Between the Ethos of Science and the Ethos of Ideology

Abstract

This paper attempts to explain the continuous friction between Marxist sociology and Marxist ideology in terms of the premises of the theory of scientific communism, which accords to proletarian ideology the status of scientific truth. The successive stages of the evolution of Soviet sociology are related to the parallel development of views on the scientific ethos. The notion of the “ethos of ideology” is introduced and applied to the analysis of the ideological turmoil Soviet sociology underwent in the course of its establishment as an academic discipline. “Value tolerance” is advocated as an alternative to the “value-partisan” and “value-neutral” orientations in social science.     

Political leadership – the key for explaining post-communist diversity

This article focuses on the evaluation of recent research on post-communist political regime diversity in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It offers a snapshot of the literature which looks for explanations for this diversity in four sets of factors: pre-communist and communist legacies, transitional institutional choices, political leadership, and foreign influence. The findings are based on the political evolution of three countries: Slovakia, Belarus, and Macedonia. They are representative for all post-communist countries both in terms of regime trajectory and regional location. The author concludes that post-communist political regime diversity can best be explained when the political leadership in general and the top politicians’ ideology, in particular, are placed at the centre of the analysis. This explanation correlates well with all types of post-communist regime, whether democracy, dictatorship, or intermediate regime. The other factors – legacies, institutional choices, and foreign influence – at best, may act only as reinforcing variables in some cases.     

Sports Sociology’s Still Untapped Potential

Following up on Zirin’s (2008) challenge that sports sociologists “get off the bench,” and Karen and Washington’s (2001) plea to make sports sociology more central to analyses of social power, this article empirically reviews and assesses the sociology of sports from 1977–2008. Using a sample of 441 articles selected from the three major sports sociology journals during that period, we conclude that sports sociology exhibits a strong and increasing bias toward micro‐level analyses of (for example) how the content of sports frames and constructs the social world. A smaller and shrinking body of work examines more macro‐oriented issues such as the economics and politics of sports, and there seem to be few attempts to meaningfully synthesize these micro and macro orientations. We think this partiality toward micro‐oriented frameworks is rooted in factors unique to sports sociology while also reflecting larger trends within sociology as a whole. As advocates of popularly accessible public sociology, we respectfully suggest that sports sociologists try harder to weave macro analyses into their work, not necessarily replacing micro‐level approaches, but complementing them. We believe that sports sociology is well‐positioned to become a standard bearer for public sociology, but only if it pays more attention to the way organized sports intertwines with the organizational, political, and economic forces that perpetuate and exacerbate social inequality.     

Organizational theory in political sociology

Organizational theory and research has been enormously generative for political sociologists, if not always as fully centered as it might be, relative to broader notions of political power, economic resources, culture, and their interplay. This review both calls attention to the ways that organizational theory continues to inform political sociology and sets an agenda for how this interchange can be productively extended in various ways in scholarship on states, political parties, advocacy organizations, and business influences in politics. I highlight the genealogy of the new institutionalism and its variants (World Polity and institutional logics), population ecology (and the growing interest in both categories and audiences, alongside studies of the “ecology of ideology”), and research that follows in the broad tradition of resource dependence theory (and the link to more management-oriented approaches such as “non-market strategy” and stakeholder theories of organizational political activities). I also emphasize how novel theories of social movements and fields have offered innovative insights that incorporate organizational and political processes. I conclude by elaborating an agenda for how political sociologists can go further in maintaining and extending their highly productive and rewarding engagements with organizational theory.     

Jewish tradition faces the Soviet economy: moral dilemma of ‘shadow’ entrepreneurship in the former Pale of Settlement,Ukraine

Soviet life in the former Pale of Settlement appears in the memories of its residents as a world of living Jewish tradition existing within the professional and business activities of artisans and merchants at a time when the ideology and political structure of the Soviet Union prohibited private enterprise. That is why it occupied the shady parts of the socialist economy. Today, after collapse of the Soviet Union, it still poses moral dilemmas for those associated with its illegal activities. However, recollections about Soviet illegal enterprise also provide a space for critique of the Soviet system and a base for construction of contemporary local identity; in this way people reconcile the economic ethics of the recent Soviet past with modern capitalist reality. Narratives about illegal economic activities in the Soviet period are about the relationship between the people and the state. They are seen as a cosmological system; the Soviet state acted as an economically ineffective external force. Within its matrix was integrated a local world of human relationships with their customs and rules created the own local world of consumption and welfare. At the centre of this space is the socially and economically experienced Jewish entrepreneur whose competence is based on local Jewish tradition. Stories about illegal Soviet economic activity have become the heritage of local communities that approve of local business continuity.     

