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This paper argues that bullshit is a practical resource for self‐deceiving individuals, or those who merely prefer to avoid self‐examination, insofar as it is able to provide a mask for poor doxastic hygiene. While self‐deception and bullshit are distinct phenomena, and bullshit does not cause self‐deception, bullshit disrupts the capacity to interrogate the motivational biasses that fuel deception. The communicative misdirection engaged in by ordinary social bullshitters is applied reflexively by the self‐deceiver to distort, evade, and obfuscate the self‐deceiver's self‐accounting. This discussion presupposes a broadly narrative approach to self‐awareness and discusses how a motivated susceptibility to bullshit offers an explanation how our reports about ourselves can be frequently at odds with reality, and suggests that a complacency about rational validation of belief outside of self‐certainty, i.e., the prevalence of bullshit, is even more of a threat than Frankfurt thought it to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the new narratives around the experience of illness, acording to the movement of people with disabling chronic illneses. This article is divided into four different moments. The first one presente a description of the disabling chronic illneses, the second one offers some notes about the moral and capitalistic assumptions that have shaped the experience of illness. The third section focuses on disability as a mechanism for the territorialization and entrapment of the experience of illness. The four and last moment exposes a quick panoramic of the starting points for ill movement. We conclude that ill militancy achieves to build a narrative and experience of illness that come together as part of an anticapitalistic and antiableist praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala are PhD sociologists who served as presidents of their countries. Jože Pučnik of Slovenia, also a PhD sociologist, was a leading but defeated candidate in his country’s first post-communist presidential election. This paper explores the relationship between their sociological work and their political careers. Cardoso’s work was interdisciplinary and focused on historical conjunctures. He was very widely cited in scholarly publications. Pučnik was concerned with overcoming fundamentalist megaliths and uniting theory and practice. He had difficulty communicating the relationship between his sociology and his political leadership. Arévalo wrote a dissertation in the historical sociology of Guatemalan militarism, and also pursued an applied sociological career in conflict resolution. Sociological leadership may be enhanced by using middle-range theories tuned to current situations, especially at times of crisis, and by advocating timely and feasible solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the tensions between ideals about sociology (and what it ought to be) transmitted during university socialization and the everyday working activities among Argentinean sociologists. It focuses on an extreme case: that of the graduates who, lacking the opportunity or the desire to join the professoriate, became market researchers. The case is extreme because while university training provided these individuals with a set of methodological and analytical skills that proved to be useful (and profitable) when studying consumers and markets, it also encouraged a critical, world-rejecting, view of the discipline which was at odds with their professional activities. Not surprisingly, they encountered a distressing moral puzzle: were they betraying sociology's progressive values, values to which they were seriously committed? Building on E. Hughes' concept of "dirty work", this paper examines how these individuals navigated an occupation that was, at least initially, seen as morally objectionable, and the ways by which they came to imbue it with new and edifying "sociological" value. This article is based on interviews with sociologists working in market research and a socio-historical account of the School of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, the nation's most important program, where all our interviewees were trained. This study has implications for understanding situations in which actual professional practices are in sharp contrast with the ideals presented during university socialization, and the identity repair processes that university-trained workers undertake when dealing with deviant careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]