Abstracts KE 2-3 [2013]

Nikos Panayotopoulos

Introduction to socioanalysis

This article attempts to present the principles of socioanalysis which, according to Pierre Bourdieu, as an accumulation of the results of a reflexivity on the tools and the acquis of both the objective or structural and of the analytical, clinical type approach, was enabled in the research which aimed at the exploration of the forms of suffering that the economic and social crisis produces, nowadays, in Greece. Part of the results of this research is presented in this issue.

Franz Schultheis

Socioanalysis beyond borders: fieldwork in European sociology

While the processes of the so-called globalization, for example in the field of financial capital, are progressing at a furious speed accompanied by lots of symptoms of social crisis and disorientation, social scientific research on these processes continues to be largely restricted to the given national contexts, even though big international conferences or scientific collections of essays often indulge the illusion that a simple stringing together of contributions to a social issue from various national contexts opens up the path for real cross-border scientific perspectives and «transnational»  diagnoses. In order to arrive at the long overdue international opening up of social scientific research and socio-critical analysis the sociologist himself must first approach the relevant scenes of the events no matter how difficult the empirical work may turn out to be in view of his «foreignness» and not least of the often not inconsiderable problems of communication. What might at first appear to be an unnecessary handicap could offer him a weighty heuristic opportunity, as his «foreignness» can be turned into reflexive «distance» to the apparently self-evident givens of the everyday life-world of another society. As a result of the lack of personal involvement in the social relationships to be dealt with, being foreign provides the opportunity for a participant but, nonetheless, critically distanced objective approach.

Nikos Panayotopoulos & Franz Schultheis (dir.)

Claire Andreou, Natassa Kondyli, Ioanna Mikrogiannaki, Aliki Panagi, Eva Papoti, Yiota Psarrou, Michael Gemperle & Patricia Holder

Interviews

An «old» youngster: interview with an unemployed employee

An uncertain future: interview with an unemployed

The economy of need: interview with a retired

A very delicate balance: interview with an architect

Double compulsion: interview with a doctor

«The dead» expectations’ «society»: interview with a teacher assistant

A life that… «vanishes»: interview with a special educational needs’ teacher

The «business ethics» in the survival of doing business: interview with a

The absent presence: interview with a foreigner

«The basic human rights I want, nothing more»: interview with two teachers

Stavros Tombazos

Elements for the understanding of the capitalist crisis

The world economic crisis is not the result of the fall of the rate of profit, but rather the result of a schema of reproduction of capital with a high level of exploitation, in which the deregulated finance permitted the realisation of value, through the accumulation of unsustainable debts, on the one hand, and fictive values on the other. In this context, the deregulation of finance was a necessity. The progressive transformation of the financial crisis into a public debt crisis constitutes an attempt of capital to reduce its own devaluation. This attempt, however, undermines the social, cultural and democratic acquis and sharpens the class struggle. The economic crisis is being transformed into a crisis of civilization, because the imperatives of capital are opposing –by now openly-the explicit or implicit axiological foundations of «Western civilization».

François Chesnais

The first five years of the on-going world economic and financial crisis

This paper distinguishes three phases in the development of the world economic and financial crisis up to now. It examines in greater detail first the initial 2007-2008 «subprime» period of financial turmoil and, then, the banking crisis in the Eurozone which started in 2010, in which the main crisis-prone assets are government bonds. But it also seeks to understand the reasons for the system’s capacity to offset the consequences of its fundamental contradictions and of the mirages born from money fetishism, to impose austerity if not outright misery, thus making the crisis a terrain for the application of Shock Doctrine. The definition of financialization is broadened and seen as an epoch marked by the extremely strong centralization and concentration of industrial and of interest-bearing capital alike, one also in which capital has continuously increased the scale of value and surplus value appropriation by establishing a hold over social life in a great number of dimensions.

Michel Husson

Political economie of the euro system

This article seeks to show how the current crisis of the Euro zone stems from the original design faults of the «Euro-system», whose contradictions, revealed by the financial crisis, are of a structural nature. This demonstration is carried out through a statistical and analytical methodology which gives this study a «technical» nature. But it is a necessary stage for the development of a more solid diagnosis of possible exits from the current crisis, or rather from its specifically European dimension. This crisis has deeper roots than the symptom through which it has been expressed, namely a sovereign debt crisis. Thus, there are only two responses adapted to the structural nature of the European crisis: either the breakup of the Euro-system, or its radical refoundation. The others confine themselves to staggering the contradictions over time or programming a socially unacceptable regression.

Nikos Panayotopoulos & Maria Vidali

The misery of politics

Elements for a sociology of the management of the new «dangerous classes»

This article attempts an analysis of the sociogenesis of the process of a new collective managerial practice of the social protection that tends to be established in the contemporary Greek social state, to a certain extent, as a product of the modus operandi of the field of institutions and of the organizations that form the area where social policy is exercised. In this way, the present paper is a contribution to the history of the modern Greek welfare state.

Christian de Montlibert

The sufferings of the emigrant-immigrant in the work of Abdelmalek Sayad

Abdelmalek Sayad has devoted all his work to the study of migration. After having conducted some researches with Pierre Bourdieu on the effects of the colonization («Uprooting») A. Sayad studied the phenomenon of immigration where he shows that it is always preceded by an emigration whose causes and characteristics we must understand. Emigration-immigration often results from a bargaining between the states; it creates many illusions like these of the «provisional» and of «return». By analyzing these situations, Sayad shows that the sufferings of the immigrants are related to the conditions of existence and to the properties of the social positions that the immigrants occupy in the two social spaces which are the host society and the society of origin. Being at a loose end in both societies the immigrants suffer from a «double absence».

Franck Poupeau

Peripheries

Research note on the ethnography of environmental inequalities in El Alto (Bolivia)

The research on the issue of environmental justice in a very disadvantaged urban context faces several difficulties. The researcher seems condemned to ascertain that the unequal ability of residents to protect themselves from nuisances that affect their neighborhoods is related to the poor access to urban services and to the insufficiency, see the non-existence, of land planning policies. Environmental inequalities are then perceived as a simple deviation of social inequalities. We return to this problem on a research that was conducted in late 2000’s on the socio-spatial inequalities of access to water in El Alto, in order to reflect on the methods and levels of analysis that were used.