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The aim of these issue of 'International Review of Sociology' is to present some reflections, which, starting from the analysis of several mediterranean countries, highlight the overall employment context of graduates in Sociology, characterised by widespread underemployment (or over-education) and difficulties in accessing the labour market. In particular, the papers highlight the need for a greater connection between academic sociology and professionals and the university's responsibility to establish adequate training paths and provide both specific and transversal skills, which are fundamental in the work of the sociology professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares the lives of three female social scientists born in the first two decades of the twentieth century and belonging to the first generations that had the opportunity not only to study at universities, but also to realistically consider a professional career in academia. Marie Jahoda, Herta Herzog and Patricia L. Kendall made their ways separately and interacted only rarely with each other, but shared at least one characteristic which influenced their careers: they were married to Paul F. Lazarsfeld, one of the eminent sociologists of the twentieth century, prominent as someone who encouraged and supported many of his collaborators and students. The comparison of these three women shows that they were professionally successful but did not completely prioritize academic work before other interests, ambitions, and obligations. These priorities found a correspondence in their underperformance in academia with regard to the particular preconditions to enter the pantheon of an academic discipline. Both their oeuvres and their academic records suggest that they were not actively striving to become academic 'immortals.' Here it is shown that women, even if they are to be located below the 'ultra elite,' produced remarkable and memorable intellectual achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main focus of the Italian literature on the profession of the sociologist is the transmission of sociological knowledge and the occupational outcomes of sociology graduates. In my paper, I try to examine additional aspects in depth that I believe to be crucial for the development of the profession: the absence of a sociological community of interests, the weak forms of association not supporting sociologists working in non-academic settings with regards to interprofessional conflicts and a public presence that conveys and transmits the usefulness of the profession and the discipline. Sociologists rarely use the skills acquired through formal education to strengthen their position in the labour market through collective actions. Their effort to control the market of particular services is too weak. In the paper, I argue for the need to construct a community of interest that intends to include practitioners and academic sociologists in their entirety, independently from institutional membership and to promote sufficient control on the dynamics of supply and demand of professional services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of the article shares his numerous encounters with sociologists. The World Congresses that are organized every forth year by the International Sociological Association (ISA) had never-before 1970-been situated within any of the countries of Eastern Europe which at that time were known as members of the Soviet Bloc. The first ISA World Congress to occur within the Soviet Bloc took place late in the summer of 1970 in Varna, Bulgaria. Sociologist Andrei Zdravomyslov was such an individual, a face emerging out of faceless anonymity. At one of the first plenary sessions in one of the large assembly halls at the World Congress in Varna he presented a paper comparing the conceptual frameworks of Marxian historical materialism and Western structural functionalism. In the debate after the presentation of papers, the author asked for the floor and tried to convey one of his darling ideas, namely that classical Marxism as well as Western structural functionalism lack a proper understanding of certain structural contradictions emerging in what he called "modes of information and cognition" in contemporary societies.

