The mission of the institution
After 1990, against the background of reforms and contextual changes, the structure of the Romanian society, the dominant expressions and processes, the spiritual configuration and the social mentalities were thrown in a state of disarray beyond comparison, and they began to prefigure the signs of a future that is alarming in many of its aspects.
New phenomena, social, economic and environmental risks emerged, along with logistic decompositions, new conflicts, specific phenomena such as cross-border crime (with trends that show the organization of underground networks), the emergence of “the third Romania”, a Diaspora representing up to 10% of the Romanian population.
The political and institutional changes, the integration in the European (EU) and Euro-Atlantic (NATO) structures determined the transformation of the profile of certain institutions and social bodies (the Army, for example), and imposed an accelerated pace of the reforms of the public administration structures (from the Government, the Parliament and the Presidency up to the structures of local administration) and of the behaviors of national social security system and of the social and national protection system.
The sociological research system responded to such changes by noting various states of affairs, investigating rhythms and trends and so on. The disadvantage of this type of reactive research is that its effectiveness on the medium and on the long term is weakened by self-induced gaps.
In anticipation, we will say that the program of the Institute of Sociology of the Romanian Academy must align its structure, its pace and its axis of ideas to the traditions that support it and, in equal measure, to the call of the times and to the initiatives of the Romanian Academy itself. The directions and thematic areas of the research will be oriented in relation to the following directions, in which elements of continuity are reflected and new ones are added.
The requirement to pursue and highlight the worth of the “forgotten work” and the relaunch of abandoned directions
A category of forgotten works already compose a sad library of Romanian theoretical culture, starting with (a) the totally unknown “System of the Fundamental Laws of Society”, due to Count Alexandru Sturza through which Romanian culture is present at the origins of sociology as a science (Sturza’s work was finished in 1813, and A Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy was published in 1830) and continuing with: (b) the study of the sociology and theology of the empire due to Cantemir; (c) the works of the members of the “Bucharest Sociological School”, whose restitution was stopped after 1990; (d) the landmark works of Romanian "critical culture" (whose profile was configured in a famous work by American sociologists who studied in Romania in the 70s-80s of the last century (K Jowitt, John Cole, Katherine Verdery, Daniel Chirot, etc.); (e) the invaluable contribution of the Transylvanian school or with aspects of the work of the Pasoptists, ignored in several aspects of it and this, in order to relaunch, at this time, the older initiative of a series of the "Gustiana" Virtual Sociology Library (a project that we will expand in collaboration with ICCV and CESPE).
Resumption of one of the research directions that made the glory of the Gusti-Stahl School, namely that of rural research, regional monographs and those focused on a major social problem, such as:
The encyclopedic and restitutive requirement. From the encyclopedia of repressed values to the encyclopedia of Romanian performances.
Monographs of works, authors, groups, directions, theories, institutions of the interwar and postwar period (theory of afferent costs – Mihail Manoilescu, the theory of communities of life (Ernest Bernea), the theory of coexisting successions: Tudorel Postolache, the theory of weakly structured environments, the theory of persistent uncertainty: Cătălin Zamfir, the theory of dense spaces and empty relations, Noopolitics and noological sociology, the theory of substructural phenomena. A history of Romanian sociology. Romanian geopoliticians on the security space of the Romanian state. Sociology and geopolitics of security spaces. The study of aligned threats: convergence of impact.
New phenomena, social, economic and environmental risks emerged, along with logistic decompositions, new conflicts, specific phenomena such as cross-border crime (with trends that show the organization of underground networks), the emergence of “the third Romania”, a Diaspora representing up to 10% of the Romanian population.
The political and institutional changes, the integration in the European (EU) and Euro-Atlantic (NATO) structures determined the transformation of the profile of certain institutions and social bodies (the Army, for example), and imposed an accelerated pace of the reforms of the public administration structures (from the Government, the Parliament and the Presidency up to the structures of local administration) and of the behaviors of national social security system and of the social and national protection system.
The sociological research system responded to such changes by noting various states of affairs, investigating rhythms and trends and so on. The disadvantage of this type of reactive research is that its effectiveness on the medium and on the long term is weakened by self-induced gaps.
In anticipation, we will say that the program of the Institute of Sociology of the Romanian Academy must align its structure, its pace and its axis of ideas to the traditions that support it and, in equal measure, to the call of the times and to the initiatives of the Romanian Academy itself. The directions and thematic areas of the research will be oriented in relation to the following directions, in which elements of continuity are reflected and new ones are added.
