Sociologin i Grekland : från 1907 fram till Metaxas-diktaturen (1936–1940) och andra världskriget

Sociology in Greece from 1907 to the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–40) and the Second World War This paper focuses on pre-conditions for sociology to develop and the subject matters of emerging sociology in Greece. Pre-conditions were at hand but without continuity, and the opportunity for sociology to develop was lost. Sociology is said to have started in 1907 with the book The Social Question by Georgos Skliros. He presented sociology and Marxism as identical and deals with Greek society and (among other things) the language issue, all of which triggered off a vibrant debate. Sociological associations and journals were started. However, the initially reformist perspective of social science was gradually replaced by an approach that was more socio-philosophical, influenced by classical sociology, German sociology in particular. This turn was associated with the institutionalization of sociology at the universities during the 1920’s. The Metaxas dictatorship in 1936 put a stop to any further development of sociology for a long time.

The Survivability of Swedish Emergency Management Related Research Centers and Academic Programs : A Preliminary Sociology of Science Analysis

The Survivability of Swedish Emergency Management Related Research Centers and Academic Programs: A Preliminary Sociology of Science Analysis Despite being a relatively safe nation, Sweden has four different universities supporting four emergency management research centers and an equal and growing number of academic programs. In this paper, I discuss how these centers and programs survive within the current organizational environment. The sociology of science or the sociology of scientific knowledge perspectives should provide a theoretical guide. Yet, scholars of these perspectives have produced no research on these related topics. Thus, the population ecology model and the notion of organizational niche provide my theoretical foundation. My data come from 26 interviews from those four institutions, the gathering of documents, and observations. I found that each institution has found its own niche with little or no competition – with one exception. Three of the universities do have an international focus. Yet, their foci have minimal overlap. Finally, I suggest that key aspects of Swedish culture, including safety, and a need aid to the poor, help explain the extensive funding these centers and programs receive to survive. 

Styrning och ideologiska dilemman i Skolverkets skolutveckling : exemplet ANDT-undervisning

Governing and ideological dilemmas in drug education Drug education (ANT) in Swedish schools has a history over decades. Here, the pedagogical approaches fluctuated between transfer of solid knowledge from the teacher to the pupil, and working with values and have a more pupil-driven teaching – a classic dichotomy. Rhetoric about the school’s way of teaching has thus always been ambivalent and subject to reexamination. The study analyses various textual material on ANT education. As a methodological tool Billigs concept Ideological dilemmas is used, which is a fruitful way to identify the rhetorical building blocks of (school) politics, but also to analyse political talk in more detail. The article analyses the ideological dilemmas under three dichotomies: Knowledge vs. values, teacher control vs. learner control, and prevention vs. promotion. Throughout we can see this question of how teaching could be successful, given the tension between authority and democracy. The article concludes by relating this basic ideological dilemma in a wider discursive context of governance in our time. 

För Sverige i framtiden : Bio-objektifiering av ny medicinsk teknologi

Taking Sweden into the future – Bio-objectification of new medical technology In this article, we analyze how contemporary discursive silences around new biotechnologies such as cybrids and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), have been enabled by earlier policy processes in the area, e.g. boundary work around what is human and non-human, living and non-living, subject and object. The analysis of policy processes around xenotransplantations and the use of human embryonic stem cells, shows that the stem cells’ and xenografts’ “bio-identities” become stabilized through high expectations for the future, a lack of therapeutic possibilities and struggles over definitions of life. The policy processes around human embryonic stem cells and organs from other animals, are characterized by a normalization of certain understandings of ”life”, trust in scientific progress and it’s national financial potentials and a categorization of criticism as irrational. Through these “bio-objectification processes”, debate and decision making has been moved from a political and public context into ethical committees and research funding bodies. The article concludes by discussing consequences of this political non-handling of biomedical technologies and how these bioobjects could be re-politicized.

Att göra sig anställningsbar : Om instrumentella identitetspositioner och könad säljbarhet

To make oneself employable – instrumental identity positions and gendered marketability. The article takes up the question of the negotiation of expert discourses in career advice and constructing the self in the practice of CV writing. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with 19 students (11 women and 8 men) the stories about job search are analyzed. The concept of discursive positioning is used in order to analyze how the students position themselves in relation to career advice and position the self in CV writing. The results show that the female students had difficulties embodying the position as a marketing self as they described it as conflicting with feelings of ‘who they were’. ‘Being you’ in CVs and job interviews is, further, an ideal that is negotiated in relation to what to display as a job-seeking subject. CV writing involves a process of identifying suitable characteristics in an instrumental manner, but it is also combined with an introspective reasoning and identification to find ‘authentic’ strengths and characteristics in ‘who you are’.

Barnfri : en stigmatiserad position

Childfree: a stigmatized position International research has addressed the subject but in Sweden voluntary childlessness has until now been overlooked. This article draws on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 21 Swedish childfree women. The interviews focused their decision not to have children and attitudes they faced due to their rejection of motherhood. They all had encountered pressure to conform to a pronatalistic norm, proclaiming parenthood to be self-evident in an adult normal life. The results highlight different strategies used by the women to avoid instigating the dislike of those around them. The article argues that understanding childfree as a stigmatized position helps providing new insights to what conditions the social relations between the childfree and ‘the normals’, i.e. persons who advocate having children. Further, viewing the childfree as a stigmatized group has theoretical implications that contribute to developing Goffman’s classical theory of social stigma.

