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This research by social scientists from Bulgaria, Germany and Taiwan started with the question of how a comparison of the institutional cultures of these three countries could be done. 'Institutional culture', here, refers to the traditions of society as well as to the values of particular institutions. The authors attempt an answer by exploring problems of cultural comparison, by describing the research process as a meeting of cultures, by developing an agreed upon conceptual framework to orient the analysis. They exemplify their approach in comparable descriptions of the core cultures and of the related economic-political exchange cultures of the three countries. This allows a contrast between the institutional cultures of different 'civilizations', and the authors provide a matrix of traditions and exchange patterns for empirical research on particular economic phenomena. The data basis is literature at hand on the history of mentality as well as on the history and sociology of societies and institutions. The research was carried out in 1997/8. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political sociology in the federal Republic of Germany. The core of political sociology is constituted in by four elements. It aims at analyzing political phenomena from a macro-sociological points of view, it is historically oriented, founded on empirical research and interested in theory building. The combination of these characteristics makes up the ideal type of political sociology. For R. Dahrendorf, sociology cannot be separated from the analysis of political problems. He argues that both sociology and history have the task of explaining the rise and success of National Socialism. Historians have to explain in detail the uniqueness of the German development from 1918-1945. The task of sociology is more general. It consists in collecting the material necessary for explaining the failure of German democracy and the victory of National Socialism. The period of politicization had contradictory effects on shaping the research agenda of political sociology in the years following 1968. First, the debate on neo-Marxism had the positive effect of innovation in the political sociology research agenda. The consequences of student opposition in reshaping the traditional research agenda of political sociology were already expressed by the general topic the German Sociological Association had chosen for its Sixteenth Meeting in 1968: Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.

This article focuses on the biographical research in former West Germany. German sociologists ignored their predecessors, relating instead their inquiry to the U.S. works, and having to reconstruct the whole itinerary. However, a new movement could only have developed in proportion to the knowledge its participants. On the one hand, then, the failed attempts to found a German biographical research had left marks in the researchers' habits. Yet on the other, the rich corpus of theoretical concepts elaborated by other German thinkers could be drawn on, and made to fit sociological principles. German sociologists also view biographies as accounts of the relations, i.e. tensions, between the individual and society. Three notions are at stake here: that of the individual, and the processes of socialization and individualization. In the first instance, biography is defined as a factor of individuation and integration, therefore of socialization from the perspective of its significance and function in everyday life. As for individualization, German researchers tend to view it through the notion of "Biographisierung."

The existence of social science sects and the fusion with their respective myths and ideologies tend to give social science an inward-looking perspective, and one which helps account for its combative pre dispositions and for its discontinuous nature. The same inward-focused perspective is made evident in this, the third step in the effort to mark the characteristics of social science. The present section takes a position essentially the same as the one adopted for sociology by Ayala. He divided sociology into national branches, and then asked rhetorically how one can attach the term national to a discipline which aspires to discover general truth without respect to time or place. There is no German Physics or French chemistry, only national aspects of a unitary discipline and a unitary history. His explanation is that these sciences develop as cumulative knowledge. If some national centre of physics or chemistry should deviate from the international standard, the critical experiment would mediate the difference and establish unity.