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Institute
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.
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)
Introduction
(2017)
In the course of the last four decades, neo-liberalism has established itself as the dominant form of governing both national societies and global affairs. On the foundation of both Keynesian economic policies and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates among currencies, the world economy recovered. The classical sociological meaning and concept of citizenship as defined by T. H. Marshall and others after World War II rests on an analysis of the relationship between the capitalist economy and political democracy against the background of 'embedded liberalism'. Today, however, the enforcement of neo-liberal principles in order to turn modern democracies into 'market societies' impinges heavily on our idea of citizenship. The critical aspects of a flawed citizenship go directly to the heart of the idea of citizenship itself, as both democratic and social participation and a substantial conception of individual liberty all seem to be under attack from the global politico-economic regime.
Introduction
(2017)
The history of citizenship is one of social struggle against pre-modern authorities, nobles and aristocracies, of class struggles and the demands of social movements, and no less of cultural, ethnic, indigenous protests against the long history of colonialism. Paths to citizenship in Europe have taken very different directions, as Charles Tilly has shown with regard to England, the Netherlands, Russia or Prussia. Max Weber's dictum of defining the state by the accomplishment of the monopolisation of the legitimate means of violence is of utmost significance for the history of citizenship. There can be no doubt that the experience of World War II prepared the ground for the twentieth-century idea of citizenship. Consequently the Western concept of citizenship has been promoted as a role model in the march towards modernity as peaceful, democratic and universalistic. Finally, this chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
Introduction
(2017)
This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the role of Frontex in the European Union as an agency to protect its external borders in the Mediterranean from irregular or 'illegal' migration. It discusses that Europe is an arrangement for European citizens only – and for some privileged non-citizens as in the Swiss case. The book explains the points to the possibility of a transnational membership regime that, however, bears certain antinomies that also point to unresolved problems. It offers an interesting view on the symbolic boundary between the citizen and the consumer, discussing this nexus from the perspective of citizenship studies, consumer culture and surveillance studies. Among the many far-reaching transformations that both societies and citizens have faced in recent years, the European migration crisis has most urgently brought to mind the fact that modern citizenship has always been about boundaries and about processes of inclusion and exclusion
Robert King Merton (1910 – 2003) gilt heute längst als Klassiker der Soziologie. Er kann als der bedeutendste Soziologe der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts und als Wegbereiter einer modernen Soziologie bezeichnet werden, die das konstitutive Verhältnis von soziologischer Theorie und empirischer Forschung ins Zentrum des Interesses gerückt hat. Aufgrund seiner Beiträge zur Sozialtheorie, zur Begriffsbildung in der Soziologie und seiner vielfältigen inhaltlichen und empirischen Arbeiten spielt Merton bis heute eine bedeutende Rolle in der Soziologie als wissenschaftlicher Disziplin.
Violence
(2015)
Gewalttätige soziale und politische Auseinandersetzungen, wie sie sich jüngst in den Staaten Nordafrikas und des Nahen Ostens, in den französischen Banlieues oder in London ereignet haben, deuten darauf hin, dass die sozialen Ordnungen, in denen sie entstehen, nicht länger ungeteilt als legitim erachtet werden. Vielmehr werden sie von alternativen Ordnungsvorstellungen infrage gestellt und herausgefordert. Auf die Erklärung derartiger Ordnungskonflikte ist die Soziologie nicht gut vorbereitet. Der Aufsatz skizziert deshalb zunächst Probleme und offene Fragen einer Soziologie der Gewalt – von der klassischen Soziologie über begrifflich-konzeptionelle und theoretisch-methodologische Probleme bis hin zu problematischen modernisierungs- und zivilisationstheoretischen Annahmen über eine künftige Rolle von Gewalt in sozialen Prozessen. Eine Erklärung der genannten Phänomene, so die These, wird nur dann möglich, wenn eine Soziologie der Gewalt den konstitutiven Zusammenhang von Phänomenen physischer Gewalt und Formen sozialer Ordnung in den Mittelpunkt stellt. Eine erklärende Soziologie, die „Warum“- und „Wie“-Fragen nicht auseinanderreißt, muss sich dazu auf die sozialen Mechanismen der Gewaltentstehung in Prozessen der Produktion und Reproduktion sozialer Ordnung konzentrieren.
Im Auftrag des Staates
(2011)
Folter ist ein Akt extremer kollektiver Gewalt, der im Auftrag eines Staates im Geheimen ausgeübt wird. Die Frage, was Menschen dazu bringt, anderen Menschen diese extreme Gewalt anzutun, verengt den Blick für ein Verständnis der Folter allzu schnell auf individualistische Erklärungsversuche. Der vorliegende Aufsatz geht im Gegensatz dazu von der Gruppe der Folterer aus und rückt die sozialen Beziehungen dieser Form der Vergesellschaftung und die von ihnen ausgehenden sozialen Dynamiken und Effekte in den Mittelpunkt. In einem ersten Schritt werden Georg Simmels formale Bestimmungen der geheimen Gesellschaft rekonstruiert und auf die geheime Gesellschaft der Folterer angewandt und spezifiziert; auf dieser Grundlage werden im zweiten Schritt Handlungsbedingungen der Mitglieder der geheimen Gesellschaft der Folterer herausgearbeitet; der dritte Schritt bestimmt die eigendynamischen Prozesse des Phänomens der Folter, die aus der Eskalation politischer Konflikte, der Gruppe der Folterer und der Situation der Folter erwachsen. Die These lautet, dass sich aus der Perspektive einer relationalen Soziologie ein theoretischer Zugriff auf das Problem der Folter ergibt, der weiterführende Erklärungen des Phänomens ermöglicht.
Der Beitrag diskutiert Genese, Bedeutungsgehalt und theoretischen Kontext des Merton’schen Konzepts der Opportunitätsstruktur und des von ihm bei Weber entliehenen Konzepts der Lebenschancen. Die These lautet, dass beide Konzepte konflikttheoretisch interpretiert werden müssen, damit sie ihr volles analytisches und erklärendes Potenzial zur Analyse zentraler sozialer Konflikte entfalten können. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass beide Konzepte in ihrem Bedeutungsgehalt konvergieren, ein konflikttheoretisch inspiriertes Verständnis aber unterschiedliche theoretische Strategien erfordert. Während die Opportunitätsstrukturen jenseits des Merton’schen Verständnisses reinterpretiert werden müssen, um verstehen zu können, dass das Handeln sozialer Akteure die Optionen anderer beschränken kann, ist für die Lebenschancen ein Zurück zu Max Webers ursprünglicher Idee angezeigt, um der Bedeutung sozialer Schließung als sozialen Mechanismus einer Auseinandersetzung um knappe Güter nachgehen zu können
The Secret Society of Torturers107How do normal people become able to torture others? In order to explain this puzzling social phenomenon, we have to take secrecy – the characteristic trait of modern torture – as the lynchpin of the analysis. Following Georg Simmel’s formal analysis of the “secret society”, the contribution reconstructs structural and cultural aspects of the secret society of torturers that generate social processes that allow its members to behave extremely violently, forcing individuals to turn into torturers. The contribution argues that the form of social behaviour that we call torture is socially shaped. It goes beyond social psychology to de-velop an explanation from the perspective of relational sociology
Schließung, soziale
(2014)
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.
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.
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.