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This article re-examines the problem of EU subsidiarity in the light of the political economy of federalism and centre–right thinking. It argues that if Christian Democratic, conservative and liberal parties are serious about strengthening subsidiarity, they should urge the EU to take steps in the direction of scenario four of the European Commission's White Paper on the Future of Europe. Misleadingly titled 'Doing less more efficiently', this scenario is in fact about 'delivering more and faster in selected policy areas, while doing less elsewhere', as the subtitle correctly states. A new compact combining the targeted strengthening of key federal policies at the EU level with the EU's gradual disengagement from other policy areas seems the most promising way to take the Union out of the doldrums and strike a compromise between Eurosceptics and Europhiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the logical and historical determinants of European integration and reflects on the potential and dangers this presents for labour movement renewal. Through the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ a regulatory gap has been established between political mobilisation at the national level and neo-liberal regulation at the European level. The historical determination of this form is traced through an exploration of the social struggles against neo-liberalism that have developed within member states and transnational mobilizations that bridge this regulatory gap by linking resistance across national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The disciplines of anthropology and sociology had divergent trajectories and hostile relations in Europe where they originated. However, in the process of their being transplanted into other locations their relationships have undergone changes. In the New World of Americas and Australia, which experienced 'replicative colonialism', the distinction between sociology and social/cultural anthropology is maintained. In contrast, in the Old World of Asia and Africa, which experienced 'retreatist colonialism', the relationship between these disciplines is ambiguous. The other factor which impacts on the shaping of relationship between these disciplines in their new locations has to do with their orientations to the object of their study. In the New World the cultural differences between the colonisers and immigrants, on the one hand, and the 'natives', on the other, are maintained. In contrast, in the Old World the effort is to 'integrate '/' assimilate' the 'tribes' into the mainstream. This paper analyzes the relationship between sociology and social/cultural anthropology with special reference to three locations: West-Europe, North America, and South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'European social model' is a phrase often heard in European discourse. This article describes the remarkable shift in meaning that the term has experienced in the last two decades. While it was first invented to symbolise Delors's vision of a social-democratic Europe, it was then increasingly used to legitimise a predominately neoliberal integration process, before becoming a justification for the cutting back of existing welfare systems. The popularity of the European social model, however, still stems from the fact that it articulates an alternative to US-style free-market capitalism. The concept is therefore also used by left forces in order to formulate their vision of an alternative Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The far-reaching changes taking place in India in recent decades call for an examination of the changing relation between individual and society. This process, resulting in a transformation of collective identity into individual identity, is discussed in this paper in an historical and theoretical setting. It is implied that similar principles of change that transformed the European society couple of centuries ago are at work in the Indian society at present. So also, the theoretical insights developed in the western sociology are employed in comprehending the changes in India. Although the European and Indian societies are distinct inform, they are undergirded by similar basic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an introduction to the 20th Anniversary Special Issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology. It begins with some brief observations on the key developments that have shaped the disciplinary core of sociology over the past decades. It goes on to reflect on the role of classical sociology in Europe and beyond, drawing attention to its continuing presence in British and Anglo-American intellectual circles. Far from existing in a bubble of academic ivory towers, the paradigms emerging from disputes in the social sciences in general and in sociology in particular are profoundly shaped by wider historical trends – notably those influenced by different forms of collective action, as illustrated in the impact of social movements on the university sector in the late 1960s. In light of recent calls for 'the decolonization of academia', we ask to what extent sociology can, and should, strive to go beyond the hegemony of the 'Western' canon. Having given a succinct overview of the 20-year history of JCS, we elucidate the different formats of the material published in the journal, stressing the importance of editorial flexibility. On a more substantive note, we point out that the thematic scope of the work published in JCS has been wide-ranging and inclusive – not only because of its editors' broad conception of 'classics' and 'classicality', but also because of the interdisciplinary spirit permeating the journal. This commitment, as we explain, manifests itself in the wide range of thinkers and topics discussed – from a multiplicity of perspectives – in the journal. We also grapple with noteworthy challenges posed by the academic publishing industry in the early 21st century, including the difficulties arising from peer-review processes. Finally, we express our gratitude to those who have contributed to this 20th Anniversary Special Issue and emphasize the journal's commitment to defending the legacy of