Konsekvenser av rollövertagandet : ”I”, ”me” och individualiteten

Consequences of role taking: the ”I”, the ”me” and individuality This paper analyzes the tendency of taking the ”I” and the ”me” in G. H. Meads theory of role taking as two separate, qualitatively different parts of human personality, the ”I” being of individual origin, the ”me” of social. In the original Meadian sense role taking gives rise to both the ”I” and the ”me”. They are dialectically united rather than dualistically separated aspects. They refer to the joint functional power of the subject, finding itself as an object, mediated by the Other. As a consequence, the link between body and the social world becomes theoretically more stringent, as the body is given its place as a cognitive social object among others, this by contrast to interpretations where the body is left as an object mainly outside the human social experience and as a source of agency sui generis, a conception which is in opposition to Meads. The stress on the ”I”-phase, as related to body and concrete action in combination with its direct relation to the ”me”-phase, actualizes Mead as a forerunner in modern biologic/neurologic research on human perceptual, motivational and intentional capacity.Swedish Mead interpreters are critically analyzed. Interpretations of Charon, Giddens, Joas and Habermas are partly scrutinized. The author defines the conceptual pair in terms of activity, subjectivity, temporal relativity and distance.

Japanese animation and glocalization of sociology

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Att inte spänna kärran framför hästen : precisering av Meads ”rollövertagande”

Not to put the cart before the horse: clarification of Mead’s ”role taking” George Herbert Mead’s “role taking” is subject to many interpretations. Some dominant definitions restrict role taking to reflective people trying to understand each other and taking on each others' roles. Other definitions restrict role taking to the stage of a developed language. Against these two types of definitions I assert that Meads concept is explanatory, not merely descriptive, functionally as well as existentially. It has a value also on elementary levels of human development, where man is socially similar to other primates. Swedish sociologists have contributed fruitfully to straighten the debate. My intention is to clarify it further, and to explicate my own interpretation. Basic role taking is a non-reflective activity going on in any place where living entities influence each other with gestures in similar ways. In human beings it gives rise to conscious discursive reflectivity, and it coincides phylogenetically and ontogenetically with development of language, rather than being created by it. Role taking emanates from breaking automatic responsivity. It introduces distance and reflectivity and results in conscious social behavior, rather than being produced by such. In this way, role taking is a major step in the development of intelligence on earth.

Periphery and metropole in the history of sociology

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Survey research and sociology

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Sociologin, hybriderna och den sociala verkligheten : exemplet kärnavfall

Sociology, hybrids and social reality: the case of nuclear waste The continuing technological transformation of nature means that sociology’s traditional vision of a sharp divide between nature and society is becoming ever harder to defend. Starting from Bruno Latour’s critique of modernity, and Nikolas Rose’s explorations of political power beyond the state, this article presents a framework for analysing the expanding wealth of hybrids of nature and society surrounding us today, and the problems of government they pose. These hybrids confront us with the need to rethink sociology’s conception of ‘the social’. With Latour’s help, the interplay of nature and society can be understood as subject to technical mediation, opening the way for studies of the varying arrangements through which different configurations of nature and society are produced. Rather than alternative social constructions of nature, what sociologists should be at pains to analyse and question are different programmes and strategies for bringing together natural and social forces in durable combinations. In the article, the geological disposal of nuclear waste serves as a useful example for exploring the fruitfulness of the analytical framework put forward. This complex undertaking constitutes just one component in a larger field of technoscientific endeavour that has irrevocably transformed nature while simultaneously re-making society. Addressing this case, we seek to reveal the promise of a sociology that does not bound ‘the social’ in advance, but rather makes the co-production of technology and society one of its most important objects of study.

Feeling in sociology and the world

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Självet, rollerna och pågående koordinationer av mänskliga handlingar : Om att försöka se ’samhället’ som något annat än fängelse eller marionetteater

The self, roles and the ongoing coordination of human action. Trying to see ‘society’ as neither prison nor puppet theatre In the article it is argued that structural North-American role-sociology may be integrated with theories emphasizing ‘society’ as ongoing processes (f. ex. Giddens’ theory of structuration). This is possible if the concept of role is defined as a recurrence oriented to the action of others standing out as a regularity in a societal process. But this definition makes it necessary to in a fundamental way understand what kind of social being the role-actor is. This is done with the help of Hans Joas’ theory of creativity and Merleau-Pontys concept of ‘flesh’ arguing that Meads concept of the ‘I’ maybe understood as an embodied self-asserting I, which at least in reflexive modernity has the creative power to split Meads ‘me’ into a self-voiced subject-me and an other voiced object-me. The embodied I communicating with the subject-me may be viewed as that role-actor which is something else than the role played. But this kind of role-actor is making for new troubles because it is hard to understand how this kind of self is creating self-coherence by using Meads concept of ‘the generalized other’. This trouble is handled by using Alain Touraines concept of the ‘subject’ and arguing that the generalized other is dissolving in de-modernized modernity. In split modernity self-coherence may instead be created by what in the article is called the generalized subject. This concept means a kind of communicative future based evaluation, which has its base in the ‘subject’ opposing the split powers of both the instrumentality of markets and of life-worlds trying to create ‘fundamentalistic’ self-identities. This kind of self is communicative because it also must respect the other as ‘subject’. It exists only in the battle against the forces of the market or a community. It never constructs an ideal city or a higher type of individual. It creates and protects a clearing that is constantly being invaded, to use the words of the old Frenchman himself. Asa kind of test-case it is by the way in the article shown how Becks concept of individualization may be understood in a deeply social and role-sociological way.