Piotr Sztompka

Cultural Trauma The Other Face of Social Change

There is a current effort to borrow the concept of trauma from medicine and psychiatry and to introduce it into sociological theory. The author explicates the notion of cultural trauma as applicable to the theory of social change. He defines cultural trauma as the culturally defined and interpreted shock to the cultural tissue of a society, and presents a model of the traumatic sequence, describing typical conditions under which cultural trauma emerges and evolves. Drawing on the work of Robert K. Merton on anomie, and of Anthony Giddens on risk, he suggests a number of typical strategies by which societies cope with cultural traumas. Cultural trauma is treated as a link in the ongoing chain of social changes; depending on the number of concrete circumstances, cultural trauma may be a phase in the constructive morphogenesis of culture or in the destructive cycle of cultural decay.

Looking back: The year 1989 as a cultural and civilizational break☆

Abstract The transformations in East-Central Europe after 1989 proceed at two distinct levels: institutional and cultural. The complete transition to democratic polity and market economy can be effected only if appropriate cultural “habits of the heart” emerge and become fully established. The period of real-socialism has left a vicious legacy of “civilizational incompetence”, due to the impact of “bloc culture”. But the traditions of indigenous, national cultures as well as globalized Western culture may serve as an antidote, slowly eradicating the vestiges of communism. The major role in this process is performed by the young generation, who was able to escape the indoctrination and habituation by the communist system.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS IN COMPARATIVE INQUIRY: DIVERGENT OR CONVERGENT?:

The perennial sociological problem of the incommensurability of concepts becomes acute in the context of comparative research. In theoretical discourse second degree sociological concepts and the first degree societal concepts of the members of societies are both subject to this problem to which the unsatisfactory responses have been either radical relativism and theoretical anarchism, or ethnocentrism and dogmatism. Now actual historical tendencies, the globalisation of society and internationalisation of sociology are providing trans-societal and trans-theoretical concepts. At the same time the naturalistic model of comparative study of independent cases becomes less possible. Research shifts its emphasis from seeking uniformity to seeking uniqueness, and by cross-tabulating the focus and direction of comparative research we can develop a six-fold typology of comparisons: (1) encompassing, (2) universalising, (3) generalising, (4) individualising, (5) specifying, (6) particularising. The new opportunities for individualising comparisons take sociology away from natural science patterns to the logic of interpretation in history and the humanities.

The Focus on Everyday Life: a New Turn in Sociology

Sociology is currently undergoing an interesting theoretical and methodological turn. A number of recent and influential works of sociology deal with the seemingly trivial phenomena of everyday life. The standard mass surveys are being replaced by in-depth, interpretative, and qualitative procedures that focus on the visual surface of society. They do so by means of observation and its extension – photography. The author believes that this is not a new fashion but rather signals a true paradigmatic shift. For the author, it heralds the emergence of a ‘third’ sociology, after the ‘first sociology’ of social organisms and systems, and the ‘second sociology’ of behaviour and action. The new focus is on social existence manifested by social events of various scales. This sociology of social existence provides a new angle of vision, which promises to advance considerably our understanding of several perennial riddles of human society.

From East Europeans to Europeans: shifting collective identities and symbolic boundaries in the New Europe*

On 1 May 2004, Europe changed. This date marks both a beginning and an end. The enlargement of the European Union signals the beginning of a new phase in the history of Western Europe, and, for the new members from Eastern Europe, the end of a long period of exclusion and separation. Commentaries on this epochal event usually focus on ‘hard’ institutional factors such as political rearrangements, legal coordination and economic readjustments, etc. I will focus more on the ‘soft’ cultural and human factors; what I consider to be the intangibles and imponderables of a new, emerging Europe. I am convinced that culture really matters in social life.

A Modern Sociological Classic

Now that the work of Robert K. Merton has been reviewed, interpreted and systematised in topical order — according to the main problem-areas of his concern — it is time to return to another perspective; to dig deeper under the surface and to summarise the pervasive emphases, foci, and leitmotifs of his sociology. In this final chapter I abandon the topical order and adopt a thematic order.

On the decaying moral space. Is there a way out

The concept of moral space is presented here, in the arguments of classical authors who treated the decay of moral space as an inevitable cost of modernity. Three areas are identified where the decay of moral space is manifested in our period of ‘late modernity’. They are: violent crime, distrust and cynicism, and the vanishing of social capital. Paradoxically, however, opportunities to overcome the current moral void are discovered in the very traits of modernity: reflexiveness and globalization. They allow the process of moral healing through the reconstitution of primordial communities, ethnic, national, religious, in an open, tolerant and ecumenical manner, as well as the constitution of new communities of universalist and global reach.

