Followers or Activists? Social Scientists in the Reality Shows of Transformation

by
Pál Tamás

Introduction

[1]  In the 1990s, social research in the transformation countries appears to face an impasse. On the one hand, the need for cross-cultural research has never been greater. On the other hand, the so-called "crises of representation" in the social sciences prompted by the institutionalized bias of research traditions weakly related to the post-socialist realities has complicated the interpretation of the new environment. Most social scientists have reacted to this in one of two distinct ways. One group has simply retrenched behind seemingly safe disciplinary barriers. This is not a surprisingly new situation. "The anthropologist writes about extraordinary locales that have color and vividness, in contrast to the sociologist’s greater proclivity for the matter-of-fact and the prosaic," remarked Gouldner (1973: 344-45). The second group has fallen back upon a prudent localism that focuses almost exclusively on peripheral types of modernity. Elias (1987) called this "the retreat of sociologists into the present"; it is even more a retreat into their own cultural life-worlds (Kurosawa, 2000: 12).

Institution building in the knowledge sector

[2]  Groups of new social scientists of the 1990s (new generations and researchers moving toward central positions from the margins of the research system) entering into knowledge production are challenged by an old/new program of institution building and power constitution. What is better for them, to occupy the old institutions or to build new ones? Their decisions were influenced by four factors:

• How strong are the institutional or regulatory defense lines of the old academic elite? Or in other worlds, how is the old academic power structure constituted? In those countries and research sectors where some forms of academic autonomy were already constituted in the 1980s and where the academic elite of that time already used that autonomy against the late communist bureaucracy, the same instruments and regulations were applied after 1989 in an almost natural form against the new academic groups who attacked the established positions of traditional institutional academic leaders. So newcomers had difficulties taking over the latter’s’ positions. In other countries or sectors, where the elite of social research was better integrated in the ideological infrastructure of the former regime, it was now easier to use political force against them.
• Major foreign donors for social research in the region, like the Open Society Institute (George Soros’ philanthropy) and other programs or projects of "democracy building", usually had only limited trust in state institutions that were inherited from communist times. On the one hand, the donors were dissatisfied with their low efficiency and high overhead, and on the other hand, until the late 1990s, the liberal funds and programs were simply not interested in cooperation with their elite, which had already begun during the socialist decades.
• From the early 1990s on, important groups of the social science intelligentsia got involved in practical social reforms or even parliamentary politics. Those programs used the most active or pragmatic part of the research community, the people who in other circumstances would or could be the organizational leaders of academic renewal. Starting in the mid-1990s, the majority of these enthusiasts for practical social reforms usually left the political scene, but the power structure already stabilized by that time made it almost impossible for them to get involved now in academic reforms.
• Using foreign grants and research contracts, active parts of the community left the region in the period of 1988-1996. Again, groups of potential institution-builders and founders of scientific schools are overrepresented in migration flows. With low academic incomes and the low attractiveness for many academics of better paid local jobs in the market-oriented applied research centers, many fine researchers saw work abroad as a quality-of-life and professional alternative. Fewer groups in the social sciences than in the natural sciences were involved in this process. But the losses were significant, especially in the younger age groups and in countries more deeply affected by socio-economic crises than the successful "Visegrad" establishments.

[3]  Under the cumulative impact of these factors, reformers forgot for almost a decade the "old academic sector" in countries where the positions of the old academic elite were more strongly defended and limited resources were redistributed from the state budgets. The new, ambitious, dynamic groups of social researchers and projects concentrated in other places and organizations. At the same time, the new centers and educational programs emerging beyond the traditional academic sector are usually dependent on ongoing fragmented funding from different projects, rather than being integrated in larger systems, and do not provide existential certainty for professional careers.

[4]  A different model was developed in the more successful reform countries, i.e., in Poland and Hungary. Here the intellectual and organizational modernization of the available infrastructure, i.e., of state-supported or state-financed institutions, became the mainstream. Thus, in these countries, there has been no serious dualization - no isolation of old and new research in separate networks. After some compromises, modern social research was integrated in the major academic institutions.

