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- The “Matilda Effect”: Women in Interwar Romanian Sociological Research
and Social Intervention
Abstract: In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, several sociological monographic campaigns were carried out in a few villages in Romania. It was for the first time that a large research group from Romania investigated rural social life using an integrated theoretical system and interdisciplinary methods and instruments. In the second half of the 1930s, a different kind of rural-oriented endeavour started to be undertaken: the “royal voluntary student teams”, whose work in Romanian villages was more oriented towards social action than social research. In October 1938, the Law of the Social Service was issued, providing that all of Romania’s university graduates were compelled to participate in organized cultural work in villages. In most of the activities undertaken by the Bucharest Sociological School and coordinated by Professor Dimitrie Gusti, women participated in large numbers – yet another new feature in Romanian scientific practice. In this paper, I explore how gender, conceptualized as a social, political, and material category, configures power relations within a research group, and I provide tentative and inherently partial answers to such questions as: What combination of social, economic, and political factors led to women’s massive involvement in the sociological monographic campaigns' How did women’s participation contribute to the research endeavours' What are the disciplinary and institutional mechanisms and personal strategies that produced women’s inclusion in, and later exclusion from, the research group'
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- Influencer Agencies: The Institutionalization of the Digital Attention
Economy
Abstract: In Lippmann’s media interpretation, attention plays a central role. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, the author realizes that to understand the operational characteristics of mass media, it is essential to learn about the nature of consumer attention. Lippmann was one of the first researchers to discover that without examining attention, we cannot understand the patterns of persuasion or political, social, and cultural influence, and the peculiarities of media economy. Thus, in his work Public Opinion, published in 1922, he devoted a distinct chapter, entitled Time and Attention, to this topic. Lippmann’s legacy lives on with us in this sense as well. With the advent of digital media, new possibilities for exploiting attention appeared, and tracking the characteristics and changes of these is also of great importance in contemporary media research. The following study focuses on the institutionalization of the digital attention economy, and within it deals with influencer agencies as the newest segment of the media and cultural industry.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- The Reorganization of Hungarian Sociology after the 1956 Revolution
Abstract: The history of Hungarian sociology in the state-socialist period can certainly be described in terms of a general Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) historical model, the most important feature of which is the undivided power of the Communist Party. Under such conditions, the Soviet Union and local political power holders had a direct influence on the institutionalization and functioning of sciences, including sociology. The study contributes to understanding the social impact of the 1956 revolution, particularly its crushing effect on the development of Hungarian sociology in relation to the general model. Firstly, the early development of sociology in the Soviet Union and most state-socialist countries in the 1950s was blocked in Hungary by the 1956 revolution. The trauma of the 1956 revolution made all groups of society, including the intelligentsia, realize that the system could not be changed in the long term. At the same time, it made it clear to the political authorities that the system could not be maintained in the long run with methods of the past. As a result, Kádár’s consolidation relied heavily on a compromising intelligentsia, needed for its expertise (in this case, modern sociological expertise) and legitimizing the system. Consequently, sociology in Hungary started developing and became institutionalized in the early 1960s. In this situation, sociology represented both a critical point of view opposing the system and, at the same time, a tool of its – covert or overt – legitimation.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- Natalism as a Nationalist Biopolitical Response from Socialism Till Today
in Hungary
Abstract: After the Second World War, the population policies of the socialist countries were not free from the dilemma of natalist/anti-natalist policies. This essay focuses on the Hungarian population policy discourses of the Kádár era and the present day, with some references to Central European specificities. The fear of the disappearance of Hungarians has been present in Hungarian intellectual discourse for several centuries, and by the twentieth century, it had become a fundamental idea that reached society as a whole. Given the growing interest (not independently of contemporary trends) in the international sociological literature not only in the transformation of biopolitics in recent decades but also in the historical antecedents of earlier periods, I believe that it may be interesting to examine the fear of national death in both a Hungarian and a Central European context.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- Levente Székedi: Limitele Supravieţuirii – sociologia maghiară din
Transilvania după 1945 [Limits of Survival – Hungarian Sociology in
Transylvania after 1945]
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- Conflict and Cooperation within the Monographic Collective
Abstract: This research is intended as an in-depth study of the contexts favouring the development of organizational and scientific cooperation practices, as well as of the contexts favouring the emergence of organizational competition and conflict practices within the Gustian School. I will follow how the respective practices emerged and consolidated within the abovementioned sociological school. I will also discuss the organizational climate and how internal conflicts were managed in the school. Using this approach, I intend to explore and elaborate upon the directions already inaugurated by Zoltán Rostás in his research on the organizational development of the Gustian School.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- The Peculiarity of Sociographic Knowledge in Hungary