The paper applies a theory of institutional change enriched with mezzorules, fluidity and agency to India's informal sector institutional evolution using two illustrative examples. The concrete examples are rooted in unfree labour and rural casual labouring in India, a country which has a high degree of informality. Section 1 introduces some concepts, and section 2 examines processes of institutional change in the informal sector. In section 3, two illustrations are explored: (1) the norms for girl child bonded labour; (2) the individualisation of women labourers. Section 4 concludes. The fluidity of institutional rules demands a recognition of the supra-economic nature of the context within which economic-institutional change occurs. We propose the analysis of mezzorules in a dialogic research context, i.e. interactions among workers and collective agents - as a helpful and transformative approach for sociologists specialising in the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, more and more employees, whether they are employed by state-owned or private enterprises, readily admit they suffer from stress. Although subjected to both deep and difficult transformations, post office counter clerks do not use the word. A three-year research study with counter clerks of La Poste, led by clinical sociologists from the viewpoint of clinical sociology, invites us to question the notion of stress. To begin, the paper takes the opportunity to clarify the use that a clinical sociologist makes of this English notion usually connected with individual psychology. It then shows in which circumstances the counter clerks, including those who work in offices considered 'calm', are in fact confronted with working conditions that qualify as stressful. Finally, through clinical cases, the paper contests the North American view of stress by showing that it is essentially founded on an individual understanding of this pathology and that it abusively overlooks the collective dimension of work in its account of a real suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can clinical sociology be considered from an epistemological point of view, since it deals with social problems not in their overall dimension, but seen as specific situations where concrete people are suffering? This paper is concerned with a two-fold epistemological difficulty: from the one side, studying such problems could involve a therapeutic intervention that exceeds a purely scientific approach; then, has a clinical sociologist to deal with a social therapy? And how far does that (not) involve any political involvement? From the other side, under which conditions could he (she) generalize information coming from his (her) experience as to contribute to social theory (according to Merton's suggestions about theory and research)? An effective contribution to answer such questions can come from the concept of 'cultural pattern', as pointed out in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has been structured in three areas. In the first one, the author shows the relevance that words and conversations among individuals have on social research, both terms being very important to the well-known sociologist and writer Franco Ferrarotti. In the second part, the author explains the necessary qualitative methodology to be used when analysing a main topic. In the third one, the author analyses the reality of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from the gender perspective to detect if they are or not a reflection of that Spanish reality regarding sex discrimination. Finally, this paper states the challenge the Spanish society needs to face to outweigh sex inequality without excluding the NGOs or any other form of association. This paper calls for the involvement of society, which along with the state and market, has an important task to accomplish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the strong criticism by Elias against the nation-state paradigm in sociology. Elias pointed his attention on sociologists of the twentieth century but particularly criticizes the analytical model of Parsons (AGIL), which seems to him an abstract combinatory of variables (pattern variables) without any references in social contexts. The sociology in the twentieth century is an apologetic of nation-state and, in Parsons, of the hegemonic role of the United States in the world. In fact, during the twentieth century many authors (historians and sociologists) tried to overcome the nation-state paradigm in the social sciences. The author of the paper analyses the contribution of Toynbee, Braudel, C. Schmitt, Huntington, Wallerstein and Hard-Negri. These attempts are based on different unit analysis: the civilization and its clash in the case of Toynbee and Huntington, the world economy in the case of Braudel and Wallerstein, and power in the case of C. Schmitt and Negri-Hardt. The author appreciates these attempts but his conclusion is that the concept of global society can better serve as unit analysis for a construction of a new paradigm in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present and summarize the theoretical proposals of four leading scholars of the so-called ‘relational sociology’. First of all I try to contextualize its emergence and developments in the increasingly globalized scientific system. From this particular (and international) point of view, relational sociology seems to develop through a peculiar scientific path opened and charted by well-identified actors and competitors, their invisible colleges, their global connections, cleavages, and coalitions. Whatever the structuring of this field, it accomplishes the criticism of classical individualistic and collectivistic sociological theories, a task strongly facilitated by the development of new methods and techniques of empirical research, and by the increasingly powerful computing capabilities. After this brief historical reconstruction, and following very strictly the contributions of the four scholars, I try to synthetize their theoretical designs, focusing