Re-institutionalization of scientific schools

[5]  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the scientific schools remained central elements of the organizational landscape of the social sciences. Old institutions disappeared, new ones were created outside of basic research, and many intellectuals who in the communist years believed that the research system was the only safe place to survive and to defend their personal autonomy in a hostile environment now left it and started to discover the zones of intellectual and professional existence outside of research. So the remaining centers of excellence in research and education started to be based on informal contacts, intergenerational alliances, and networks again. They saw the role of scientific schools where they still existed - mainly in economics, but also in sociology and political science - as especially important. But the structure of these schools changed significantly. Formally, they were patriarchal institutions centered on strong "fatherlike" personalities. The professional concepts and scientific worldview of the respective "Great Old Men" were transferred to the young through the school’s middle-aged generations. With minor changes, this basic structure remains almost intact in the humanities, but began to change dramatically in the 1990s in the "hard" social sciences. The force of international research contacts seems to have been central in this process. The structure of schools whose founders possessed international merit was modernized, but not transformed totally. But in most cases, even if he was a brilliant scholar, the Maestro, the central personality, was not really involved in international networking, and in the 1970s-1980s, this factor just wasn’t yet a major chunk of institution building in the internationally isolated "socialist" social sciences. Consequently, in the new internationalized order of social research, the Great Old Men lost important parts of the organizational power to the middle-aged strata, who were usually better prepared for international networking than the founder of the school. The really young entering the research enterprise usually searched for integrators to help incorporate them in networks with resources available for them. They often considered middle-aged scholars more capable of integrating them and therefore as having more organizational power than the Maestros.

[6]  In some cases, members of that middle-aged generation were unable to make the necessary compromises in the internal power game, and their school soon collapsed. But others pursued their interests and were able to stabilize their schools in new environments. The new school concept, however, was no longer centered on continuing or further elaborating the master’s thoughts, but sought a discursive framework to maximize the availability of grants. In this respect, the school could be understood as a framing institution packaging available intellectual resources for international and, in very special cases, for national trade as well. Naturally, schools in these situations usually did conserve the disciplines. Especially in resource-intensive research areas, the availability of grants was really limited for young scientists with approaches, methods, and views different from those of the established center. At the same time, international research careers channeling the central personalities of existing or would-be centers to academic positions in the West had negative impacts on the established scientific schools in the region. Students were usually unable to follow their Masters to world centers. The Internet improved that situation in the last 5-6 years to a certain degree, but didn’t change it dramatically. Only a very few new schools with distinct international merits emerged in the region.

Experts and advisors

[7]  In the 1980s in the region, before the transition started, economists used to have more experience than sociologists or political scientists in policy consulting. Experts in collecting and interpreting data for policy decisions were better established in their sectors than in areas directly related to ideology, where other social scientists could be used. Overpolitization of decision-making played a role here as well, but, formally, the policy community tried to follow international patterns in many sectors of macroeconomics. The available roles of sociologists were more divided. Sociologists broadly used and interpreted social statistics, but policy makers understood or interpreted their independent intellectual role in a much narrower way. Critical sociologists investigating substantial questions of transformation were not put in expert roles either before or after the changes started. On the one hand, the social policy administrators - the former partners of sociologists in expert positions - didn’t disappear after 1989. Established contacts survived both in cognition and in personal communication. On the other hand, practical advisory roles for political scientists at existing centers are new. Behind the scenes, ideologists of the late state socialism were already frequently using research data and other sorts of social science information formatted in accordance with international standards. But either the policy makers or the experts of that time survived after the transitions started. Very few enlightened party apparatchiks of that time occupied important positions, even in those countries where strong socialist parties dominated the political landscape of the 1990s. The majority of them, especially the "Agitprop" people (the party communicators), whose social science concepts were once in relatively high demand, simply disappeared from public view. Something similar also happened to their former advisors, the political science experts, but with more compromises. In the opinions of the new political class, segments of the research community that were closer to the pre-1989 power structure were therefore illegitimate. Elements of personal trust play an important role everywhere in this business, but the advisory roles around the former communist elite were especially removed from the public eye and based on personal relations. So the new political clients were not interested in the services of those who served the former rulers, despite the qualifications of some people in that circle. Later, in the 1990s, these experts were usually very successful in marketing research and other areas of expertise outside of politics.

[8]  During the transformation, new policy makers and new experts emerged on the scene. Both groups were just learning their roles, and in such a transient situation the communication between two inexperienced entities is especially complicated. Former dissident intellectuals occupied important niches in some countries and political movements until the mid-1990s, but that didn’t generate genuine demand for closer relations between reformers and social researchers. Some of the new policy makers had once been researchers, and understanding themselves and their former professional careers as part of the contemporary social science community and therefore as "experts" in their respective sectors, they were not interested in other experts, much less advisors from the community, except for the purpose of buying fresh social data.

