Search

This review essay examines the theory of tendential modernity, elaborated by Constantin Schifirneț, through the lens of decolonial theory. It attempts to put these two macrosociological paradigms into a critical dialogue.

This study examines the reconfiguration of the colonial matrix of power along biopolitical lines in interwar Romania. I reconstruct a shifting field of human sciences and governmentality whose cognitive interest resided in identifying the proper template for national subject-making and social modernization. This undertaking was predicated on diagnosing economic, political, and cultural blockages hindering the transformation of Romanian peasants into active political subjects. Building human capacity in the full, renewable, and open-ended sense implied by the term “bios” was seen as essential to overcoming what world-systems scholars would later characterize as conditions of dependency. But the empowerment/ knowledge inherent in the biopoliticization of national development was simultaneously circumscribed and enabled by its transformation into power/knowledge mechanisms. I thus show the strong linkages between economics, sociology, and biopolitical theorizing during that era. Drawing on Weberian notions of the iron cage, Foucauldian approaches, decolonial thought, and the concept of alternative modernities, I examine several important projects of national development. These are exemplified by Dimitrie Gusti, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, and Ştefan Zeletin. Said projects were based on analyses that reveal how Romania’s domestic status quo, peripheral characteristics, and role in the international political economy were conceptualized at the time. Furthermore, the biopolitical visions and alternative modernity programs advanced by these thinkers were imagined as upgraded variations of the Weberian iron cage. These variants were geared towards creating subjects capable of reproducing their distinctive internal economic, social, and political logics. In this way, these competing modernity projects, which were connected with well-defined organizational actors, helped crystallize the broader interwar colonial matrix within Romania.

Abstract The adjoint method is used to calibrate the medium complexity climate model “Planet Simulator” through parameter estimation. Identical twin experiments demonstrate that this method can retrieve default values of the control parameters when using a long assimilation window of the order of 2 months. Chaos synchronization through nudging, required to overcome limits in the temporal assimilation window in the adjoint method, is employed successfully to reach this assimilation window length. When assimilating ERA‐Interim reanalysis data, the observations of air temperature and the radiative fluxes are the most important data for adjusting the control parameters. The global mean net longwave fluxes at the surface and at the top of the atmosphere are significantly improved by tuning two model parameters controlling the absorption of clouds and water vapor. The global mean net shortwave radiation at the surface is improved by optimizing three model parameters controlling cloud optical properties. The optimized parameters improve the free model (without nudging terms) simulation in a way similar to that in the assimilation experiments. Results suggest a promising way for tuning uncertain parameters in nonlinear coupled climate models.

The studies assembled in Universitatis Sapientiae – Social Analysis, 4: (1–2)/ 2014 comprise a multiplicity of themes and assorted research perspectives on the process commonly known as “Europeanization”. Despite their diversity, their analytical common denominator is that they highlight the conceptual and heuristic limits of the dominant convergence paradigm. Officially endorsed by EU institutions, this socialscientific paradigm focuses on overcoming differences in levels of regional development. It is also characterized by a uniform approach regarding disparities in development levels and towards the progress of convergence. More specifically, it focuses primarily on quantitative indicators. By contrast, this volume engages with a host of hitherto neglected issues such as the local differences and specificities that developed within the convergence process. These include, but are not limited to: the emergence of a distinct type of “post-peasant” society in the Romanian rural milieu, the practice of ethnography in the archives of the Romanian secret police, as well drug policy in Hungary from the 1970s through the 1990s. My objective here is to provide a critical précis and commentary to some of the studies collected in this volume

We present a variational assimilation system around a coarse resolution Earth System Model (ESM) and apply it for estimating initial conditions and parameters of the model. The system is based on derivative information that is efficiently provided by the ESM's adjoint, which has been generated through automatic differentiation of the model's source code. In our variational approach, the length of the feasible assimilation window is limited by the size of the domain in control space over which the approximation by the derivative is valid. This validity domain is reduced by non-smooth process representations. We show that in this respect the ocean component is less critical than the atmospheric component. We demonstrate how the feasible assimilation window can be extended to several weeks by modifying the implementation of specific process representations and by switching off processes such as precipitation.

This article analyzes Bucharest Sociological School from the perspective of state consolidation and interethnic relations. It outlines the constitution of a nationalist epistemic regime linking the Romanian people to territory across a multilayered field of discourse and national boundaries. As case studies, I highlight the monographic action, The Encyclopedia of Ro-mania, and the concurrent development of Hungarian rural sociology. These framed an oscillating policy of inclusion/exclusion towards ethnic minorities.

This article assesses the concept of alternative modernity from the perspective of the social modernization and nation-building projects undertaken by the Bucharest Sociological School during the interwar period. The analysis commences with a critique of the theoretical field that hitherto provided the principal explanatory models for understanding interwar Romania, namely the concept of path dependence and world systems theory. It then proceeds to scale down the comparative civilization approach underpinning alternative modernities theory into a more discrete, socially-grounded definition of alternative modernity appropriate to the specific time period and local context. This is accomplished, on the one hand, by means of a critical assessment of recent scholarship pertaining to the alternative modernity of interwar Romania and, on the other hand, by foregrounding the issues of local agency and geopolitical context. I thus argue that the vision of an alternative, quintessentially rural and “Romanian” modernity elaborated by the Bucharest Sociological School was inserted into the social structure by means of a culturally specific program of socio-economic modernization of the rural world. This program was consciously elaborated as a sociologically informed alternative to the dominant, urban forms of modernity prevailing in the West.