the analysis on two scientific issues of great significance for the future of relational sociology: the specific ontology of ‘social relations’ and the methodologies used to observe it adequately. Finally, I wonder if we are facing a new sociological paradigm, already well structured and internationally established, or rather a ‘relational turn’ that probably will develop into a new ‘sociological field’ internally very differentiated and articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, many different versions of relational sociology have appeared. In this paper, I present a critical realist version developed since 1983, which is also called ‘relational theory of society’ (CRRS). It shares with the other relational sociologies the idea of avoiding both methodological individualism and holism. The main differences lie in the way social relations are defined, the kind of reality that is attributed to them, how they configure social formations, and the way in which their changes are conceived (morphogenesis and emergence). In particular, this approach is suitable to understand how the morphogenesis of society comes about through social relations, which are the connectors that mediate between agency and social structure. The generative mechanism that feeds social morphogenesis resides in the dynamic (that is, in their ways of operating) of the social relations networks that alter the social molecule constituting structures already in place. Social morphogenesis is a form of surplus of society with respect to itself. Society increases (or decreases) its potential for surplus depending on processes of valorization (or devalorization) of social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Social Sciences and, specifically, the sociological research, have progressively assumed the gender factor as one of the strategic keys to understand contemporary phenomena. In fact, as a variable for socio-statistical analysis or as a characterizing trait of individual identity, it is a decisive factor in the interpretation of the deep social transformations, and it inspires the self-reflection of the sociologists about the analytical tools of their discipline. The contribution proposes, through a lexicometric approach, an analysis of the articles published in the last two decades by the oldest journal of Sociology, published by Routledge. The main aim is to highlight the different ways in which gender issues are declined in the international sociological researches presented in the repertoire of the International Review of Sociology and to outline, both on the lexical level and on the topic level, the changes occurred over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are sociologists in danger of losing, or perhaps we have already lost, political sociology to economists attempting to reduce it to political economy? In recent years, various proposals have been advanced for altering classical political sociology and its sub-disciplines into the "new" political economy or public choice theory. Thus, some sociologists propose what is called a nascent rational choice research program in political sociology to illustrate an alternative methodology, to be applied to all political phenomena, including power and ideology. The rationale for advancing a "new" political economy as an alternative to classical political sociology is found in that this latter has not supposedly developed a consistent theoretical framework but only a "set of tacit agreements about certain areas of inquiry, including social order, legitimacy and consensus." In general, "homo politicus" or the autonomous political actor is subsumed under "homo economicus," with most political economists being disinclined to see any major differences between the two. As an illustration, some political economists complain that even modern neoclassical economists do not go far enough in conceiving political and other social actors, especially in new democracies, as equivalent to rational economic agents. The above argument on the affinity between classical political sociology and the "new" political economy is elaborated in the remainder of this paper as follows. In the first section, the subject-matter and method of classical political sociology are re-defined, especially in relation to those of the "new" political economy.

The historical development of Ethiopian sociology was traced from 1951 with the influence of western sociologists. It does not mean that no native sociologists could create a new Ethiopian sociological thinking; however, these perspectives could not rampant worldly due to cultural, economic, social, political, and environmental encumbrances. Due to such factors, Western sociologists have been not only influenced to create sociological researches and development but also create a new country's national identity so far in Ethiopia, especially for Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim's philosophical beliefs. In sum, there is no clear-cut school of sociology in Ethiopia. Some scholars have followed up France School of Sociology and the other one frequently performed the premises of the German School of Sociology. In my observation, the Ethiopian sociologists have rigorously executed both schools of Sociologies after the colonialism period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statistics are impossible without concepts. As the sociologist of invention Colum Gilfillan put it in 1952, ‘counting begins with definition of the thing to be counted’. This article is concerned with statistics on science, technology and innovation (STI). It documents how official statisticians have, over time, defined the concepts used for measurement. Debates on definitions of the concepts measured started at the very beginning of STI measurement in the first half of the twentieth century. Then, from the early 1960s onward, methodological manuals were developed to conventionalize the definitions. This article claims that the manuals did not have the expected result. They did not stabilize the definitions and the