Cultural and political sociology for the new decade

Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy

The European Sociological Association (ESA) is a non-profit, Europe-wide academic organization with over 1,500 members. It aims at facilitating "European sociological research, and teaching and communication between sociologists and between sociologists and other scientists " (ESA 2009). The association was established in Vienna in 1992, at the first European sociological conference. The latest biennial ESA conference was held in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, from between September 2-5, 2009. The main question of the conference was whether we can look at European society as an increasingly cohesive entity or whether divisions of nation, class, ethnicity, region, gender, and so on continue to be more salient. Is there one European society or are there many European societies? Is the nation-state the most appropriate unit of analysis or are other approaches needed? Is there convergence or divergence between the regions of Europe? A particular focus of the conference was ...

This essay reviews works in (political) sociology that offer alternatives to sociology-as-usual. Sociologists with even fleeting awareness of the recent history of political sociology are surely familiar with the cultural turn, the global turn, and the turn toward complexity; however, another turn seems to be afoot, one toward existential concerns that direct us to recover how people experience 'the complex contradictions of the social and political world' (Taylor, The New Political Sociology, p. 197). Complex experiences often leave behind residues or 'traces,' and contributors in a recently edited volume challenge sociologists to unlock the social significance of these traces and find new ways to capture what our methods capture so poorly, namely, popular forgettings, geographies of exclusion, and the slow erasure of deeds, memories, and other subjugated knowledges belonging to individuals who find themselves dismissed, dispelled, or disenfranchised by nation-states. Traces left behind by individuals navigating the complexities of contemporary experiments in human 'being' are just the sort of analysis that must, in principle, place the actor at the center of analysis, and, after careful study, we now appreciate that despite the analytical ease of assuming that actors are singular, sociologists should examine actors as plural and unearth their essential multiplicity.

Globalisation, Europeanisation and the issues related to postmodernism have faced the Western European welfare states with a series of difficulties and challenges, but the social policy systems adapted to these challenges in various manners and confronted them. The socio-cultural diversity on the one hand, and the attempt to unify the national systems, on the other, are matters which have raised and continue to raise questions on the European level, both in what concerns the social and the cultural dimensions. Why are there social policies in the EU? How have the objectives of these policies developped and changed and how are they convergent with the cultural endeavors? What are the motions of the national, European and global prospects?Starting form the path-dependency theory, we were trying to identify those distinctive marks which are challenges in the attempt to unify the systems from the New Member Stated with those from Western Europe. Later on these distinctive marks became cultural indicators. Concerning the New Institutionalism Theory and Neoclassical Sociology, the attempt was to analyze to what extent is the institutional framework organised by the cultural beliefs or by the common norms of the majority. Moreover, we shall attempt to discover the role played by the state in these exchanges of influence and how the European and global contexts affect the decision making process and that of national policy creation. Key words: social policies, cultural directions, national state, European Union.

2020

In the 1990s, the idea that culture had a role to play in political sociology was relatively novel. Identifying sociologists who fit this emerging interdisciplinary subfield posed a challenge. Today, it is difficult to imagine a sociologist, or even a political scientist, who would argue against the importance of culture to politics. It has become de rigueur to acknowledge culture in political analysis. If anything, the field of politics and culture borders on oversubscription. Methodological issues that dominated early syntheses (Berezin 1994, 1997b) remain salient. These include epistemological discussions of culture as an explanatory factor in social analysis (e.g., Berezin 2014a; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methodology (Goertz and Mahoney 2012). Boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002) are intrinsic to politics and culture. A range of sociological subfields – inequality studies (Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014), comparative historical socio...

Comparative European …, 2010

The aim of the article is to develop a perspective on EU studies centred on social agents and to assess its contribution to the understanding of both the making of an EU political field at the top and the emergence of European social fields at the bottom. This perspective, intellectually informed by authors such as Pierre Bourdieu or Norbert Elias, provides a way to deepen existing approaches and to expand the scope of EU studies in two ways. First, it aims to evaluate the social foundations of the European integration process through a very precise analysis of what social actors involved in EU processes think and do considering their position in wider structures of interaction and domination. Second, it calls for wider collaboration with sociology, history and anthropology and bringing back traditional notions and toolkits from other social sciences in order to better understand an emerging European institution-society nexus.

In: Cambio. Rivista sulla Trasformazioni Sociali, II/4, 2012

The democratic nature of the European integration project is contested, and contestation and dissent seem to be on the increase, or at least becoming more visible, with the current economic crisis. A European project confined to transnational market-making is found wanting in terms of social competence as well as civic-democratic enablement. It seems undeniable that the attempts by the European Union (EU) to enhance its democratic standing have so far had limited success. For a political sociology of European democracy, an increasing gap between a European society and the formal-political world of the EU raises a host of significant and interesting questions. The article will tie in with some of the recent sociological studies that focus on European democracy, civil society, and social movements, and will contribute to the delineation of a specifically political-sociological approach to European democracy. The approach will link political theory with sociological insights, the latter in particular taken from the sociology of critical capacity as developed by Boltanski and Thévenot and others. Such an approach seems particularly useful in terms of the sociological exploration of different forms of critique and various repertoires of justification regarding the European polity, not least those expressed by ‘anti-political’ and dissenting movements.

Revista Española de Sociología, 2020

Europe is facing new and radical challenges that demand extraordinary resilience from EU members, especially southern European societies, because of their outlying position and specific social problems in comparison with their EU neighbours. The difficulties of building a united Europe in the wake of the economic, financial and political crisis have exposed divergences in EU governance. In this context, sociology is an important tool to inform public policies and to provide the general public with an understanding of current challenges. The uses of sociology have social, political and practical implications in fields that are especially significant for southern European societies, such as welfare, work and employment, education, migration, social cohesion and political participation. However, the usual tensions in the organization of scientific research are now particularly intense in terms of how the sociological knowledge utility is understood and communicated. The trend toward in...

2017

What are politics? Are they the debates leading up to an election which chooses between a Democrat and a Republican? Certainly they are that, but they are also much, much more. In general, political sociologists analyze social bases of power and policy determination, institutional interrelationships, intellectuals and ideologies, political trends and change, and political participation and membership. More than anything else, political sociology studies power, authority, and legitimacy usually on a "macro" scale.

Soziologie - Sociology in the German-Speaking World

By focusing on the differencebetween politics and the political as well as on current trends towards post-democracy,this paper attemptsanassessment of Germanlanguagecontributions to contemporary political sociology. Even though the subject is still searchingf or its native disciplinary territory and its disciplinary boundaries, scholars in German-speaking countries have onlyrecentlybegun to engagewith new approachesthat have arisen from science and technology studies (STS) or other fields that have pursuedinnovative research and theories of the political.This argument is underpinned in some detail by comparingthreecontributions from German-speaking sociologists to the debate on post-democracy.G iven the far-reaching events and transformations in recent history thathaveput politics in flux and exerted strain on democracy,p olitical sociologyh as appeared to be rather hesitant to veer from its established ways of thinking and explore new territory.