[9]  The dynamics of the relationships between politicians and social science in public opinion and the media followed another trajectory. In comparison with the 1980s, the role of the political analyst, commentator, or chronist on the TV screen became much larger, or at least more visible. And popular opinion usually overestimated the impact on decision-making of the social scientists who were presented to the public on these programs. With significant delay, in the late 1990s, politicians utilized this particular mode of perception, as well. Those social scientists with high public visibility were often presented to the audience as partners or allies of given political movements or governments, but they were used neither in forming broader concepts of reforms, nor in supplying new social data. A new expert model - the role of virtual advisors - is emerging. Because this group is highly visible to potential voters, the decision-makers want to demonstrate its availability to politics as a further source of their legitimacy, though they are not interested in its concrete advice or knowledge.

[10]  However, social scientists produced remarkable changes in utilizing concrete knowledge in the 1990s. At the beginning of transformation, many intellectuals and of course many social scientists took personal part in campaign planning and in political communication. Of course, the people involved in these activities were not professional political technologists. Most of the concrete tasks were performed by researchers from the academic sectors, paid case by case for their performances. These researchers’ additional income depended on the fees their political customers paid. But the major organizational problem of the 1990s in this area was the growing discrepancy between the step-by-step, systematized or accumulated "technological" skills of involved researchers as individuals, on the one hand, and the limited efforts in infrastructure building for them, on the other. The creation of organizational frameworks for knowledge generation usually lagged behind the cumulated personal experience of would-be political technologists formally still occupying academic jobs. The political system in most countries of the region in the late 1990s started to suffer from the low effectiveness of this system. In these years, the policy intellectuals without proper infrastructure started to be marginalized on the markets of political expertise; in the end, they were replaced by consulting firms more or less similar to their Western functional counterparts. This change had two consequences. The first is connected to the structure of research, the second is related to the self-images of the social science elite. At the very end, the upper strata of academic social researchers enjoyed the dual job market of the 1990s very much. On the one hand, they used to receive higher consulting fees as experts, but on the other hand, they continued to play the high-status roles of academic gurus on the intellectual attention markets. Also, their informal or only poorly formalized contacts with the political elite could be understood - both by the public and in their own role interpretations - as continuous involvement in the reforms and a kind of direct personal impact on the process of change in society. The latter was especially important for those social scientists who continued to be prisoners of the old role models of the East European intelligentsia. For these public intellectuals, the availability of advisory positions was interpreted as an organic role or as a continuation of regional tradition. They were ready to accept them as part of their illusory involvement in political decisions. They continued to perceive these illusions as reality, even in indefensible situations.

[11]  But in the late 1990s, they were forced to choose. Either they became practical consultants with real job descriptions and real income, accepting the asymmetries of service professions. Or they continued to serve in the academic sector, while being quickly marginalized by professional policy consultants. Academic incomes in most countries continued to grow during the 1990s, but even where they did, this replacement meant financial losses for these "dual" professionals.

[12]  Politicians also interpreted the new professional structure of experts as quite ambivalent. On the one hand, the services offered by the new commercial consulting sector may have been more professional than the previous ones. But in the absence of academic interference, they were less stimulating for building concepts. Cooperation was more hierarchical, based on clear dependencies between services and their clients; the tasks were formulated in a more simple language; and the asymmetries grew rapidly.

[13]  But the neo-etatist politicians of the late 1990s were not interested in legitimizing themselves by taking the intellectuals’ sides anymore, and in general terms they were afraid of multifunctional players on the political scene (including the dual role of academic advisors), who make that scene more complex to calculate.

[14]  The end of transformation or "system change" is interpreted for different groups of the society in different frames and by different signs. For some, the end of the process is signaled by the end of privatization or by the multinational firms’ opening of mass production facilities. Academic social scientists could interpret the end of politicians’ intensive use of them as consultants or advisors as the turning point.