statistics based thereon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernization, in the sociological tradition, was usually understood as increasing differentiation. Theorists as different as Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons all shared the view that modernization meant the opening of new horizons. The publication of Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition transformed the discursive universe: contrary to the tradition of differentiation theoretical sociology the pamphlet interpreted modernization as a process in which the plurality of local cultural traditions was destroyed and their various narratives were rearticulated into a unified modern canon under the repressive meta-narratives of science, progress and the Enlightenment. At first, sociologists were at odds with this new interpretation until Beck, Giddens and Lash brought up the idea of modernity in two phases in their Reflexive Modernization (1994) and related publications. According to them, 'traditional modernity' was based on cultural closures, such as unified class-identities, nationalities and fixed gender-identities, but it was followed by a 'second' or 'reflexive modernity', where several traditions lived side by side, just as the postmodernists claimed. An intense debate emerged. The article asks: did we learn anything from the debate on reflexive modernization and if so, can the learnt lessons be used fruitfully in the study of contemporary society? The answer seems to be negative for the most part. However, the modernization theoretical approach can still be seen as a useful tool for framing research questions and contributing to the diagnosis of the era. This is how it can still provide a point of departure for research, but not deliver all the answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A delay in the transition to parenthood is common to all European countries, but Mediterranean and North European young people follow different pathways of transition to adulthood, which are described in the article. Since 2003, we have conducted four social inquiries in Italian urban contexts involving male and female young people with and without children and the article is therefore focused on Italy. The principal purpose of this research programme is to interpret the determinants of the Italian phenomenon of delaying the birth of the first child. The interpretative axes for conceptualizing the problem are intergender and intergenerational comparisons. In particular, the results of these inquiries indicate that in Italy the delay of the parenthood transition is linked to the policy-makers' 'delay' in realizing that the decision to postpone having children is not strongly linked to any 'crisis of family values'. The real problem is that since the beginning of the twentieth century, the present younger generation is the first to suffer from a general decrease in social opportunities as compared with the previous one. The mechanism is illustrated by Bourdieu: the new generation's members continue to form their life expectations on the basis of their parents' situations without considering the changes in conditions (e.g. inflation of study titles) that restrict their access to social resources. According to our results, the delay in the assumption of the parental role is an unintentional effect of a set of intentional actions aimed at creating and consolidating life conditions supporting self-realization. 'Delayers' continually try to resist the distressing sensations of precariousness, instability, vulnerability and uncertainty recognized by influential sociologists as distinctive features of contemporary life. Consequently, the delay in the family-building process takes on an active connotation: the attempt is to fill the gap in life chances related to gender and generational memberships. The last part of the article is dedicated to a comparison of European countries' social policies in support of parenthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative and more generally axiological feelings are one of the most important social phenomena and one of the least mastered scientifically. They can be satisfactorily explained if we start from an intuition contained in Max Weber's notion of 'axiological rationality'. This notion can be interpreted as indicating that cognitive rationality can be applied, not only to descriptive, but to prescriptive questions; not only to representational, but to axiological questions. Although the cognitive theory of axiological feelings presented in this article has never been explicitly proposed before, it has been implicitly used by several classical and modern sociologists. Several examples show that it can provide a convincing explanation of empirical data. The cognitive theory of axiological feelings shows that these feelings can be context-bound and yet be rational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on elite research in Germany. Elite research is a well-established field in Germany. This is mainly due to German history. After World War II, many intellectuals, politicians, and social scientists argued that the inability of German elites to accommodate the deep sociopolitical cleavages in German society had been a major factor in the failure of the first German democracy. Research on German elites has been carried out by sociologists, political scientists, and increasingly also historians. These three fields can be roughly associated with different methodological approaches, i.e. longitudinal social background studies, cross-sectional studies on career patterns and political attitudes, and historical case studies. While quite a few cross-sectional studies have dealt with the social backgrounds of political and other elites in Germany, there are only two truly longitudinal studies on changes over time. Historical case studies have dealt with various elite groups in different periods. These studies are valuable contributions to the systematic knowledge of German elites until 1945 and on elite continuity in West Germany after 1945.

