Search

Re-interpreting Simmel's work on money as an attempt to develop a critical sociology of consumption from a relativist theory of value, this paper illustrates the extent to which it may be seen as something more, and different than, sociological impressionism. The modern social space of valuation is chiefly defined by the development of money economy within metropolitan settings. This allows for the public commensurability of values and pushes for their private incompatibility. Subjectivism is heightened in so far as individuals' capacity to sustain difference is vital to social, objective exchange. Contrary to neo-classical economics, the appreciation of individual choice entails for Simmel a critical appraisal of the social conditions of its existence which results in a discussion of the risks associated with the pressure to perform as autonomous choosers. The paper concludes with a view on what may be a Simmelian sociology of consumption, one which enriches the classical focus on social distinction with a critical concern for the modern conditions of valuation and self-constitution. Fashion and style may be conceived of as techniques of consumption that, embodying particular combinations of difference and indifference, help govern the modern world of goods. In this view, these mundane practices have the potential to function as a balancing practice of self-constitution, taking place between the indifference of the market which allows individualization, and the risk that the individuality thus constituted remains empty, a reproducer of commensurability unable to bestow value on things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an outcome of a project that started with exploring theories of development in advanced societies, especially those of functionalism and Marxism, and then moved on to consider the role of knowledge development in the process of societal change. This shift is connected with the presumption of critical humanism. Critical humanism maintains that social inquiry and social theories should also reflect on the social-structural context and context of application-praxis, should relate to the self-reflection and social consciousness of people, and should be oriented towards problems of social transcendence and social emancipation. History is seen as a dialectic process where social conditions create man and man creates history from given conditions. The development of social knowledge and social consciousness plays an important role in this process. The explication of social emancipation should take its point of departure in human conditions in human needs and the exploration of emancipatory means, goals and transcendence should be part of an increasing self-consciousness of society and people. The functionalistic theories of evolution and modernization appear as naturalistic and deterministic notions from the point of view of critical humanism.

This paper is a broad attempt at a multi-level conceptualization of social change. It proceeds by taking a concrete research problem (the relationship between industrialization and the response of labor) and following it through successive stages of conceptualization, model-building, and the construction of an integrated structure for operationalization. The purpose of the paper is thus twofold; specifically, it presents a theory, model and data-gathering approach for the concrete problem at hand and, generally, it outlines possible theoretical and causal links among three distinct levels of social phenomena. It begins by depicting selected concepts from five different theorists in a conglomerate model which shows posited conceptual links within a causal range. It then proceeds to build up a multi-level framework around the three levels of ecological aggregate, organizational structure, and the individual actor. The theoretical nature of human ecology is presented as especially appropriate for analysis of change variables and the relationship of organizational structure to the ecological base is defined. The communal unit is defended as a contextual base and the individual is related theoretically to both this base and the level of emergent structure. A more complete categorization of contextual and backround variables is then added to that of the existing literature, and the nature of these variables is made more precise in terms of the multi-level structure. Finally an attempt is made to integrate, in a determinate fashion, the three "incommensurate" levels. This is done by relying on principles from ecological psychology whereby the concepts organism-environment, inside-outside, and thing-medium are used to postulate possibilities for cross-level causality. The end product is a multi-level, ecologically-based data structure for the analysis of dynamic social variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social changes associated with late modernity have led many to question the continuing relevance of class analysis. This paper shows that, far from being dead, class remains an important analytical tool. This is shown in relation to the constitution of economic classes, the causal effects of class situations, the formation of social classes, and patterns of class awareness. It is argued that economic class divisions can still be identified and that they continue to exercise a major impact on life chances. Nevertheless, class effects must be considered alongside other, partially offsetting, causal effects, and this means that patterns of social class formation are looser than in the past. People continue to recognise the existence of economic and social class divisions, but they are likely to supplement this with other lifestyle factors in constituting their social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on a seminar on social change and social structure held in Vuoranta near Helsinki, Finland in November 1976. Eighteen sociologists from Poland and about twenty from Finland participated in the event. It was organized as part of an exchange programme between the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Finland. The practical arrangements were made by the Research Group for Comparative Sociology at the University of Helsinki. The Polish group was led by professor Wlodzimierz Wesolowski and the Finnish group by professor Erik Allardt. The process of preparing the papers for the seminar was somewhat unusual. The main theme was divided into fourteen separate topics, including class structure and stratification, social mobility, political systems, family, regional development, cultural participation and others. For each topic a Polish and a Finnish participant met before the seminar and agreed on the general content of the paper to be prepared, the idea being to emphasize the comparative nature of the seminar. In one case the respective participants succeeded in writing an integrated paper in which the comparative aspect was central. In general, there seemed not to be great differences in the sociological orientations of the two groups.

