European Sociology

Abstract: Social cohesion is frequently mentioned in political discourse. However this concept remains vague and ill-defined. We intend to propose a typology of social cohesion patterns and examine under which conditions this concept might be used. Firstly, we will sketch a brief history of its introduction in the political debate. Then we will sort out three different meanings of this concept, in order to analyze which representations it is associated with.

Résumé: La référence à la cohésion sociale est récurrente dans les discours politiques. Pourtant la notion demeure mal définie et indéterminée. Cet article propose une typologie des modèles de la cohésion sociale à partir de laquelle définir les limites et les conditions auxquelles un usage pertinent de la notion de « cohésion sociale » – préalablement définie – est possible. Après un bref rappel des étapes historiques qui ont marqué l'introduction de la notion de cohésion sociale dans le débat public, nous identifierons trois types de modèles de cohésion à partir desquels nous proposerons une description systématisée des représentations que l'évocation de la cohésion suscite.

The relationship between morality and economy has been muddied in the course of disciplinary specialization. While dominant paradigms in economics abstract from the moral dimension, recent approaches to morality and ethics in anthropology neglect the material economy. E. P. Thompson’s “moral economy” has been an influential bridging concept in recent decades, but recent inflationary usage has highlighted shortcomings. Following an overview of the disciplinary debates, the moral dimension of economic life is illustrated in this paper with reference to work as a value between the late 19th and early 21st centuries in Hungary. Contemporary workfare is explored with local examples. It is shown how discourses of work and fairness are being extended into new ethical registers to justify negative attitudes towards a new category of migrants.

Contrary to expectations, the EU’s eastward expansion in 2004 did not sound the death knoll of nationalism in the region; rather, it signalled its reinvention and, in some respects, reinvigoration. In this paper, we examine three ways in which nationalism has been redefined in Hungary and Poland in the context of EU enlargement. First, consensus on the desirability of European unification has lessened the importance of left/right party divisions; in its place, the ‘‘nation’’ has provided a fulcrum for interparty contestation. Second, EU integration has provided nationalists in the region with a backdoor for realising old nationalist ambitions of national reunification across the porous borders of the EU. Third, we examine the way radical nationalist organisations in Hungary and Poland increasingly define themselves in opposition to the EU.

I  appear as natural enemies of a political world di-vided into culturally homogenous and territorially bounded nations each represented by a sovereign state. This perception has influenced social science theory and methodology and, more specifically, its discourse on ...

Between 1940 and 1944, sociologist Talcott Parsons and political scientist Eric Voegelin engaged in a vigorous correspondence, discussing the origins of totalitarianism and modern anti-Semitism, the legacy of Max Weber, patterns of secularization set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, the methodology and goals of social science, and more. This article introduces and explicates the surprisingly amicable and intellectually rich exchange between these two seemingly different thinkers. Although the letters hold obvious historical interest, their variegated topics are also closely thematically related, revealing an inner logic that we interpret as a theoretical search for “critical naïveté”. This logic, we argue, is relevant to contemporary discussions about the social, political, and scientific legacies of world-transcendent spiritual traditions.

ThisPaper is the second of two essays devoted to a sociological examination of the emergence and attempted professionalization of psychiatry in Victorian England. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of an institutional response to madness: first in the form of private, profit-making madhouses, and then, via direct state investment in the asylum solution, in the form of a rapidly proliferating network of county asylums coping with the ‘pauper insane’. The development and consolidation of these institutional means of coping with madness parallels that of a group of ‘experts’ in the management of the mad. For it was the existence of institutions which permitted, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, formed the breeding ground, for this emerging coterie of specialists. During the nineteenth century, at least, ‘psychiatry’ is to all intents and purposes coextensive with ‘institutional psychiatry’.

The paper addresses the question whether national decision-making has become increasingly interdependent in recent decades, and what role “world models” play in any such trend. These questions are scrutinised by utilising the “Historic Hansard” corpus, which contains all records of the UK Parliament from 1803 to 2005, complemented by other corpora. The results show that references to other countries were most frequent in parliamentary debates very early in the 19th century. However, allusions to other countries have evolved from referencing case examples to referencing policies that are constructed and branded as models. The idea of transferable models caught on particularly strongly from the 1950s onward. The other corpora used for the study confirmed that these changes reflect a global trend. Hence, the post-war era has witnessed a worldwide spread of the idea of model as a precondition for a global proliferation of named models.