The article presents an interview of sociologist Vladimir Yadov. Sociologist Gennadi Batygin has published a book on Russian Sociology. This is a volume of 700 pages consisting of 25 interviews with leading Russian sociologists of the recent past and a lot of documents and photos related to the main topic. The book is in Russian. Vladimir's father was a lecturer in the history of the Communist Party. In their home, therefore, the library was composed mostly by books from the social sciences. He understood nothing, but what he did understand that was socialism. When the Second World war started, he was 12 years old. And by the end of the war, he was 16 years old. When he was leaving school there was really no choice for him. When he came back to Soviet Union from London School of Economics, London, he was nominated as a member of the European Association for Experimental Social Psychology. They had a very interesting approach. Vladimir had worked in the area of general sociology, he would have been pressured much more by the official ideology, the official doctrine. But he had chosen social psychology, and official ideology was not so dominant in that field on that level of study.

The article presents an interview of sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaya. Tatiana's interest in humanitarian science is of very early origin. In a sense he was born with an interest in social problems, the problems of people, problems of social justice and so on. His mother was well educated, the daughter of a professor. She used to read to him and his sister on literature, art history, human interest reports about poverty, about the rich and the poor and so on. The war 1941-1945, and the immediate post-war years exposed the contradictions of Soviet society, and illuminated a lot of the dark corners which catastrophically deviated from the official ideology. In terms of economic science he was interested first of all in problems which were most immediately connected with people's lives. From physics he moved to economics, and in economics to the problems of income distribution. His generation lived in a specific "desert" island in the ocean of world science. There was only Marxism-Leninism-as the "only true and correct" science.

The article presents an interview of sociologist Andrei Zdravomyslov. He was born in 1928. His childhood experience was connected with his family. The influence of Zdravomyslov's father and mother was strong. His parents were of different social origin, and the chances of their marrying each other had been equal to nil. My mother's parents were peasants and his grandfather was a judge in court. When he was about ten years old and wanted to be physically strong and with good muscles, then his father told him that it is better to have good ideas in the head, and that a person should study all his life. Zdravomyslov was 13 years old when the Second World War started, and this was the most important experience in his life actually-because he was on the verge of death many times during this period. He went into teaching Marxism and Leninism in Karaganda in Kaszhakstan. It is a mining region; a new mining institute for mining engineers was opened there. And in each technical higher education school there were chairs of Marxism-Leninism.

The article reports on the thematizing reflexivity subjectivity and social order in sociological theory. Needless to say, one could highlight differences between such styles in theory-building, and eventually raise the question as to which has to be taken as the most radical. Yet, the main concern is to stress the degree to which they converge. This convergence stems from the perception that not even theory is any longer able to "reflect" something. Theory can only eradicate concepts from their frame of reference, pushing them beyond a point of no return. If by doing so, theory looses its "objective" validity, in fact it remarkably increases real affinity with the actual system. Such a convergence then does not occur at the stage of redefining research strategies within the established thematic boundaries of sociological tradition, nor by a mere inclusion of formerly neglected research topics. On the contrary, it comes about at the stage of a thorough re-specification of the criteria whereby the discipline draws its boundaries and sets its thematic domain.

The article aims to propose a synthesis between two distinct sociological traditions consisting of a case study comparing the Israeli Jewish population to the Israeli Arab population. After four decades of extensive criticism of structuralism, functionalism and their various derivatives, the weaknesses of these theories are well known. However, this has not produced convincing alternative theories on the macro-or middle-range levels that can deal with basic problems such as the location of the individual as an active actor in social processes. One of the most ambitious and promising attempts to re-theorize the role of the individual in social processes is Anthony Giddens' structurization theory. At the core of this theory are individuals, known as "agents," who do not create systems or cultures per se but "produce or transform them, remaking what is already made in the continuity of praxis." Agents are autonomous, knowledgeable and skillful, although never fully aware of their action. Agents' actions are always bound by historical-situational contexts, compounded by given power structures, which are not of the agents' choosing. However, agents are never fully culturally pre-programmed and have a wide range of knowledge about their "world" and are capable of offering "rational" explanations of the reasons and the motives of their action.