Styles of Intellectualism in Weber's Historical Sociology

The prevailing concept of the intellectual in contemporary sociology is an ideal type derived from Weber. Intellectuals are understood as politically disinterested, socially unattached individuals, who in their subjective intentions pursue knowledge for its own sake. Weber's ideal type thus provides the action framework for a sociology of knowledge that has been used as a direct counterclaim to Marxist theories of ideology. The author challenges this position, arguing that Weber's sociology of religion embraces important elements of a Marxist theory of ideology and thus presents an ambivalent concept of the intellectual that points toward a historicist sociology of knowledge.     

Science and neoliberal globalization: a political sociological approach

The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization.     

Machinisme, marxisme, humanisme : Georges Friedmann avant et après-guerre

Georges Friedmann (1902-1977) is known as the founder, following WW II, of a “sociology of humanist work”. Before the war, he was a Marxist intellectual, close to the Communist Party, who admired the young Soviet Union. How this political and ideological itinerary affected his sociology of labor, has never been systematically analyzed. To do so, “machinism” (mechanization), a key concept in the first part of Friedmann’s writing, is scrutinized. This concept came not from Marx, but from Michelet’s romantic conception of history, with which Friedmann was familiar. Following the war, it was given up for the pair “natural/technical milieu”; but this shift in vocabulary did not radically alter Friedmann’s views. Questions arise about how the intellectual itinerary of the founder of French labor sociology, who was shaped by the political trauma experienced by his generation, has lastingly affected this discipline.     

Intellectual property and industrialization: legalizing hope in economic growth

This article draws on theoretical resources from economic sociology and sociology of law to intervene in economic debates about the relationship between intellectual property and industrialization. Utilizing historical evidence from the earliest period of American intellectual property law and from a formative company in the New England textile industry, I propose a social process of influence that connects intellectual property law to industrialization. I argue that, consistent with the findings of New Economic Sociology, social relationship structures and social capital are the proximate influential force in industrialization. However, I also argue that transformative changes in those social relationship structures are rooted in the emergence of a particular type of political culture: what I call here, borrowing from Hannah Arendt and Frank Dobbin, a “Natal-Industrial Culture.” A Natal-Industrial Culture, as I propose it here, is a political culture in which collective hopes for the future are placed in new technologies and new cultural products, as means for achieving economic growth. Intellectual property law contributed to the emergence of this new type of political culture by holding out the promise of property, as a reward for the provision of new technologies or new cultural products. Because of the way that hope works on motivation—through cognitive pre-rehearsals of future attainment, which involve semantically-meaningful propositions and contribute to positive emotional experience—the promise of property provided a powerful stimulant to social capital formation. Working through the semantic resonances of property, intellectual property law contributed to a political culture in which invention and creativity were expected to secure a future of growth within the political community, both for particular members and for the political community, as a whole. By fostering a Natal-Industrial Culture, intellectual property law contributed to systematic invention and social capital-formation, leading, in turn, to the transformative changes in working and material provisioning that constitute industrialization.     

Third Sector in Ukraine: Civic Engagement Before and After the “Euromaidan”

This study explores the determinants of the low level of civic engagement in Ukraine. Applying the methodological framework of analytical sociology, we consider different social mechanisms that explain the weakness of the Ukrainian third sector. First, we discuss how the political system and economic performance of the country have shaped beliefs, values, and motives of people by creating the context for their actions. Second, we focus on different aspects of people’s experiences during the Soviet times to formulate a number of hypotheses concerning unwillingness of citizens to join CSOs. Analyzing the survey data of the years 2010 (beginning of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency) and 2014 (survey conducted right after the “Euromaidan”), we argue that some specific features of Homo Sovieticus, such as passivity, absence of political identification, and reliance on informal networks negatively affect the propensity of people to participate in CSOs. These effects are complemented by disappointment with the post-Soviet transformation and low subjective social status. Based on the results of analyses, we formulate suggestions concerning possible ways of fostering the development of civil society in Ukraine.     