classical sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important challenge for macrosociology in the 1990s is to account for the cluster of social movements in different post-World War II settings, most recently those that intend structural changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. To account for these extraordinary phenomena of historical significance calls for a new global synchronic and diachronic analysis. After discussing three major waves of these movements that have in common a challenge to the authority of the modern state, this paper proposes that 'neomodernisation analysis' may be the most appropriate macro-paradigm to relate sociology to the comparative study of cycles of modernisation and of centres of modernity. It is highly relevant since many regions of the world are undergoing ah important new phase of modernisation and since there may be taking place ah important shift in the epicentre of modernity. State socialism is bankrupt in Eastern Europe. Governments, ruling parties, of the opposition, experts, and expert committees are desperately searching . . . for a new paradigm, a new social and economic model with which to launch these countries onto a new course of dynamic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard of the intellectual antecedents of Hungarian sport sociology and their importance seem to correspond to those of other nations. However, for political reasons the period in which sport sociology developed into an autonomous discipline in the Western world did not favour the rising of sociology in the socialist states of Eastern Europe. This paper attempts to show when and in what way sport sociology evolved in Hungary, as well as what social and theoretical factors influenced, promoted or impeded its development. Furthermore, the present situation of sport sociology in Hungary is outlined: its main fields of research, its major publications as well as its institutions, organizations, and international connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of sport has become a burgeoning subdiscipline in the 21st century. To assess knowledge domains and the status quo of the field in Europe and North America, this study uses CiteSpace (a bibliometric visualization software) to analyse 870 academic articles published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Journal of Sport & Social Issues and Sociology of Sport Journal from 2008 to 2018. By mapping/examining core contributors, keywords, high citations/cited authors, major clusters and citation bursts, the findings echo John W. Loy's 'risk of critical mass' calling for various citation analysis approaches. The study expands Jon Dart and Ørnulf Seippel's recent topic model studies on subdisciplinary development in recent decades, contributing to informed discussions of geographical politics and research directions in the field. The scale and scope of this analysis is highly generalizable to assess pre-existing state-of-the-art research on the sociology of sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been increased interest in couples Living Apart Together (LAT) within the sociology of the family in Europe. One of the main questions concerns understanding their evolution over time. Given the lack of longitudinal data, the present study focuses as a proxy to study the perception LATs hold of their future and the influencing factors. Based on data from the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS), a sample of 5253 people in LAT relationships was taken from seven European countries. The results show that the future intentions of these couples are conditioned by the understanding of the family in different European countries, the age of its members and, above all, the social pressure exerted by family and friends to live together and/or marry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we question (1) whether the relationship between unemployment and mental healthcare use, controlling for mental health status, varies across European countries and (2) whether these differences are patterned by a combination of unemployment and healthcare generosity. We hypothesize that medicalization of unemployment is stronger in countries where a low level of unemployment generosity is combined with a high level of healthcare generosity. A subsample of 36,306 working-age respondents from rounds 64.4 (2005-2006) and 73.2 (2010) of the cross-national survey Eurobarometer was used. Country-specific logistic regression and multilevel analyses, controlling for public disability spending, changes in government spending, economic capacity, and unemployment rate, were performed. We find that unemployment is medicalized, at least to some degree, in the majority of the 24 nations surveyed. Moreover, the medicalization of unemployment varies substantially across countries, corresponding to the combination of the level of unemployment and of healthcare generosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how midcentury European sociologists, planners, and architects mapped the existing city to build future communities. The neighborhood unit concept spread globally in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, its deployment was supported not just by modernist planning principles but by sociological abstractions of community life. Current scholarship emphasizes how these modernist principles were contested by sociologists. The present article demonstrates instead that sociological mapping was instrumental in making the concept of community legible and operable in the postwar European city. During the 1940s, mapping social relationships in urban space was increasingly thought to reveal “authentic” community life in working-class urban neighborhoods, which previously were dismissed as chaotic and promiscuous. Such new sociological mapping shaped, if often only implicitly, the planning and design of modern housing estates and New Towns across Europe and thus connected representations of bottom–up, grassroots communities to an essentially top–down planning apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an application of Alvin Gouldner's dialectic between Romanticism and Classicism to the constitutional process of European identity