The aim of the paper is to expose the social and political dialectics of planning and urban development under 'postmodern' conditions. First, the different meanings of the term 'postmodernism' are discussed, and it is argued that notwithstanding the problems and the ambiguities of the concept, the debate calls attention to important contemporary social and cultural transformations. These are described as an interrelated development of on the one hand the socio-economic structure connected to a 'postfordist model of accumulation', and on the other the cultural discourse in art, architecture and social philosophy. The specification of this transformative development in relation to the planning discourse, planning praxis and urban structure is explored, and the paper ends up with a discussion of a possible critical moment localized in the postmodern emphasis on 'otherness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses one of the paradoxes of the sociology of health in Finland. On the one hand sociological health research has expanded considerably over the past few decades, during which time there have been a number of changes in the field of health care: the growth of a nation-wide network of health centres, the development and increasing application of medical technology, tendencies towards privatization and concentration, increasing costs of health care, changes in morbidity, and so on. These developments have given rise to a host of new problems which necessitate a social-scientific approach in research and also sociological training for health personnel. On the other hand, within medical faculties there has been growing opposition to sociological health research and education. The paper describes the main features of the sociology of health, the development of the discipline's institutional status, and its relationship to medicine both in countries where the discipline has a strong footing (the United States and Great Britain) and in Finland. In spite of the different circumstances and historical backgrounds, the difficulties encountered by the sociology of health tend to be rather similar in different countries. The development of the sociology of health in Finland is discussed from the point of view of both research and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the critical potentials of Vietnamese social science. The research starts by looking at post-war political and social changes, and the present climate of debate to get at the meaning of party leadership and party ideology on the macro level. Section 4 analyzes two social science journals to ascertain the concrete outcome of party control and ideological steering. Section 5 discusses the talk with social scientists and representatives of the State Commission for Science and Technology (SCST) and the Vietnam Committee for Social Sciences (VCSS) to elucidate attitudes to social science exchange. The author held three seminars in the VCSS on a paper about Sweden to explore possible cognitive differences between Sweden and Vietnam as to presumptions and evaluations. To get an idea of the of the conditions for empirical and critical social science in Vietnam, for two months the author followed up a Swedish study of the living and working conditions of forestry workers, comparing this with a corresponding study made by a Vietnamese research team. These and other concrete explorations are the base for some concluding remarks concerning future social science exchange between Vietnam and Sweden.