Black lives matter,capital, and ideology: Spiraling out from India

Piketty's propositions for arresting inequality are discussed through the lens of racism/casteism. We focus on the case of India's George Floyds—the persistence of caste and tribe oppression under economic growth in India—through the insights of our long‐term ethnographic research. We show that inequalities are intimately tied to dynamics of capitalist accumulation in which racial/ethnic/caste/tribe and gender difference is crucial. We argue for an analysis that truly integrates ideology and the dynamics of political economy. The wider implications, we argue are political; they lie in the question of what is to be done. Despite his ambitions to decenter economics, Piketty remains trapped in the logic of economics for what he proposes are essentially economic reforms within capitalism. Moreover, ideological change cannot be a matter of choice only, and cannot be challenged solely at the level of ideas around economic inequality. It will also have to be fought as a direct contest of oppressive ideologies such as racism, casteism, and patriarchy, leading to new counter‐hegemonic positions. We will argue that this takes us from a global history of ideology to a global anthropology of praxis. A first step is to genuinely center conversations with disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and subaltern history studying people and voices from below and from the margins, and the perspectives of scholars and activists from below and from the margins.     

Max weber's vision of economic sociology

Max Weber's economic sociology is usually associated with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), but in this paper I show that what Weber himself called his “Wirtschaftssoziologie”, or economic sociology, looked quite different and was something that he developed during the last year of his life, 1919–1920. I present and outline Weber's (later) economic sociology and pay particular attention to his ideas of “economic (social) action” and of the three different forms of capitalism (rational capitalism, political capitalism and traditional capitalism). I also show that to Weber, economic sociology was part of a more general science of economics that he often referred to as “social economics” (“Sozialökonomik”). The paper ends with a comparison between the paradigm of economic sociology, which can be found in the work of Max Weber, and the paradigm of what is known as New Economic Sociology.     

Civil Society Organizations and the Enduring Role of Religion in Promoting Democratic Engagement

As Tocqueville observed the emergence of democracy in the USA, he noted the central role religion played in undergirding democratic life. Nearly 200 years later, it is unclear whether religion continues to possess sufficient capacity to promote democratic engagement. This study links organizational theory with research on the structural and cultural characteristics of civil society organizations (CSOs) to assess the current impact of religion on democracy. It analyzes original data from a national study of politically oriented CSOs to determine whether drawing on structural characteristics of religious congregations and cultural elements of religion helps the organizations promote democratic engagement. The analysis finds a positive relationship between organizations that incorporate structural and cultural forms of religion and their organizing capacity, political access, and mobilizing capacity. These findings suggest that religion, mediated by congregations and religious culture, retains sufficient civic vitality to help politically oriented CSOs foster democratic engagement.     

From Cyber-Libertarianism to Neoliberalism: Internet Exceptionalism,Multi-stakeholderism,and the Institutionalisation of Internet Governance in the 1990s

Although it is often taken for granted that Internet governance should employ the principle of multi-stakeholderism and that existing governance structures are not suitable for the regulation of the Internet, this article places the emergence of such principles in the context of the 1990s. Drawing on international political sociology and neo-Gramscian scholarship, it explores how different elites were able to coalesce around basic principles of Internet governance to create the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). These principles were the common elements of distinct discourses and were instrumental in the unification of a power elite. They also helped to create a hegemonic discourse that was acceptable to a broader public. Based on the study of policy documents produced during the debates that led to the creation of the ICANN, this article outlines five different discourses on Internet governance and focuses on the principles of multi-stakeholderism and Internet exceptionalism as basic elements of a hegemonic discourse. The study of the origins of these principles in the 1990s can shed light on their status in current debates.     