formation. Gouldner introduced his dialectical sociology in a critical attempt to destroy compulsive identification with any fixed idea of order. In an attempt to destroy compulsive identification with any Romantic or classical idea of Europe, this article shows how Europe's identity, as it has been represented in the Constitutional Treaty (CT), as well as in sociological works, is being shaped by predominant Romantic and classic thought structures and social movements. The central argument is that the dialectic between Romanticism and Classicism in Europe is most clearly observed in the debates about democracy, human rights and rule of law — the classical values that constitute the EU's entry criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If it is to become a more widely used resource at the present time, when the demand is growing for explanations of the predicament of modern western society in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 and various similar subsequent events around the globe, classical sociology might pay more attention than it usually does to a particular set of early modern developments. These developments, it is argued here, actually created the form of the social that became large-scale modern western society. This new form of the social was and remains distinct from those older forms that were seen to flow from the natural sociality of human beings. Between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th the new form of the social emerged in different parts of Europe, contingently but not entirely accidentally, as a separate domain of relatively safe and free human interaction. It was a consequence - in part intended, in part unintended - of different bids to secure civil peace in times of extreme inter-communal, inter-confessional violence. These bids included, to name just three measures: the development of new forms of public law, especially in Germany; the development of the absolutist state, especially in France; and the separation of private religious conscience from public legal conscience, especially in England. As they were all, in one way or another, steps towards stemming, stopping, and/or preventing the flow of blood caused by religious hatreds, they are here called early modern limiting measures, and the social at the centre of the article is sometimes called the limited social or limited society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses European migrants to Spain's coastal areas. These 'residential tourists' make creative use of modern communication technologies and accessible air travel to construct fluid migration trajectories and employ transnational affective and instrumental networks. Research on British migrants to Spain has shown a high incidence of social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. While these migrants dream of integration, an ambiguous status in Spanish society constrains assimilation and leads to marginalisation.

Most of the empirical and theoretical research on the rising inequality trend in American labor markets has occurred within labor economics despite long-standing sociological interest in the structure of inequality and despite strong evidence that the trend was produced by institutional as well as technological forces. Several reasons for this imbalance are discussed. The fact of differing inequality trends in the United States and Europe offers an additional perspective on the potential explanations for the American trends. This comparative perspective highlights the role of institutions in producing inequality trends and suggests strategies for potentially productive sociological research on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has attained a prominent place on the sociological agenda, and stratification scholars have implicated globalization in the increased income inequality observed in many advanced capitalist countries. But sociologists have given much less attention to a different yet increasingly prevalent form of internationalization: regional integration. Regional integration, or the construction of international economy and polity within negotiated regions, should matter for income inequality. Regional economic integration should raise income inequality, as workers are exposed to international competition and labor unions are weakened. Regional political integration should also raise income inequality, but through a different mechanism: political integration should drive welfare state retrenchment in market-oriented regional polities as states adopt liberal policies in a context of fiscal austerity. Evidence from random-effects and fixed-effects models of income inequality in Western Europe supports these arguments. The results show that regional integration explains nearly half of the increase in income inequality in the Western European countries analyzed in this article. The effects of regional integration on income inequality are net of several controls, including two established measures of globalization, suggesting that a sociological approach to regional integration adds to our understanding of rising income inequality in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context of de-standardized transitions to work, young people are required to take more individual decisions, a process in which their subjectivities become increasingly important for social integration. While it can be assumed that this is a general trend, this article seeks to analyse the impact of different ‘transition regimes’ upon young people's biographical experiences. Based on three comparative studies related to young people's transitions to work, firstly, different ‘transition regimes’ are outlined, and secondly, the extent to which regime characteristics are reflected in young people's accounts of their experiences is analysed; simultaneously, the underlying question of the extent to which young people perceive the possibilities of making subjectively meaningful choices is addressed, along with how this decision-making process is facilitated by flexibility and secured against the risk of failure and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whiteness studies are trans-disciplinary, but here the focus is principally on sociology and