustration in social theory and considers the legacies of these theorizations. It expands on the image of cycling practices as product of an assemblage of technology, rider and environment. Riding spaces as material technologies are found to be as important as the machineries of the cycle, and a distinction is made between routes and rides to help interpret aspects of journey-making. Ideas of both affordance and script are used to explore how elements interact in performance to create sensory and experiential scapes. Consideration is also given to the changing identities of cycling practices in historical and geographical perspective. The book adds to existing research by extending the theorisation of cycling mobilities. It engages with both current and past debates on the place of cycling in mobility systems and the problems of researching, analysing and communicating ephemeral mobile experiences.
The undeniable fact is that various social sciences and other disciplines constitute the research perspective which relates to the practice of a multidimensional phenomenon. The welfare state is an excellent example of such notion, which in its nature unifies many theoretical and practical positions. It seems, however, that the economic and political dimensions of the welfare state (as conceptual or pro-social proposals) are disproportionately exposed both on the basis of scientific reflection and pragmatic approaches used by the institutions of the state. This tendency to think in economic and political terms, which incidentally is maintained for several decades, represents: (a) only one side of a complex nature of social welfare, and (b) a significant reductionism, leading to the elimination of sociological, cultural, educational, and psychological consequences of the functioning of the welfare state. This article is designed to reverse the trend of the dominant perception of the construct of the welfare state in economic and political terms, and replace it with the highlight of the mainly sociological dimension of this phenomenon (the welfare state sociology). However, it does not mean abandonment of the economic and political dimensions in general, as they are an integral part of the issue. ; Mariusz Baranowski
This article is a reading of the `new sociology' that is mainly identified with the works of C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner. Its main argument is that during the past 40 years the new sociology gave back a public face to sociology. This distinguishes it from the `old sociology' that had not been able to free itself from `private' social values. It is argued that Mills' power elite and Gouldner's coming crisis theses provided the foundation for a common enterprise among many `new sociologists' to develop a critical and public sociology that would seek to shape what Mills called the `democratic society of publics'.`New sociologists' share a critique of modern societies, namely, that though most modern societies have formal democracies, a substantial democratic social structure of publics is often lacking, due to the erosion of the public sphere by private values.
This is the peer reviewed version of the article which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12077. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. ; This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative self-reflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology's scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature and be able to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre-social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, non-human actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.
The environment cannot plead its own case but must be represented. The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the concept of representation and demonstrate its relevance for environmental sociology. Drawing on Pitkin's classic work on representation, we discuss representation as both 'acting for' and 'standing for'. We also make a distinction between actors (representatives) and devices used as representations (e.g. descriptions, graphs and images), while discussing the intertwinement of these two aspects in representative practices. This paper stresses the performativity dimension and social embeddedness of representative practices. It sheds light on different meanings and implications of environmental representation, examining issues of claimmaking and what it means to represent the environment in various instances. Given the complex, durable and transboundary character of many topical environmental problems, the paper argues that it is essential to recognize and understand environmental representation in all its variety. It is moreover argued that a sociological elaboration of the concept of representation provides a basis for understanding the conditions for environmental politics, governance, management and
Sociology in Portugal provides the first English-language account of the history of sociology in Portugal from 1945 to the present day. Banned by the fascist regime until 1974, the institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline came relatively late. Understanding academic disciplines as institutionalized struggles over meaning, Filipe Carreira da Silva gives a genealogy of sociology in Portugal from its origins in the political-administrative interstices of a dictatorship, through the 'cyclopean moment' of the political revolution of April 1974, which brought about its swift institutionalization and subsequent consolidation in the new democratic regime, to the challenges posed by internationalization since the 1990s. Attempts to define Portugal itself, he demonstrates, have been at the heart of these struggles. Analyzing agents, institutions, contexts, instruments and ideas, Carreira da Silva shows in fascinating detail how the sociological understanding of Portugal evolved from that of a developing society in the 1960s, to that of a modernizing European social formation in the 1980s, to the post-colonial or post-imperial Portugal of today.
