Zoltán Szántó

How can economic sociology help business relationship management

Purpose – By analyzing organizations as social actors and business relationships as social relationships, sociology can improve business relationship management. This paper aims to explore the issues involved.Design/methodology/approach – A business relationship is an interactive exchange between two organizations embedded in a network of business connections. The paper reviews theories of social actions and social actors and the concepts of economic field and embeddedness to illustrate some social dimensions of business relationships.Findings – Social action and social actor theories emphasize that co‐operation is always encumbered with conflicts, that consciousness about the relationship is fundamental for both strongly and weakly structured actors, and that actors (people involved in a business relationship) always have some freedom of manoeuvre. The concept of economic field underscores the specificity of each business relationship and the critical need for concrete analysis. The concept of embeddedne...

Content analysis of corruption coverage: Cross-national differences and commonalities

The article presents and summarizes some results from extensive cross-national content analysis of media coverage of corruption. The authors examined a sample containing 12,742 articles published in France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and the United Kingdom from 2004 to 2013. A limited number of studies have been done thus far to reveal how the media deals with corruption cases in certain countries, and cross-national comparative analyses are exceedingly scarce. The core focus of the study is to reveal the significant differences in the corruption cases covered by the media according to the countries under analysis. We assume that some differences exist between the media coverage of corruption in the new and the old European Union member states and also that by classifying countries into groups based on their perception of the level of the corruption, some dissimilarities will be revealed between them. We conclude that the distinction between countries based on whether they are old or new European Union members does not wholly determine the nature of reporting on international or national corruption cases, for example, Italy was more similar to the old European Union member states in this sense. Considering the level of institutionalization of corruption cases, Italy appears to be more similar to the other old European Union members, but we should clarify that differences based on this feature of the cases are not clearly highlighted in the interaction model. However, if we use the variable perceptions of corruption to classify countries, we find that countries with a ‘cleaner’ environment (the United Kingdom, France) place more focus on reporting corruption cases in the international arena.

Local Government Corruption in Hungary

This chapter reports on the key findings of an ongoing empirical research programme organized by the Corruption Research Centre of the Institute for Sociology and Social Policy at Corvinus University of Budapest.1 The general goal of the research is to make a contribution to the in-depth exploration, better understanding and explanation of different corruption transactions in Hungary. To achieve this aim, we focused on studying actual corruption situations and mechanisms rather than investigating perceptions about corruption or surveying opinions about corruption. We believe that both the interviews and media content analysis on corruption cases that were undertaken give us the potential to identify typical corruption situations, typical players in corruption games and their typical types of motivation.2 During the research, our attention turned to the local government as a pivotal level to be investigated. In this chapter we offer a detailed analysis in order to establish a general picture of the sophisticated structure and actual penetration of different local government corruption mechanisms. We do believe that a profound knowledge of actual corruption situation and mechanism types is an essential prerequisite for creating solid anticorruption measures (for example, changing regulations or the institutional environment) both at the national and at the local level.

Physicists, stamp collectors, human mobility forecasters

One of the two reviewers studied in high school to be a physicist. In the end, he became something else, but he never lost his awe of physics. The other reviewer never intended to become a physicist, but he sometimes asks himself why he didn’t become one. Today, they are both sociologists who practice their science on an action theory basis and believe that regularities exist in the world of social actions which can be perceived, understood, explained – and even used for making predictions.