Abstract: Hungarian sociography describes society and social problems in an easily understandable way. Sociographic writings do not neglect the political purpose, which creates a specific knowledge about the society within a limited public. Despite the heterogeneity of the genre, the central element of sociographic work is the critique of the dysfunctionality of the existing social system, urging social change. Sociography has not had the conditions to become a science. It remained an area on the border of politics – science – literature. All three at once; however, neither of them. The problem of the institutionalization of sociography means that its importance can be determined through the examination of its task.Burawoy’s theory on public sociology argues that the knowledge of society expressed in scientific language needs to be adapted to the common language. Based on the characteristics of Hungarian sociography, the main goal is to adapt Burawoy’s approach on public sociology to sociography. This article presents the peculiarities of Hungarian sociographic knowledge production and transmission during the 20th century and attempts to place sociography in Burawoy’s system.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- The Gusti Cooperative. Two Decades of Social History Experiments
Abstract: This text outlines the journey and achievements of the Gusti Cooperative, a research group with deep roots in the work of Professor Zoltán Rostás in the field of oral history. Established in the early 2000s, the Cooperative emerged from Rostás’s initiative to offer an alternative and complementary history of the Sociological School of Bucharest. Comprising Rostás, his Ph.D. students, and a network of friends, the Cooperative primarily focuses on social history and the history of Romanian sociology. Their work revolves around oral history interviews, documentation, and the publication of otherwise inaccessible documents from the interwar period. Despite maintaining an informal status and lacking a conventional organizational structure, the Cooperative has made significant contributions to the field of Romanian sociological research over the past two decades. Their most notable work involves the retrieval and publication of forgotten pages from the history of Romanian sociology, including anthologies, correspondences, and unpublished documents.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- A Sociological Panorama after the Great War. A Central and Eastern
European Comparatist Attempt
Abstract: This article attempts to draw a general outline of comparative Central and Eastern European sociology. It focuses on the year 1918, when the Great War ended, and it explores the background and continuation of the (re)birth of sociology. The study is justified by the fact that the history of the national schools of sociology has been approached in correlation with Western centres, and therefore a regional approach is needed. First, the study differentiates between countries that were allied to the victorious powers in the First World War and countries that lost the war, between countries where sociology gained momentum and countries where science suffered. In the countries that were at an advantage – Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Serbia –, sociology was at very different stages of institutionalization, but it registered significant progress until the 30s. The countries that lost – Bulgaria, Russia, and Hungary – were not only more weakened after the war but also plagued by revolutions, civil wars, and retaliations; they were not a fertile ground for sociological production. Apart from Russia, it is only in the 1930s that sociology started to considerably develop in these countries. The article does not only compare the status of sociology in the seven countries, but it also explores the evolution of the relationships between them. After an understandable dependence on the Western academic centres, there was the possibility for a regional identity to form.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
- “Hungarian Supremacy Cannot Be Debated”. Hungarian Conservative
Sociologists on the Nationalities Question (1908–1918)
Abstract: Magyar Társadalomtudományi Szemle (MTSZ), i.e. Hungarian Review of Social Sciences, was published between 1908 and 1918, and it was the highest-toned journal of contemporary Hungarian conservative sociology. At that time, in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, one of the most pressing social issues was the nationalities question: what rights belong to non-Hungarian-speaking nationalities living in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary' This question was answered by two schools of tender-aged Hungarian social science. In general, liberal-left sociologists following Western scientific patterns believed that the language and cultural rights of national minorities need to be expanded. Conservatives, on the other hand, called for a restrictive policy to maintain the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Hungary. The analysis of the authors and writings in favour of the extension of rights has been completed (Litván 1978, 2006; Litván–Szücs 1973). Conservative sociologists who support the restriction, however, have so far received almost no attention in the history of sociology. In this writing, I would like to fill this gap. After the short institutional presentation of contemporary conservative sociology, I will focus on their central journal, MTSZ. I will analyse the articles in which the authors have taken a position on the nationalities question. I argue that the articles published in the MTSZ have primarily addressed the nationalities question as a political and demographic issue. Therefore, I will describe these two types of writing. (Beyond that, some articles focused on social theory, culture, or education when writing about the rights of non-Hungarian-speaking minorities.) My basic question is how those aspects of the nationalities question appeared in MTSZ and how those all create a specific political store of knowledge. If we get answers to this, not only will we shed light on one of the forgotten but exciting schools of early Central European social science, but perhaps the history of the first quarter of the 20th century will also be better understood.
PubDate: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT
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