social history. Firstly, I identify elucidate and synthesize the major ways in which whiteness in this literature has hitherto been problematized, to provide a sociological view of the multidisciplinary work so far. Five interpretations are identified; whiteness as absence, as content, as a set of norms, as resources and as a contingent hierarchy. Secondly, I make some proposals regarding the whiteness problematic's degree of pertinence to European settings, with a brief discussion of the Irish case. Finally, I argue that whiteness is useful if conceptualized in a way that sets it within the parameters of studies of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. environmental sociology has gone through a very different development path compared with its European counterpart. U.S. environmental sociology was dominant in establishing the field and setting the terms for the development and identity of this subdiscipline. Whereas U.S. environmental sociology still sets the tone in terms of internal organization, structure, and interaction, arguably Northwest European environmental sociology has been more innovative in the last decade of the former millennium with respect to theoretical and conceptual contributions. Although we can still witness significant differences between the environmental sociologies of the two continents, these differences are diminishing. During the past decade, a remarkable degree of interaction, exchange, and social learning has taken place between the two academic communities, facilitated by various aspects of globalization. The question of whether we are moving to one environmental sociology should, however, also take other—and especially the emerging Asian—environmental sociologies into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of studies of post-communism - habitually grouped under the heading of 'transitology' - understand the transition ultimately as a political and cultural convergence of the ex-communist societies with Western Europe. Even those critical approaches that regard the post-communist transition as a relatively unique phenomenon (as in the approaches of path dependency and neo-classical sociology) tend to conflate normative prescriptions with empirical descriptions and to move within an overall framework of what Michael Kennedy has aptly called 'transition culture'. This article argues instead that the transition's nature can only be fully grasped if a case-specific and historical-contextual approach is taken. In theoretical terms, a three-step movement to grasp diversity in Central and Eastern Europe is proposed: (1) the acknowledgement of the plurality of modernizing agency and its creativity; (2) the acknowledgement of multi-interpretability and difference as primary elements of modernity; and (3) a sensitivity to the resulting institutional variety in societal constellations. In substantive terms, it is argued that diversity is a distinctive mark of Europe that is bound to persist in an enlarged Europe, despite the spirit of assimilation in the accession process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological colonization is defined as the standardization of ideas previously less relevant to native populations and includes exportation of race constructs to native subjects among whom race was previously all but insignificant. Since the existence of Europe's colonization, colonial powers have dealt with non-European subjects in one of three ways eradication, exclusion or assimilation. Ironically, it is the assimilation experience that has impacted and, by colonial influence, denigrated, any challenges to the race status quo. There are two methods used to circumvent psychological colonization and to correct this methodological flaw. The first is utilization of the democratic process, incorporate a variety of demographic tools and settle upon the most popular. This approach would prove fitting in a democratic sovereignty but would not necessarily be effective. Demographic tools that rely upon popularity run the risk of collapsing into an intellectual solipsism that is unproductive and no less hegemonic. The second alternative suggests a more encompassing approach, which must accommodate a meaningful effort and sensitivity to a diverse population. Although non-Europeans have distinct heritages, they also have in common various stresses of Eurocentrism. The boundary of their frustration exceeds group demarcation. Consequently, the minimization of Eurocentrism and the incorporation of greater intellectual diversity will reduce western hegemony at a time when the racial significance of populations worldwide could all but completely diminish. Hence, discarding the issue of race will, no doubt, precipitate confusion and complexity in the initial call for modifications in thinking and perception of non-European populations.

Evaluates the societal differences in organizing manufacturing units in Europe. Cross-national comparison of matched factories; Findings on the societal differences of the units; Importance of a multidimensional concept of professionality.

The article presents information on early American sociology and the Polish peasant. "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20)," by W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, is something of a forgotten classic in sociology. The book has been kept alive in recent decades primarily by social historians (Handlin. 1951: Cravens. 1978; Persons. 1958; Zarelsky, 1984; Eider, 1981) American sociologists did not fully appreciate its theoretical importance when it appeared nor have they since. The main importance of the book was in founding the discipline of sociology, in the epistemological sense of clarifying the unique intellectual space into which this discipline alone could see and explore (Foucault, 1973: 344-348; Husserl. 1970a). The attitude-value scheme is at a level of secondary importance. This scheme was mortgaged to the very scientism from which the authors were trying to escape. The inconclusiveness of their epistemological break, however, is not a fatal flaw for the scheme, and its similarity to contemporary European theory suggests its continued usefulness. By laying claim to the epistemological turf that defines sociology.