... Page 3. MARGARET SOMERS is the over-attention to the 'objective* class structure and the concomitant assumption that class ideas, organizations, and activities can be inferred therefrom. ... 183 Page 5. MARGARET SOMERS manner suitable for systematic comparison. ...

Nationalism in the modern world began in European metropoles but spread throughout the world system in the form of anticolonial nationalism. While many studies have explored the former, this essay systematically examines the latter. Based upon an original database of 124 cases, we test multiple theories that might account for the origins and spread of anticolonial nationalism. We adjudicate between cultural-cognitive approaches emphasizing the discursive bases for national imaginings on the one hand and, on the other, theories that emphasize political-economic dynamics and elite conflict. Our time-series regression analysis suggests that while cultural-cognitive approaches best account for the initial wave of anticolonial nationalism, from 1700 to 1878, theories stressing political-economic dynamics and elite conflict explain anticolonial nationalism in the later wave, from 1879 to 1990. The analysis suggests that theories of nationalism need to be attentive to the historical specif...

Over the course of the past decade, “radicalization” has become prevalent as an analytical paradigm to interpret and explain phenomena of political violence, notably in research on jihadist terrorism and Western “foreign fighters” in Syria and Iraq. Thereby, while to some extent opening up new avenues of investigation, the concept also significantly re-shaped the way in which phenomena of political violence were analyzed and explained, focusing analytical attention on processes of cognitive and ideological transformation, mainly at the individual level. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the main strands of development in recent research on radicalization, with reference to and within the context of broader sociological research on political violence as well as reviewing critical debates and recently emerging sub-fields of investigation.

Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—sovaluable—to us. The article thus examines the sociology outlined by Geoffrey Ingham and criticises its ontology of money as ameasure of valueunderpinned by state authority. By contrast, it argues that money ought to be primarily intended asvalue in itself. Accordingly, money’s most specific attribute is none of its canonical functions but rather purchasing power: the powernotto pay, or else the power tobuy time. The latter is not the mere product of state (fiscal) agency, but is entangled from the start with the production of liquidity and the construction of speculative markets for debt. Thus the paper emphasises the importance of concrete bankdiscounting vis-à-vis abstract accounting in concrete processes of monetisation, and shows how modern money, far from cancelling debts, is historically constructed within liquid financial relations so as to “buy time” and systematically procrastinate the final ...

Deputy sheriffs make arrests for many reasons: to solve problems, generate statistics, rectify perceived moral wrongs, or enforce compliance with the law. Many studies of discretion in arrests have looked at situational and structural determinants of the decision to arrest. Citizen demeanor, race, gender, and the nature of the crime have all been examined. Turning from these approaches, this study considers the institution of policing, focusing on the relations among deputies to try and explain who makes an arrest, especially when more than one deputy is on scene. Drawing from data collected during a year and a half of ethnographic research as a deputy sheriff in a rural California county, we show that arrests are a form of symbolic capital. Arrests are given, taken, and fought for as deputies struggle to work with each other and compete for prestige and positions within the Sheriff’s Office. Exchanged, gifted, and stolen as a valuable good, an arrest has the power to solidify exist...

Deputy sheriffs make arrests for many reasons: to solve problems, generate statistics, rectify perceived moral wrongs, or enforce compliance with the law. Many studies of discretion in arrests have looked at situational and structural determinants of the decision to arrest. Citizen demeanor, race, gender, and the nature of the crime have all been examined. Turning from these approaches, this study considers the institution of policing, focusing on the relations among deputies to try and explain who makes an arrest, especially when more than one deputy is on scene. Drawing from data collected during a year and a half of ethnographic research as a deputy sheriff in a rural California county, we show that arrests are a form of symbolic capital. Arrests are given, taken, and fought for as deputies struggle to work with each other and compete for prestige and positions within the Sheriff’s Office. Exchanged, gifted, and stolen as a valuable good, an arrest has the power to solidify exist...

A report on the ESA PhD workshop by Simon Sorokos and Martha Van Der Bly - For most participants in the Sixth Conference of the European Sociological Association, proceedings began at the plenary opening session at de Centro de Congresos in central Murcia on September 23rd. However, two days before men sporting beards and wearing sandals gathered in order to talk past one another across half-filled rooms, an atmosphere of real academic discovery had already been established at the Campus Universitario El Espinardo, 4km out of town, among a group of PhD students drawn from all over Europe.