The aim of this article is to argue about the transition from the risk society to the uncertainty society. In view of the fact that the pandemic from Covid 19 has shown that vulnerability could potentially become a permanent condition, it is appropriate to try to configure uncertainty by choosing a different epistemological key, capable, both to question some of the paradigms on which the organization of the current economic and social systems in industrialized countries insists and to define meanings usefull to build new models of global behavior. Without incurring the error of associating uncertainty with indeterminacy, the challenge inherent in the proposal of a sociology of uncertainty consists in a proof of refutability towards any kind of functionalist logic. Both with respect to analyzes supported by causal relationships and with reference to forms of cognitive rationality focused on the automatic absolutism of numbers, the sociology of uncertainty represents the heuristic bet in opposition to the determinism of any "simple" typology of rational thinking. Through the critical review of the dialectic within which risk sociology has elaborated most of its key concepts and suggested them to other disciplines, the sociology of uncertainty acquires an interesting interdisciplinary value. In addition to providing a meaningful and dynamic interpretation of reality, its interdisciplinary value is essential for assigning a specialized role to social research. Especially with regard to applied sociology, the issue of uncertainty allows to broaden the heuristic horizon and to combine sociology and economy to adopt an approach capable of keeping together the analysis of forms and processes of socialization with that of environmental problems and territorial, and to address the issue of the reduction of inequalities through solutions that guarantee the widening of participation and the increasing of deliberative practices. Upon a methodological approach based on much more awareness, the goal is the promotion of social learnig. This last is foundamental to allows sociology of uncertianty is the management of vulnerabilities in the view either of understanding and interpretation of social phenomena and of defining of local and global policies ; L'intento di questo articolo è argomentare sull'opportunità di un passaggio dalla società del rischio alla società dell'incertezza. In considerazione del fatto che la pandemia da Covid 19 ha dimostrato che la vulnerabilità potrebbe potenzialmente diventare una condizione permanente, è opportuno provare a configurare l'incertezza tramite la scelta di una diversa chiave epistemologica, in grado, tanto di mettere in discussione alcuni dei paradigmi sui quali insiste l'organizzazione degli attuali sistemi economici e sociali nei paesi industrializzati, quanto di procedere all'individuazione di significati intorno ai quali costruire nuovi modelli di comportamento globale. Di conseguenza, la sfida insita nella proposta di una sociologia dell'incertezza, senza in alcun modo incorrere nell'errore di associare l'incertezza con l'indeterminatezza, consiste in una prova di confutabilità nei confronti di ogni genere di logica di matrice funzionalista. Cosicché, sia rispetto alle analisi supportate da relazioni causali sia in riferimento a forme di razionalità cognitiva incentrate sull'automatico assolutismo dei numeri, la sociologia dell'incertezza rappresenta una scommessa euristica in opposizione al determinismo di qualsiasi tipologia pensiero raziocinante e, per così dire, necessariamente spiegazionista. Attraverso una revisione critica degli ambiti dialettici entro i quali la sociologia del rischio ha elaborato gran parte dei suoi concetti - chiave e li ha suggeriti ad altre discipline, la sociologia dell'incertezza acquista un valore interdisciplinare. Oltre che per fornire una interpretazione significativa e dinamica della realtà, il valore interdisciplinare è essenziale per assegnare alla ricerca sociale un ruolo specialistico. Soprattutto per quanto riguarda la sociologia applicata, il tema dell'incertezza permette di allargare l'orizzonte euristico e di combinare sociologia ed economia per adottare un approccio capace di tenere insieme l'analisi delle forme e dei processi di socializzazione con quello dei problemi ambientali e territoriali, e di affrontare la questione della riduzione delle disuguaglianze attraverso soluzioni che garantiscano l'ampliamento della partecipazione a la diffusione delle pratiche deliberative nei contesti di vita. Tale approccio metodologico di fonda su un incremento di consapevolezza. Per meglio dire, esso promuove la consapevolezza come traguardo intorno al quale organizzare gli stili di vita e le condizioni di benessere sociale. Nell'auspicio che la consapevolezza possa permettere l'adozione di strumenti utili a mettere su un piano di verità i fatti così come sono e non come ci piacerebbe che fossero, la sociologia dell'incertezza, non solo confronta con la dimensione della vulnerabilità, ma trae da essa informazioni al fine di affrontare con maggiore solidità empirica e rigore metodologico la comprensione e interpretazione di fenomeni e processi sociali, ovvero anche per fornire contenuti a misure locali di governance cosi come per la definizione di strumenti per policies economiche e politiche a livello globali.
