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Citizenship
(2024)
Schließung, soziale
(2020)
In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft führt Weber das Konzept »offener« und »geschlossener« sozialer Beziehungen (s. Kap. II.4) als § 10 der Soziologischen Grundbegriffe systematisch nach der Unterscheidung von »Vergemeinschaftung « und »Vergesellschaftung« (WuG, 21 § 9) ein. Während das soziale Handeln (s. Kap. II.16) bei der ersten dieser beiden Formen sozialer Beziehungen auf affektuell oder traditional begründeter Zusammengehörigkeit von Individuen beruht, gründet es bei der zweiten auf der wert- oder zweckrationalen Orientierung ihres Handelns. Trotz dieser wichtigen, anhand seiner Handlungstypen getroffenen Unterscheidung, macht Weber dann allerdings zugleich deutlich, dass im Hinblick auf Prozesse sozialer Schließung kein Unterschied darin besteht, ob es sich um subjektiv gefühlte oder rational motivierte Zusammengehörigkeiten dreht. Vielmehr gilt jegliche soziale Beziehung nach außen hin als »offen«, »wenn und insoweit die Teilnahme an dem an ihrem Sinngehalt orientierten gegenseitigen Handeln, welches sie konstituiert, nach ihren geltenden Ordnungen niemand verwehrt wird, der dazu tatsächlich in der Lage und geneigt ist« (ebd., 23).
Soziale Schließung
(2023)
In recent years, all over the globe we have seen intensifying economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, social marginalization and cultural repression in all kinds of political regimes, from liberal democratic to authoritarian and dictatorial. Although the strategies vary with regard to regime and context, in all of them we observe that while a growing number of social groups are speaking out and rising against them, a presumably much higher number of groups do not. In this article, I argue that all these processes can be conceived as aspects of ongoing closure struggles in social life. However, in order to understand why some social groups are able to fight against closure strategies while others are not, closure theory in its current state of elaboration is not of any help. While it operates with the term solidarization, it does not offer any explanation of how such acting in solidarity may become possible in closure struggles. The article is a mainly theoretical contribution of how to solve this problem.
Violence
(2015)
Introduction
(2020)
The processes of neo-liberalisation, coined as ‘actually existing neo-liberalism’ are by their very nature variegated and context-specific and can appear in multi-faceted and contradictory forms. Consequentially, sociological reflection has tried to conceptualise ongoing processes of transforming the city under the concept of urban neo-liberalism which is generally understood as the contextually specific and path-dependent realisation of neo-liberal restructuration projects, embedded in varying social, political, economic, and cultural ‘regulatory landscapes’. As much as neo-liberalism as ideology and political programme aims at erasing any democratic participation in society, its proponents have taken sides pushing ahead the re-conceptualisation of the city as a market with the right of the stronger ‘to do down the weaker’. The city has become a focal point for neo-liberalism’s war against democracy and citizens. Turning social relations into market transactions in order to restructure cities is not a new idea from the neo-liberals but one of the non-negotiable dogmas of their religion called science.
EU-Citizenship
(2018)
Individualistische Ansätze können die sozialen Dynamiken terroristischen Handelns nur unzureichend erklären, da sie keine Terrorismusanalysen, sondern Analysen von Terroristen liefern. Der Aufsatz geht deshalb von Georg Simmels formaler Analyse der „Geheimen Gesellschaft“ aus und entwickelt auf dieser Grundlage eine soziologische Erklärung dafür, wie die sozialen Beziehungen innerhalb solcher Gruppierungen die Opportunitätsstrukturen ihrer Mitglieder so strukturieren, dass ein Handeln entsteht, das wir als terroristisch bezeichnen können.
The consequences of economic globalization have created a new interest in ́EmileDurkheim’s conception of an institutional and moral reorganization of modernsociety that he developed in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Contrary toexisting attempts to explain these political processes towards democratization, thisarticle argues for a causal analysis of social change and concentrates on the socialmechanisms that trigger the reorganization process of modern society. Two thesesare entertained. The first thesis argues that the programme of an institutional andmoral reorganization of modern society can be reanalysed as a causal process ofdemocratization. This process takes two steps. While social mechanisms of reorgan-izationbring about the institutional and moral reorganization of modern society,social mechanisms of stabilizationguarantee the functioning of the emergingdemocratic system. Further, the second thesis argues that this kind of explanationcan be applied to Durkheim’s vision of a European confederation. The analysisreveals that his idea of a ‘post-national’ constellation refers to crucial problems ofthe recent debate regarding a democratic deficit in the European Union, and itshows that Durkheim’s contribution to both political sociology and historical-comparative research has been misconceived and prematurely repudiated.
Social Closure
(2012)
“Social closure” is one of the most basic terms and concepts in sociology. Basically, closure refers to processes of drawing boundaries, constructing identities, and building communities in order to monopolize scarce resources for one’s own group, thereby excluding others from using them. Society is not a homogenous entity but is instead internally structured and subdivided by processes of social closure. Some social formations, such as groups, organizations, or institutions, may be open to everybody, provided they are capable of participation, while access to most others is limited due to certain criteria that either allow people to become members or exclude them from membership. Therefore, social closure is a ubiquitous, everyday phenomenon that can be observed in almost every sphere and place in the social world. Members of societies experience closure from the very beginning of their social life. To be excluded from certain groups starts at school, where presumably homogenous classes begin to subdivide into distinct peer groups or sports teams. Here, exclusion may be rather arbitrary, but the experience of having a door slammed in one’s face proceeds in cases, where inclusion depends on formal rules or preconditions. Access to private schools follows explicit rules and depends on financial capacities; access to university depends on a certificate or diploma, eventually from certain schools only; membership in a highly prestigious club depends on economic and social capital and the respective social networks; and finally, in the case of migration, people will have to be eligible for citizenship and pass the thorny path of naturalization. However, it is not just the enormous plurality of forms that makes social closure crucial for sociology. Rather, the process of closure of social relations—of groups, organizations, institutions, and even national societies—is the fundamental process of both “communal” (Vergemeinschaftung) and “associative” relationships (Vergesellschaftung), and neither would be possible without social closure. In this broad and fundamental sense, social closure is not restricted to processes in national societies. It even allows for understanding crucial processes of the way the social world is organized at the regional or global level.