The purpose of the study is to consider the advantages and disadvantages of pollster and sociological approaches to electoral research.The article shows that conducting electoral research in modern election campaigns is carried out equally by pollster (for purely political purposes) and sociological (for scientific and sociological purposes) technologies. It has been proven that optimal results can be achieved by combining pollster and sociological approaches to electoral research. It was determined that today the organization of an effective (...) election campaign requires equally sociologists-pollsters and sociologists-analysts, the result of whose work is respectively collected empirical data and an analytical product, scientific expertise.It has been demonstrated that pollster and sociological approaches to conducting electoral research differ not only in the concepts of public opinion and the styles of its research, but also in the subject field. The electorate as a subject of electoral research acquires different content for different approaches. The pollster approach is more likely to understand the electorate as a circle of voters who vote for one or another party or candidate for an elected position and, in fact, are supporters of a certain political force or personality, while representatives of the sociological approach mostly consider the electorate as a collection of all citizens who vested with the right to vote and who exercise or do not exercise it under specially created conditions. It is argued that the integration of the subject fields of electoral polling and electoral sociological research will allow more effective and productive use of analytical potential in the election campaign, since such an organization of patronage work will help not only to record the results of electoral research, but also to predict the trends of electoral choice, the flow of votes, the reactions of electoral groups to specific political events. The availability of systematic ideas about the types of voters and their personal profiles will help to meaningfully approach the understanding of the electorate. (shrink)

Explores sociocultural influences on the construction of traditional aesthetic theories and judgments.

In this article, I present a sociological approach to the problem of meaningful work that dwells on its broad social and cultural sources, as opposed to the focus on subjective and organizational factors currently prevailing in the field. Specifically, I consider two sociological perspectives, those of community and autonomy, as important conceptual tools for understanding the ambivalent character of modern culture in providing individuals with a sense of meaningfulness of their activities. I also review some of the existing (...) research on meaningful work and interpret it through this conceptual distinction, both to show the latter’s relevance for the field and to identify the gaps it might help fill. As a result, based on the sociological perspectives, I propose a general conceptual model and discuss five directions to further advance the theoretical comprehension of meaningful work, and I suggest some implications of these perspectives for normative business ethics. (shrink)

The sociology of science seeks to theorize the social conditioning of science. This theorizing seems to undermine the validity of scientific knowledge and lead to relativism. Bourdieu and Latour both attempt to develop a sociology of science that overcomes relativism but stipulate opposite conditions for the production of scientific truths: while Bourdieu emphasizes autonomy, Latour emphasizes associations. This is because they work with oppositional epistemological and ontological assumptions. In both theories, the notion of truth lacks an independent definition; it is (...) derived from the theorist’s position on rationalism and defined with reference to how it is produced. This interdependence creates a different problem in each case. Bourdieu’s assertion that truths produced in relatively autonomous scientific fields are “trans-historical” remains an epistemological assertion. Latour’s argument that truths are produced through associations fails to capture the different resources, distinctions and boundarie.. (shrink)

The paper proposes a distinction between ethical problems internal to the practice of a discipline and ethical problems external to it. It argues that ethical problems encountered in architecture are typically of the former kind, in contrast, for example, to bioethical problems. From this point of view, it discusses the state of other arts and surveys various 19th and 20th century positions concerning ethics in architecture. It illustrates that, where architecture is concerned, ethics is closely related to aesthetics and frequently (...) tied to a philosophy of history, a point which is explained with the help of the above-mentioned distinction. (shrink)

Current sociological theories appear to have lost their general persuasiveness in part because, unlike the theories of the ‘classical era’, they fail to maintain an integrated stance toward society, and the practical role that sociology plays in society. The authors explore various facets of this failure and possibilities for reconstructing sociological theories as integrated wholes capable of conveying a moral and political immediacy. They discuss the evolution of several concepts (for example, the social, structure, and self) and address (...) the significant disputes (for example, structuralism versus humanism, and individual versus society) that have dominated twentieth-century sociological thought. Their ideas and analyses are directed towards an audience of students and theorists who are coming to terms with the project of sociological theory, and its relationship with moral discourses and political practice. The authors of these essays are sociological theorists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. They are all established, but not ‘establishment’ authors. The book contains no orthodoxies, and no answers. However, the essays do contribute to identifying the range of issues that will constitute the agenda for the next generation of sociological theorists. (shrink)