Theoretical Approaches to Trust; Their Implications for the Resolution of Intergroup Conflict

In the rich and evolving research of trust, there are two opposite theoretical approaches. One in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), Robert Putnam (1993), Francis Fukuyama (1995) and other considers trust as a quality of interpersonal relations emerging from below, turning into shared cultural resource and producing viable democracy and prosperous economy. The causal vector is from micro to macro, from interpersonal networks to organizations, institutions, and the state. This is the dominant approach. But there is also an alternative perspective which claims that trust is facilitated or even enforced by the “civilized public sphere” (Papakostas 2012), or “institutionalized skepticism” (Cleary and Stokes 2006), i.e., the rational political and economic organization, and particularly the clear, stable, transparent, and consistent law universalistically and efficiently applied and executed. Here the causal vector is from the state, organizations, and institutions toward interpersonal trust, from macro to micro. Both approaches should not be considered as competing but rather as complementary. They have also different but complementary implications concerning the resolution of intergroup conflicts by building trust. For example, the earlier suggests cultivating trust from below by encouraging personal contacts, mutual acquaintance, cooperation, participation in common voluntary ventures by hostile groups. The latter approach would rather emphasize the need for enforcing trustworthiness by overarching, higher level structure of organizations, institutions and laws assuring accountability, stability, transparency of social relations, through control and surveillance of both feuding parties. It is only the parallel employment of emergence and enforcement of trust that opens the possibility of gradual resolving of intergroup conflict.

Worrying about Trust

In the last few decades, the subject of trust has become one of the central research topics in sociology and political science. Various theoretical approaches have crystallized, and an immense amount of empirical data has been collected. The focus on trust is for two kinds of reasons. One has to do with immanent developments in the social sciences. We have witnessed a turn from almost exclusive preoccupation with the macro-social level, that is the organizational, systemic or structuralist images of society, toward the micro-foundations of social life; that is, everyday actions and interactions, including their ‘soft’ dimensions, mental and cultural intangibles and imponderables. Another set of reasons has to do with the changing quality of social structures and social processes in the late-modern period. The ascendance of democracy means that the role of human agency is growing, and more depends on what common people think and do, how they feel toward others and toward their rulers and how they choose to participate and cooperate. The process of globalization means that more and more of the factors impinging on everyday life of people are non-transparent, unfamiliar and distant, demanding new type of attitudes. The expansion of risk means that people have to act more often than before in conditions of uncertainty. The traumas of rapid, comprehensive and often unexpected social change produce disorientation and a loss of existential security. If the ambition of sociology to become the reflexive awareness of society is to be realized, then the current interest in trust seems to be wholly warranted.

Civilizing the Public Sphere: Distrust, Trust and Corruption, (Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology)

In the research on trust there has always been a puzzle: why consistently, over many decades the winners in the international rankings of trust were Nordic countries, and particularly Sweden? It has been equally surprising why the rankings of trust coincide so closely with the scales of functioning democracy and economic prosperity, with the North of Europe again at the top. The contrasting picture appeared in the South of Europe: Robert Putnam (1993) diagnosed the syndrome of low public trust, poor political performance and low economic growth in the South of Italy. And recent economic and political collapse accompanied with the fall of trust that we witness in Greece seem to confirm the correlation. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon has considered trust as independent variable, the explanans, and the condition of politics and economy as the dependent variable, the explanandum. The reasoning has been as follows: countries where there exists strong social capital i.e., networks of positive, close interpersonal relations, bonds and ties, with particular importance of trust and trustworthiness, generate efficient democracy and strong economy, whereas the weak social capital, pervasive distrust or at most trust of the mafia type, limited to closed groups (Edward Banfield’s ‘amoral familism’ [1958]), are politically unstable and economically unsuccessful. The deeper but inevitable question: ‘why trust emerged and developed in some lucky countries, and did not in others?’ was initially faced with the teleological notion of ‘national character’, but later was relegated to the discipline of history, a sort of ‘academic outsourcing’. Supposedly the long peaceful development without major wars plus a geopolitical location a bit outside of the turmoils of European continent produced and cultivated the Nordic tissue of trust. And the opposite historical fates of the Southern countries left a legacy of distrust and escape from the public sphere to ‘amoral privacy’ of small family-like communities. The possibility of reverse causal vector, namely that it is the rational political and economic organization (e.g., clear, stable, transparent and