Think tanks and transformation

[15]  Most social researchers on transformation do not take part in guiding the change individually, but rather integrated in various think tanks, searching for access to policy communities to inject new ideas into current debates. A policy community is all potential actors who share a common "policy" focus and, sooner or later, succeed in shaping policy. In these networks, think tanks provide organizational and communication links between the different audiences. The first waves of policy institutes of the region, which had already been established during state socialism’s technocratic attempts at modernization in the 1970s, usually disappeared or collapsed in the first period of transformation, due to their close ties to the old party and the state apparatus. But a significant number of their members were able to cross the river, incorporated in international bodies or academic institutions. The second wave emerging in the late 1980s to early 1990s primarily served international donor organizations, aid agencies, and philanthropic foundations operating in the region. The third wave of the 1990s consists of business consultants, political advisors, and communication experts tied to the new national elite. However, until recently a large share of this third wave remained state-focused, given the sources of financing and the local character of their audiences. Relatively few think tanks of this generation pursue research agendas or interact cross-nationally with one another on a regular basis. The first wave served the national elite of its time, while taking part in the global confrontational game. The second wave was forced to be international (due to its clients’ interests, it networked in the region more intensively than its predecessors did in the state socialist decades). The third wave is more local, using international data and helping to interpret external impulses in its systematic comparative effort.

Social criticism and the new elite

[16]  Let us pose the simplest question: How is critical analysis, especially radical interrogation of one’s own society and historical period, accomplished? For our purposes, a good answer distinguishes between involvement and detachment (Elias ,1987a). An involved critique employs another state or system of reference as a normative guide to interpret or even to change the existing social order (i.e., using contrasts like opacity and transparency, is and ought, etc.). On the other hand, detachment aims to achieve historical or cultural distance from the investigator’s social context. So a detached critique can be either genealogical (historical) or intercultural (anthropological).

[17]  The first defamiliarizes the present by establishing a temporal gap with a past used to contrast and compare ongoing events, the second "goes abroad" to search for different models of human conditions (Kurasawa, 2000: 13). In a similar situation, in his well known "Traditional and Critical Theory", Horkheimer (1972: 207) appeals to history, where the questioning of the existing social order must be informed by an understanding of the sociohistorical conditions at its roots. In other transitional situations, the historical wing has predominated in sociological circles, and detachment has also been realized cross-culturally. In the post-1989 situation, there have been surprisingly few studies devoted to surviving fragments of the state-socialist past or to revitalized pre-modern traditions in the current Eastern European environment.

[18]  Social research’s cross-cultural tendency has contributed to the self-criticism of Western modernity by stepping beyond the confines of our frameworks of thought and action. The distancing effect produced by encounter and engagement with other sociocultural formations questions the modern West’s points of references. At the same time, the existential references of the 1990s in Eastern Europe question the apparent givenness or naturalness of existing modern Western beliefs and practices (which are commonly perceived as removed from the sociohistorical domain). The Balkans create and keep alive a sort of short-distance Otherness for Western Europe (there is a rationale for distinguishing between short-distance and the long-distance Otherness in analogy to how post-Soviet politics distinguishes between the "near abroad" and the "far abroad"). In these situations of transition, borrowing Castoriadis’ terminology, the "self-institutioning of society" creates and institutionalizes modes of conduct and systems of belief. If the founders of the sociological discipline cultivated unabashedly cross-cultural interests for the internal relativization of Western worldviews and experiences, post-1989 sociology was forced to do the same for the external relativization of the same experience. A sort of ethnological counter-current could be identified as part of a New Critique, perhaps in a post-Bourdieu fashion.

Have scholars taken part in local democratic transitions?

