Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

/pdf/modern-social-imaginaries-3bxtlxvdjy.pdf

Modern Social Imaginaries

This book completes Margaret Archer's trilogy investigating the role of reflexivity in mediating between structure and agency. What do young people want from life? Using analysis of family experiences and life histories, her argument respects the properties and powers of both structures and agents and presents the 'internal conversation' as the site of their interplay. In unpacking what 'social conditioning' means, Archer demonstrates the usefulness of 'relational realism'. She advances a new theory of relational socialisation, appropriate to the 'mixed messages' conveyed in families that are rarely normatively consensual and thus cannot provide clear guidelines for action. Life-histories are analysed to explain the making and breaking of the various modes of reflexivity. Different modalities have been dominant from early societies to the present and the author argues that modernity is slowly ceding place to a 'morphogenetic society' as meta-reflexivity now begins to predominate, at least amongst educated young people.

The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society

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 ...

Relational sociology: a well-defined sociological paradigm or a challenging ‘relational turn’ in sociology?

The aim of this article is to pinpoint the relevance of family relationships in the studies on ‘social capital’. In order to clarify this perspective, Pierpaolo Donati outlines a new approach called ‘relational approach’. According to it, social capital is a property and a quality of social relationships, not an attribute of individuals or social structures as such. This theory has two major advantages: first, it leads to differentiate those components of social capital which are usually conflated; second, it permits to identify various forms of social capital (primary, secondary-communitarian and civic or generalized). Riccardo Prandini criticizes the sociological prejudices which consider the family mainly as an obstacle for the full deployment of ‘liquid’ and ‘modern’ social relations. The family's social capital is defined as the reciprocal orientations of the family's members which are able to generate trust and therefore cooperative actions. Empirical evidence shows that the family's social capital ...

The Family in the Light of a New Relational Theory of Primary, Secondary and Generalized Social Capital

This themed section is aimed at evaluating different personalised policies and at drawing a clear map of opportunities and challenges for future implementations. All the essays are based on evaluat...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03906701.2017.1422888

Themed section: the person-centred turn in welfare policies: bad wine in new bottles or a true social innovation?

This essay focuses on the relevance of family relationships (conceived as familial social capital) to the common good (conceived as public social capital). The article consists of three sections. T...

Family Relations as Social Capital

En las últimas décadas ha surgido un notable interés por la llamada «sociología relacional» (SR). Son ya varias las redes de académicos que trabajan en paralelo para desarrollar y difundir la SR, como la «Escuela de Nueva York» (con Harrison White, Charles Tilly y Mus­ tafa Emirbayer), el grupo «Relational Sociology» de la Asociación Canadiense de Sociología o la red «Relacional Studies in Sociology», impulsada por Pierpaolo Donati desde la Uni­ versidad de Bolonia. Este sociólogo italiano fue el primero en acuñar el término «sociología relacional» y difundirlo, a partir de los años ochenta, primero en Italia y después también en otros países.

Riccardo Prandini

Papers

Relational sociology: a well-defined sociological paradigm or a challenging ‘relational turn’ in sociology?

The Family in the Light of a New Relational Theory of Primary, Secondary and Generalized Social Capital

Themed section: the person-centred turn in welfare policies: bad wine in new bottles or a true social innovation?

Family Relations as Social Capital

Lessico della sociologia relazionale