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Totalitarian Experience and Knowledge Production
Totalitarian Experience and Knowledge Production examines, in a comparative perspective, sociology as practiced in six European Communist countries marked by various forms of totalitarianism in the period 1945-1989. In contrast to normative sociology’s view that such coexistence is essentially impossible, the author argues that sociology could function in these undemocratic societies insofar as sociologists succeeded in establishing relatively autonomous institutional and cognitive zones. Based on the self-reflection of scholars who had practiced their profession during that period, the book reveals the tribulations of the scientific identity of sociology under the specific social-political conditions of totalitarian societies. It becomes evident that the basic principle that made sociological knowledge possible was freedom of thought in search for scientific truth despite the ‘truth’ imposed by political authority.
Inventing the Future in an Age of Contingency
In a world where communication and language are not as divisive as they once were, we are experiencing a convergence unlike any other. Through technology and a broadening of our cultural understanding, we are opening doors and closing communication borders. While it is easier to adapt to and enter each other’s worlds, still we must navigate complex systems to understand operations within groups and organisations. Our experiences allow us more acceptance, but education is the only door to full comprehension. The chapters in this volume challenge readers to explore complexity theory and offer elements that support the continued and ever-growing need for its use. The book explores technology, culture, and science to navigate systems within organisations, in order to divulge the broad spectrum in which complexity theory may be utilised.
Knowledge for Whom?
This ground-breaking volume is a follow-up to Intellectuals and Their Publics. In contrast to the earlier book, which was mainly concerned with the activity of intellectuals and how it relates to the public, this volume analyses what happens when sociology and sociologists engage with or serve various publics. More specifically, this problem will be studied from the following three angles: How does one become a public sociologist and prominent intellectual in the first place? (Part I) How complex and complicated are the stories of institutions and professional associations when they take on a public role or tackle a major social or political problem? (Part II) How can one investigate the relationship between individual sociologists and intellectuals and their various publics? (Part III) This book will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of the sociology of knowledge and ideas, the history of social sciences, intellectual history, cultural sociology, and cultural studies.
T. G. Masaryk and the Jewish Question
An English translation of a successful title by the first post-1989 Czech ambassador to Israel, Miloš Pojar. The book is a result of the author’s life-long interest in this difficult and taboo theme. Starting with the first publication of the samizdat collection, TGM and Our Present Day, Czech anti-Semitism has been newly researched in a broad context. This book presents a useful summary of Tomás Garrigue Masaryk’s stances from his writings and political activities, including a detailed description of the historic first visit of the head of the state to Palestine in 1927. The English edition contains a preface by Shlomo Avineri and a personal essay by Petr Pithart.
The Perspective of Historical Sociology
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the themes that make up the field of Historical Sociology. At its centre is the human individual as related to social and historical development. The key question it raises is who or what is responsible for the process of human history: society or the individual?
After Communism
Freed from direct political constraints, many sociologists from former Communist countries have sought to maintain a clear distinction between research and politics through an attachment to objectivity, conceptual clarity and methodological rigour. Yet they have often sidestepped the critique of epistemological certainties which has become orthodoxy in much 'Western' thinking, and which has implicated sociology in the very structures of power it describes. This collection of writings, based on the 2002 Critical Sociology Conference held at Tbilisi State University in Georgia, was produced by sociologists working as members of or visitors to post-Communist states. As such, it reflects the ten...
State and Society in China's Democratic Transition
This book examines China's process of democratic transition, and the role of state and society in this process.
Lazarsfeld’s Methodology and Its Influence on Postwar Sociology in Europe
This book explains how the Columbia model of sociology, which was based on the methodology of P.F. Lazarsfeld, became a dominant sociological school of thought in American and European postwar sociology. Providing an overview of Lazarsfeld’s inventions and his methodological, organisational, and institutional innovations, it describes the means by which a particular model of sociology was gradually adopted in departments headed by Lazarsfeld and in the work of his successors. With attention to the use by Lazarsfeld of methodological texts published by prestigious publishing houses in his research and teaching, his activity in international organisations – including the UN – his collaboration with figures such as Robert K. Merton and Raymond Boudon, and his attempts to show how the roots of his empirical research methodology lay in the work of early European scholars, this volume shows how a particular sociological paradigm came to prevail over others for more than a decade. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in the history of the discipline and questions of research methodology.