Several alternative strategies have been used in studies of the structure and development of national societies. In descriptions of single national societies there is often a tendency to search for unique features and patterns. While unique patterns of development certainly can be found, it is nevertheless reasonable to claim that in comparative studies categorical concepts should be transformed to variables the values of which are identifiable in different societies. With the rise of new states and the intensification of interest in the "third world" the arguments for the search of unique features have appeared in a somewhat new form. It is often stated that solutions and arrangements used in the economically developed part of the world cannot be used in developing states, and vice versa. In principle there is nothing new in this argument. In all social science analyses the problem of how much to oversimplify reality is a crucial one. Whatever arguments can be forwarded they reflect most of all the preferences and predilections of the researcher. Whether one wants to deal with unique features or not depends on the level of generality of the models and frames of reference preferred. This paper is written under the assumption that it is worthwhile to strive for models and frames of reference which are generally applicable. Four important strategic considerations are here stressed as particularly important in developing models for the comparative study of the structure and development of national societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extraordinary growth in the number of legally independent units of government during the 1950s and '60s has prompted a wide variety of scholarly efforts toward description, analysis and theorizing. The literature generated through these efforts is voluminous and dispersed and has so far never been subject to systematic codification. In this brief paper there can be no question of doing justice to the entire range of approaches to the comparative study of state formation and national development. Only a few lines of attack will be singled out for discussion and even these will not be evaluated in any great detail: the purpose is not to review the past literature but to define priority tasks for future cooperative data processing and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore some of the points of contact between Giddens' theory of self-identity and late modernity, and the broader constituency of post-modern theories of subjectivity. We take as our focus some recent work by Anthony Giddens, who has set out an account of what it means to live in 'late modernity'. This account, we argue, resonates with a parallel 'post-modem' account of subjectivity. We express reservations about the way in which both late- and post-modem subjects appear in these theoretical accounts to be disconnected from their 'real' social and political contexts. Similarly, we point to the way in which social action is increasingly seen as having broken free from material and political interests. We point to the dangers of losing sight of material conditions and political circumstances in theoretical debates about modernity and post-modernity. Moreover, we set out some broad critical propositions intended to counter this tendency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic and social changes in advanced countries have affected the development and growth of sports federations for the past fifty years. This paper focuses on the ways in which changes in the development of organized sport reflect politico-structural change s in society and what factors are linked with them. Finland is regarded as a good area of research because of the differentiation in sports movements after the civil war in 1919 and the enormous growth in the support of sports federations after the Second World War. The main targets are the Finnish Central Sports Federation and the Workers' Sports Federation. Social cleavages between the working and bourgeois classes, between ethnic groups (Finnish and the Swedish speaking population), as well as different socio-economic factors have affected their development and growth both quantitatively and qualitatively. Changes in support for the Central Federation are not influenced by situational structural factors and changes to the same extent as development possibilities in the Workers' Federation are. Support for the Central Federation is more dependent on general social-political conditions, whereas support for the Workers' Federation with its closer leftist and labour movement links is more closely and directly connected with factors affecting the position of workers in society or their internal organizations. In spite of many levelling factors, the connections are reflected in the development conditions of the two organizations even during the period after the Second World War. However, there are differences in the explanation of support during the pre-war and post-war periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, cultural analyses have become an integrated part of urban theory, and culture is often seen as an important factor in the interpretation of both the structural changes of society and the multiplicity of life forms. But culture is not only used as a means to understand actual changes; equally often it is used as a tool to create changes. Under the headings of culture and space, culture and place, and culture and urban policy, the article presents a general view of recent urban theoretical attempts to grasp the role of culture, first in a global, secondly in a local and thirdly in an urban political perspective. The analyses of culture and space focus on the central role of culture and the cultural industries in the reconstruction of the economy, which took place after the economic recession in the 1970s. The spatial consequences of this reconstruction are discussed in terms of globalization, polarization and hierarchization. The analyses of culture and place strive to increase the knowledge of how the structural changes have affected the built environment and the social and cultural life of the city. The consequences are often discussed in terms of gentrification, aesthetization and privatization of public space. Special attention is paid to the growing social polarization and segregation. The analyses of culture and urban policy focus on the role of culture in the effort to strengthen the competitiveness of the city. Two different strategies are discussed, an instrumental one which directly aims at economic growth, and an integrative one where the goal is to restore the cultural hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author suggests ways on how globalization should be conceived as a process. He approached globalization from a constructionist point of view and claims that global trends and developments do not form a single dynamics of global social change. He calls on globalization researchers to be aware of their participant role in a continuous public, political discourse on social change, and on the political uses of the terms they use as analytical concepts.

The article relates the views of Alain Touraine regarding social movements in advanced industrial societies. Since May 1968, Touraine has sought to assess the transformative potential of incipient progressive social movements in post-industrial societies. He has done so by articulating a theoretical framework, described variously as a sociologie actionnaliste and a sociology of the self-production of society, which seeks to be at once anti-functionalist and post-Marxist. Although his political orientation and the contours of his critique of the programmed society often bear a marked resemblance to those of contemporary critical theorists, he differs from them insofar as he sees sociology as a praxiological resource for the new social movements. It is his view of the distinctive position of sociology in contemporary advanced industrial societies that has led him to undertake a large-scale project, which he refers to as sociological intervention. This has led to a series of studies which document the method of pratique in action: in the French student movement; the anti-nuclear movement; the ethnic revival among the Occitan population; the Solidarity movement in Poland; and the workers' movement in France.

The article summarizes the development of development theory from its early economistic and eurocentric phase to the present more interdisciplinary and global debate, particularly in the wake of the so-called dependency school. In this context a number of contemporary theoretical trends are distinguished and their relevance is briefly discussed. It is shown that many of these trends take as their point of departure the dependency problematique, and the article concludes that the questions raised by the dependency school were and still are relevant, although the answers arid remedies sometimes were less than adequate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the scope and mission of the journal. The journal embraces theoretical and empirical work, micro and macro levels of analysis, quantitative and qualitative methods, and all substantive areas of sociology. The criteria for evaluating papers submitted for publishing are explained. The topics that the editors are in need of further research and clarification are mentioned, including sociology of economic and social change.