This paper examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial framework of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks and Turks) and following two monotheistic faiths(Christianity and Islam) in marked contrast to the recent history of Cyprus. In broad outline it closely parallels Gellner's thesis (1983) that nationalism is a by-product of industrialization, extensive education literacy and geographical and social mobility, and it seeks to show that the major cleavages in Cyprus were mainly intraethnic rather than interethnic.

Purpose: A huge amount of research and literature has reported the disturbing increase in the rate of drug abuse by youths and the havoc which this phenomenon has wreaked on the lives of individuals and nations across the globe. Against this backdrop of this problem, this study explores the effect of marriage and religion on drug abuse among students of selected tertiary institutions in Owerri metropolis in Imo State, Nigeria. Methodology: The objectives include to: i. examine the socio-demographic profile of the target population; ii. Determine the most commonly abused drug by the students; and iii. Determine the effects of marriage and religion on drug abuse among the students. Findings: The study was a cross-sectional research which disproportionately combined qualitative and quantitative methods. A sample size of 2,400 participants, drawn from five tertiary institutions in Owerri Capital Territory, Imo State of Nigeria, was used in the study. Researchers’ made Questionnaire was ...

This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.

At the heart of the $2 trillion Islamic-finance industry is a ban on interest. But why is there only an Islamic ban on interest today? After all, for over a millennium, interest was also gravely sinful in Judaism and Christianity. While scholars have addressed the evolution of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic economic morality in isolation, very few since Weber have tackled the interest question directly and comparatively.I argue that the fate of the religious interest ban has always depended on the fate of religious jurists. When religious jurists are absent, no systematic interest ban emerges. When religious jurists emerge as technical experts, the interest ban appears and thrives. And when religious jurists come under attack or lose their traditional role in society, the interest ban withers and dies.To conclude, I call for a reconstruction of Weber’s theory of religion and economic morality that dissolves the tradition-modernity binary.

Purpose: A huge amount of research and literature has reported the disturbing increase in the rate of drug abuse by youths and the havoc which this phenomenon has wreaked on the lives of individuals and nations across the globe. Against this backdrop of this problem, this study explores the effect of marriage and religion on drug abuse among students of selected tertiary institutions in Owerri metropolis in Imo State, Nigeria. Methodology: The objectives include to: i. examine the socio-demographic profile of the target population; ii. Determine the most commonly abused drug by the students; and iii. Determine the effects of marriage and religion on drug abuse among the students. Findings: The study was a cross-sectional research which disproportionately combined qualitative and quantitative methods. A sample size of 2,400 participants, drawn from five tertiary institutions in Owerri Capital Territory, Imo State of Nigeria, was used in the study. Researchers’ made Questionnaire was ...

Le propre des enquêtes sur les emplois du temps est de faire appel à un dispositif de questionnement spécifique, le carnet quotidien d'activités, mis au point dans l'U.R.S.S. des années 1920, standardisé dans le cadre du programme multinational d'enquêtes dirigé par Alexandre Szalai en 1965–66, et ensuite généralisé à un trés grand nombre de pays. Le carnet permet de quantifier les durées d'activités faiblement institutionnalisées telles que, notamment, le travail domestique et les loisirs.Les principaux résultats de recherche obtenus sur la base spécifique d'enquétes sur les emplois du temps sont décrits dans trois domaines thématiques principaux, les débats sur la civilisation du loisir, l'évolution des rôles de genre, et la synchronisation familiale des temps sociaux.

The liberalisation of religious practice after the fall of the Soviet regime and the support by the Russian state to the Russian Orthodox Church have contributed to the enormous growth of the church economy. Controversies within and without the Church interrogate commercial and gifting practices. The relationship between the expansion of church commerce and the operation of moral boundaries, underlined by critical stances, has been determined by culture and history, with the post-Soviet transformation having played a key role in shaping popular notions of selflessness and profit-seeking. Moreover, as people participate in the church economy they mobilise perceptions of the differential moral valence of gift and commerce in order to communicate concerning the power of the Church, its controversial image, Russia’s social stratification, and to deploy ethics of equity and honesty.