[19]  Traditional, mainstream studies of social transformation in East-Central Europe at this point either apply conflict-theoretical approaches or try to apply models borrowed from descriptions of post-Soviet transformation processes. It might be fruitful to add to them Latin American models that contribute to understanding the precise nature of sociopolitical change during processes of democratization. Two of these are regime analysis and cultural studies. The first focuses on interpretation of elite behavior during institutional changes, and the second evaluates cultural changes among the population at large. The focusing on central issues presents alternating explanations for theoretical problems of transition (issues of clientelism, normative concepts of democracy, and the identification of relevant sociopolitical actors). Munck (1998) gave regime analysis its name; cultural studies approach originally developed by British Marxist-Gramscian sociologists in the 1960-1970s to explain the peripheral transformation in Latin America could be related to Alvarez et al. (1998). The minimalist definition of democracy advanced by Schumpeter (1942) - "the democratic method (or) institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide via a competitive struggle for the people’s vote" - has created an elite model of democracy approaching this and other procedural specifications. Regime analysis concentrates on the emergence and stabilization of these procedural rules. Studying the institutionalized rules of constitutional reform and political transition, this literature recognizes the constraints of democratic stabilization on the periphery mostly derived from the longstanding traditions of oligarchy and the heavy legacies of authoritarian rule (Krische, 2000). For this, Garreton (1994) used the term "authoritarian enclaves"; O’Donnell (1998) recently recognized that polyarchical regimes can coexist with a properly democratic regime of law and that a solely regime-based focus is insufficient. Therefore (Munck, 1996) the political regime should be disaggregated into its procedural and behavioral dimensions. The first establishes the new "rules of the game" for the transition to democracy. The second, behavioral dimension means the strategic acceptance of these rules by all major political actors and the lack of normative rejection of these rules by all major political actors. It’s very clear: collectivist or reductionist conceptions of the political regime ignore the independent importance of institutions. In this approach, the normative component only appears in the actor’s behavioral dimension "ex negations". Now for Eastern Europe there is a commonplace, which the Latin Americanists underline for their own regime: their "hybrid" character, the importance of "another institutionalization" - that of clientelism, particularism, and corruption. Of course, it is an open question whether widespread informal cultural and institutional practices threaten the consolidation of liberal ideas of democracy, or if, vice versa, they are the basis for its survival. But at any rate, the two-dimensional desegregation of the political regime helps to raise the fundamental question for the policy situation of the exact definitions of the science-based advisor’s strategies: WHO are the regime’s real political actors? In this situation it is important that those claiming to hold a purely strategic point of view often lapse into a "quasi-moralistic" account of Weberian categories, i.e., clientelism is often used more as an argument of authority, which deploys it as a heuristic category (Krischke, 2000).

[20]  The cultural studies approach, on the other hand, prefers to look at the unfolding of a nonlinear cultural process of political and social change, in which "ambiguity" is a keyword (Alvarez et al., 1998). In these frameworks, social actors are responsible subjects and interpreters of the meanings and political relevance of their actions within their specific national contents. In this respect, the policies are cultural policies, and this a central strategic element for the policy experts self-identification. And these cultural policies can be interpreted as processes enacted when sets of social actors shaped by and embodying different cultural meanings and practices come into conflict with each other. When movements deploy alternative concepts of social justice, nature, equality, democracy, and technological progress that unsettle dominant cultural meanings, they enact cultural politics (Alvarez et al., 1998). In this sense, as a policy advisor, the social scientist of transformation is part of particular cultural formations, which are results of discursive articulations originating in existing cultural practices - never pure, always hybrid. The lack of differentiation between the public and private (like social authoritarianism), where political relations are perceived as extensions of private relations, regards favoritism, clientelism, and paternalism as normal or at least regular practices of politics. Alternative concepts of democracy and knowledge representation, which would be related to new role sets of experts, would view democratic struggles as encompassing a redefinition not only of the political system, but also of economic, cultural, and scientific practices, to engender a democratic ordering for society as a whole. The social scientist in this situation could became part of "subaltern counterpublics" (using the term of Nancy Fraser, 1993: 14). This can be defined as parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities and interests. Continuing this line, the social scientist’s role can be reinterpreted in terms of a new concept of "social citizenship", which is different from the liberal interpretations and conceived as active participation in the collective action of dialogue and negotiations related to the whole of society and its inequities (Krischke, 2000: 119).

Historians and/or judges - are these alternative role sets for social researchers during the transformation decade?

[21]  Participating as an active player in the processes of transformation, the social scientist may play two traditional roles - that of the judge or that of the historian, an author of annals of change. These roles can’t be confronted simply as active or passive, near or distant, present- or future-oriented. The affinities imply convergence as well as divergences. In the classical tradition (Ginzburg, 1991, 1980), historical writing had to vividly present characters and situations. The historian, like the judge, was expected to make a convincing argument by communicating the illusion of reality, exhibiting evidence he or someone else adduced. The tradition based on moral and political court speeches, followed by condemnations, has gone on for a long time and has been integrated in social researchers’ modern role sets. A sort of judicial model is deeply incorporated not only in sociology, but also in historiography. In the last two decades - everywhere, and not only in the transformation countries - words like PROOF or even TRUTH have acquired an unfashionable ring in the social sciences. This extreme antipositivist attitude turns out to be a sort of inverted positivism (Ginzburg, 1991, 1983). How should an expert position himself in such a situation? The diametrically opposed assumptions - theoretical naiveté and sophistication - share the same assumption, taking the relationship between reality and evidence for granted.