I defend traditional aesthetics against sociological criticism. I argue that “historicist” approaches are not supported by arguments and are intrinsically implausible. Hence the traditional ahistorical philosophical approach to the judgment of taste is justified. Many Marxist, feminist and postmodernist writers either eliminate aesthetic value or reduce it to their favourite political value. Others say that they merely want to give a historical explanation of the culturally local phenomenon of thinking in terms of the aesthetic. As a preliminary, (...) I point out that the conception of the aesthetic these theorists operate with is a straw man. In particular, Kant would have rejected it. I then point out that the empirical evidence does not support their historicist views. Most sociological theorists adduce no evidence, thinking their view obviously correct. Where evidence is adduced, the evidence has little connection with their general historicist conclusions. Lastly, I put pressure on the historicist view, first by appealing to the enormity of the error attributed to ordinary people, and second by appealing to the inevitability of pragmatic inconsistency by those who assert the view. I conclude that traditional philosophical aesthetics was right to be ahistorical. (shrink)

This review explores the present fashion for aesthetics in contemporary sociology. It evaluates the claims that society is undergoing a deep-seated process of aestheticization, and that sociology is experiencing an aestheticization of its epistemological concerns. The aestheticization literature is divided as follows: (1) the re-reading of classical sociological theory through the aesthetic dimension of modernity; (2) the claim that postmodern society involves an `aestheticization of everyday life'; and (3) those sociological theories which stress that contemporary society is (...) more and more like a work of art in its form. The argument is made that the discovery of aesthetics as a way of problematizing sociological reasoning is to some extent rediscovery, returning to various Kantian precepts: the disinterestedness characteristic of aesthetic experiences; the antinomy between the individual and the social aspects of taste; and the work of art as an organism predicated on an inner teleology. (shrink)

Below I ask whether the theoretical assumptions of the sociology of knowledge imply a subjectivistic and relativistic approach to cognition theory—a matter that has already been discussed in Polish subject literature (among others by Adam Schaff). Does the “social conditioning of cognition” conception propounded by the sociology of knowledge deny the existence of objective truth and adequate knowledge? Karl Mannheim himself called the sociology of knowledge an anti-relativist position. The critics of his anti-relativist argumentation say it is full of ambiguities (...) and contradictions. I will attempt to take a closer look at this problem, and, at the same time, at the relation between Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge project and such measures of the adequacy of knowledge as the coherence and general consensus criterion. The main question I will try to answer is whether the Mannheimian sociology of knowledge project is a form of epistemological relativism (in the specific meaning of the term I use here), and if not, in what sense and to what degree it can be considered a position convergent with the relative truth conception. (shrink)

Ernesto Neto's installation at the Panthéon in Paris, Leviathan Toth (2006), brings us into a semiotics of intensities that does not belong to the ‘aesthetic regime’ as described by Jacques Rancière but rather to a Diagrammatic Agency of Contemporary Art. In this case study, the latter is constructed after Deleuze and Guattari – from a politics of the Body without Organs critically and clinically identified to a Body without Image.

Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Nice, Gothenburg, Genoa, Brussels, Barcelona, ≡ All these cities formed the setting of mass globalization protests. In most mass media reports, the presence of thousands of peaceful demonstrators has been outshone by the pictures of radical activists smashing McDonald's and Niketown. In the search for an adequate theological response to today's context of globalization, this article takes precisely this radical activism as a starting–point. In line with those postmodern iconoclasts’ own legitimation, a theological approach to this case (...) leads to the Marxist theory of fetishism and idolatry as it has already been investigated by liberation theologians two decades ago. Surprisingly, a renewed version of this critique of the theologization of economics can be found in No Logo , the trend–setting globalization critique written by the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein. A theological close reading of this best–selling book brings to the light a recurrent use of religious metaphor to characterize the corporate logo as a major aesthetic figure in the context of globalization. In order to understand the aesthetic and theological processes involved, a confrontation with the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar delivers a striking formal parallel between the Church's cross and today's corporate logo. Beyond an at first sight similar theo–aesthetic programme, Balthasar's theological aesthetics however opens up a position which enables us to expose the contemporary global socio–economic system as a subtly inverted Christianity. (shrink)