The sexual in Chinese sociology: homosexuality studies in contemporary China

Through a meta‐literature review, this paper examines the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China. It unfolds the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the modern male homosexual subject under major socio‐economic and political changes. Chinese sociology of homosexuality started in the reform era and has been dominated by Western knowledge production and the political ideology of the communist party‐state. Fused with the bio‐medical model and the state's modernization project in the 1980s–1990s, the sociological study adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with survey‐based methodology in the main which focused on the etiology of homosexuality. A new transnational knowledge production of sociology of homosexuality has formed since the 2000s which has shifted towards a constructivist/ post‐structuralist approach and reflexive qualitative methodology. The new sociological study examines the rise of male (as well as female) homosexual identity in China, questions the hetero/homosexual binary and discusses how an individual makes sense of homosexual identity to form same‐sex intimate relationships. By tracing the epistemology of homosexuality in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the dominance of the Western construction and the role of the state in shaping the knowledge of homosexuality and proposes alternative spaces for theorizing Chinese sexual identities, desires and practices.     

Navigating terrains of violence: how South African male youngsters negotiate social change

Two concepts of separatism, embodied in the doctrines of Black Nationalism and Apartheid, have been advocated by sections of the Black minority in the United States and the White minority in South Africa. Although these ideologies have developed on diametrically opposed political foundations, situations of subordination in contrast to situations of dominance, they contain certain common themes. This paper explores a number of basic problems in the sociology of separatism: (i) what is distinctive about separatism as an ideology? (ii) what causes the emergence of specific separatist ideologies? (iii) what structural factors are common to both ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinate’ separatism? (iv) what are the manifest and latent functions of separatist ideologies? (v) what general sociological hypotheses can be drawn from these two case studies concerning the origin and persistence of separatist ideologies?     

Sociology on Latin America in the 1960s: Developmentalism, Imperialism, and Topical Tropism

This article reveals the emergence of the idea of development in the sociological study of Latin America in the United States as a specific product of history. We show how in the 1960s, it was the result of interaction between the economic, political, military, and scientific fields generated by the mobilization of resources based on their respective rules. We criticize the idea that sociology had clearly-defined goals during this period. Our research demonstrates, for instance, how the research conducted on Latin America during that period was rooted in “topical tropism”. Our investigation is based on the analysis of empirical data including institutional information, journal articles and historical archives.     

Populist political right opinions and political trust among Norwegian youth

Recent decades have seen the growth of various strands of right-wing populist political orientations, where populism and critique of immigration policies have been central. These ideological developments have caused concern for the legitimacy of social and political institutions. The question explored in this paper, based on Norwegian survey data, is ‘Which types of right political orientations exist among young people, and how do these political attitudes affect trust in social and political institutions?’ The results reveal the existence of both a populist ‘new right’ political orientation similar to the ideology of the Progress Party and a nativist ideology. The new right orientation contains two sets of variables: (i) economic liberalism/state scepticism and (ii) nationalist values. For trust in political institutions, the emerging picture is complex because the nationalist dimension of both the populist orientation and the nativist ideological orientation implies a high level of trust in political institutions. To the extent the new right political orientations causes mistrust, it seems to come from the liberal economic, anti-statist values included in this ideology. Based on these findings, future researchers should distinguish more clearly between the ideological dimensions going into populist political right orientations and the relationship between attitudes and more practical implications of such ideologies.     

A Short History of the Sociology of Corruption: the Demise of Counter-Intuitivity and the Rise of Numerical Comparisons

This article examines the history of the sociology of corruption. It is shown that from the 1950s until the early 1970s, the sociological discourse on corruption was dominated by a functionalist approach that tried to offer a counter-intuitive perspective on deviant behavior in arguing that corruption has positive functions for political and economic development. Because of a political reading of this discourse, its ambiguous terminology and some difficulties in methodology, it was largely abandoned in sociology. However, this not only led to a change in paradigmatic orientations in the sociology of corruption, but also to a general decline in interest for the phenomenon in sociology. This gap was filled by economic models of corruption that could bypass some terminological difficulties in defining corruption and, building on this, also enabled a largely quantitative approach in numerically comparing, correlating and ranking corruption. The effect was a consensus on the mostly negative effects of corruption on development, a proliferation of the transparency ideal and the disability of sociology to offer an alternative perspective on evaluating the effects of corruption.