The notes contain some comments related to the ongoing debates on sociology of globalization concentrated on U. Becks idea of cosmopolitisation and the shaping of cosmopolitan communities. A forthcoming paradigm shift in social sciences;the definition of cosmopolitanism and the establishment of cosmopolitan communities; what is the first phase of cosmopolitisation showed; an idea and possible scenarios of it realization; critics of cosmopolitisation theory concept; cosmopolitanism vs. corporate (or cluster) nationalism; and what is going now and what should be done are main issues in question.Author concluded that: the evolutionary potential of existing sociology is not exhausted; an anthropological shock should be avoided; much more attention should be given to the study of economic and political sources of current disasters; and that local and global sociologists should be much more active in public arena and environmental politics.
Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline. Conversely, sociology plays a very limited role in IR, particularly in the large, mostly US-based mainstream. Even when IR scholars take ideas and theories from sociology, they are neither particularly interested in this fact nor capable of recognizing the significance of sociology for the history of the discipline as a whole, being as they are generally uninterested in intellectual history, as discussed in the first section. Despite the difficulty that the scarcity of relevant literature represents, in section two we identify some occasionally important traces of social theory on the IR mainstream, which encompasses both a neorealist and a neoliberal paradigm. By contrast, sociology is intrinsic to most IR scholarship outside the mainstream, which is considered here to be part of a third " reflectivist " paradigm, examined in the third section. Here the focus is set on the sociological elements identifiable in IR constructivism, Marxism, and critical theory, as well as in some European national traditions of inquiry. The conclusion buttresses these arguments with some empirical evidence and makes suggestions for further research. Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline 1. A small, but telling piece of evidence on sociologists' lack of interest in IR is the absence of an article on this subject in the fifteen-volume International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Sills 1968). The successor edition, extended to twenty-six volumes, included only two entries on IR and a few more on area studies (Smelser and Balter 2001); the most recent edition ignored IR altogether, containing not a single entry on the discipline, but included area studies (Wright 2015). This evidence suggests not only that sociologists' ignorance of IR is widespread but also that it has remained fairly constant across time. At least some IR scholars ...
The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subfields where this new work is appearing most rapidly: (a) social network analysis and group formation; (b) collective behavior and political sociology; (c) the sociology of knowledge; (d) cultural sociology, social psychology, and emotions; (e) the production of culture; (f) economic sociology and organizations; and (g) demography and population studies. Our review reveals that sociologists are not only at the center of cutting-edge research that addresses longstanding questions about human behavior but also developing new lines of inquiry about digital spaces as well. We conclude by discussing challenging new obstacles in the field, calling for increased attention to sociological theory, and identifying new areas where computational social science might be further integrated into mainstream sociology.
This article aims to problematize some of the common assumptions within the dominant discourse on statelessness, such as the hegemonic framework of the international state system and the conceptualization of the state as an emancipatory actor, by using sociological notions of citizenship and nationalism to provide a more nuanced framework of understanding. Through a sociological lens, citizenship is considered a concept beyond formal legal status and as one heavily intertwined with notions of nationhood, and as a concept which can be utilized as a political tool. The paper argues that it is necessary to consider a sociological understanding of statelessness alongside a legal understanding of the issue in order to be able to address the complexities of statelessness.