Policy impacts in theory building

[22]  The processes of institution building and problems of political communication had significant impact on professional languages. We do not think primarily about the transformation of discourse or the change in semantics, but about basic structural problems like fragmentation and eclecticism. Those new professional languages of social sciences in the post-communist world are mixtures of technical termini, fragments of Western theories that were fashionable 15-20 years ago, and Marxist terms isolated from their original intellectual or theoretical environments. The "Western" paradigms of these disciplines and research areas are also fragmented or partial, but the new "Eastern" professional concepts and languages are much more eclectic. The most important point here is probably that the "Western" and "Eastern" concepts and keywords used in the new local concepts are, in the final analysis, equally isolated from their original systematic intellectual environments and alienated from their own primary traditions. Maybe for many the major value of the new system of termini that are not context-dependent is related to its neutrality, but in the end those concepts are just badly suited for the systematic interpretation of post-socialist transformation as a whole. Naturally, the picture is even more complicated by the different national mixtures in adaptation of Western theories and organizational strategies of the research system.

[23]  Four major theoretical problems reflecting this situation are:

• Many of the projects (practically all in the beginning, in the early 1990s, but even now many) interpret the transformation as the confrontation of antagonistic systems, the Bad and the Good Society, "totalitarianism" and "democracy". This normative approach is politically understandable, but makes the manifest descriptions and interpretations of continuous processes and structures hard to interpret or even invisible.
• International research cooperation functions as a strong thematic filter for systematic interpretations of that reality. Almost every international project in the region in the early 1990s used questions developed by the "transitology" of that time, especially its American versions. So the societies of transformation were described in close comparison. Again, two different approaches can be observed in this context. The first is interested in the typology, or at least in the morphology of transforming societies and can be termed the Arboretum approach. The second one is the Assembly Line model, which believes in the existence of only one socio-political technological line of Westernization. Descriptions of the given societies could be constructed according to the speed and character of their divergence from ideal types of the Western model. In these years, almost no work is available that compares the transitional societies with real Western societies or societal processes.
• From the late 1990s on, the dominant trend has been just the opposite. Researchers in the region were invited to take part in large European programs of social science cooperation. But in practically every case, both the coordinators and the basic questions formulated as starting points in the projects were presented by West European research centers. These projects are usually not interested in the dynamics of transformation in the East, but only in the "Eastern" equivalents of problems formulated by the coordinators in their Western European social and research environments. The "Eastern" researcher is interested in joint activities and therefore tries to do his best, identifying local analogues of the "central" problems of the projects offered. Investigations of transition are consequently marginalized in these projects. The work emerging here may be interesting or even original, but usually only weakly related to local intellectual traditions and cultural environments; and cross-national comparative accents or efforts will normally be absent here.

• The structure of East-Central European social order is usually determined by specific institutional roles and informal ties and mentalities. In the classical political theories, however different the forms and compositions they take may be, both elements are almost equally present; but in their Eastern variants, they are different. Usually, the institutional approaches are more student-like, focused on events around institutional transfer, and rarely show high-level analytical skills in analyzing the local institutional mix. The most interesting local work is in the other area: describing informality, hidden mentalities, the political culture, and networks of trust or distrust. The world of informality is more interesting than that of institution building for the local research community. The research process thus simply mirrors the processes in the "real" social settings.
• There are significant differences in the structures of social theories, as well. Current theories on the international markets nowadays are non-philosophical, and usually their moral or normative elements are marginal. The dominant style of theories developed in Central Europe is just the opposite: even now it is very philosophical, and its normative elements are still very central. Concepts tied to new social players (feminism, theories of social movements, the risk society, and problems of social justice) are still insignificant. Research focuses on the presentation of general value systems. In the region, the projects perceived as leading are the qualitative or distribution-oriented ones, rather than those focused on behaviorist, game theorist, or discursive languages. The region’s middle-range theories for special analytical purposes are still underdeveloped, so macroanalytical approaches are used to explain in areas where they remain too general, and therefore inefficient. The theoretical mix is usually supported by methodological eclecticism.

published 2002

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