- Romanian immigrants in the European space (in the theme "New directions in diaspora studies")
- "Child homicides in Romania" and "Femicides" in the mirror of sociological research
- In search of well-being (remittance dynamics). "Middle class economy"
- Memory policies and practices of national commemoration. "Places of memory and places of forgetting"
- "Demographic winter, the decline of progeny and the contraction of the genealogical stock in Romania", Infertile Romania; old age on all faces
- "Pilgrimages during the pandemic in Bucharest"
- "The 2020-2021 school year in Romania during the pandemic: country report"
- Children's digital manifestations during covid 19. "Kidikot Report for Romania"
- Mediapolis - the sociology of virtual society
- Aligning threats (2021-2022-2023)
- The requirement to pursue and highlight the worth of the “forgotten work” and the relaunch of abandoned directions
- The encyclopedic and restitutive requirement. From the encyclopedia of repressed values to the encyclopedia of Romanian performances.
- The requirement of monographic research concerning fundamental issues
- The requirement of “the Open Institute”
- The requirement for introductory studies and monographs - recent authors: innovations, theories, paradigms
The requirement to pursue and highlight the worth of the “forgotten work” and the relaunch of abandoned directions
A category of forgotten works already compose a sad library of Romanian theoretical culture, starting with (a) the totally unknown “System of the Fundamental Laws of Society”, due to Count Alexandru Sturza through which Romanian culture is present at the origins of sociology as a science (Sturza’s work was finished in 1813, and A Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy was published in 1830) and continuing with: (b) the study of the sociology and theology of the empire due to Cantemir; (c) the works of the members of the “Bucharest Sociological School”, whose restitution was stopped after 1990; (d) the landmark works of Romanian "critical culture" (whose profile was configured in a famous work by American sociologists who studied in Romania in the 70s-80s of the last century (K Jowitt, John Cole, Katherine Verdery, Daniel Chirot, etc.); (e) the invaluable contribution of the Transylvanian school or with aspects of the work of the Pasoptists, ignored in several aspects of it and this, in order to relaunch, at this time, the older initiative of a series of the "Gustiana" Virtual Sociology Library (a project that we will expand in collaboration with ICCV and CESPE).
Resumption of one of the research directions that made the glory of the Gusti-Stahl School, namely that of rural research, regional monographs and those focused on a major social problem, such as:
- Population decline
- Dying villages
- Regional (county) barometer
- Communities of life: family, village, small town, etc.
- Studies of regional biosociology (Danube Plain, Carpathians, Ponto-Baltic isthmus, Danubian-Pontic ecogeny, etc.),
- Theory of strategic food routes. The Romanian South
- Sociology of internal ascension on a collective scale
The encyclopedic and restitutive requirement. From the encyclopedia of repressed values to the encyclopedia of Romanian performances.
Monographs of works, authors, groups, directions, theories, institutions of the interwar and postwar period (theory of afferent costs – Mihail Manoilescu, the theory of communities of life (Ernest Bernea), the theory of coexisting successions: Tudorel Postolache, the theory of weakly structured environments, the theory of persistent uncertainty: Cătălin Zamfir, the theory of dense spaces and empty relations, Noopolitics and noological sociology, the theory of substructural phenomena. A history of Romanian sociology. Romanian geopoliticians on the security space of the Romanian state. Sociology and geopolitics of security spaces. The study of aligned threats: convergence of impact.
The requirement for monographic research on Romania's fundamental problems
This section refers to one of the strategic directions of the Institute's activity, namely to fully restore the connection with the great Gustian tradition, relaunching for this purpose the systematic research of the rural issue in all its facets. The main objective is to relaunch the program of regional monographic research on the Romanian countryside in its current terms. Such an approach aims to achieve the multidimensional-longitudinal diagnosis of agrarian communities in a regional profile by launching the County Barometers, the biosociological study of rural communes and small towns exposed to decoupling from the developing economy and the risk of threatening population losses. The monographic series “Life and Death in the Romanian Village” will be relaunched (which includes volumes published periodically), the “Treatise on Rural Sociology” will be re-edited (in the first edition we managed to gather all rural sociologists from Romania to work) together with the “Dictionary of Rural Sociology”, large-scale works, long out of print. The novelty of this direction will consist of the three approaches: the county barometer, the rural sociological atlas, the construction of a regional synthetic index based on five aggregate indices: human capital, critical infrastructure, socio-demographic vulnerability, demographic power and social fatigue of the couple. In the same context, monographic works dedicated to:
The encyclopedic and restitutive requirement. Encyclopedias, treatises and dictionaries – Encyclopedia of the Bucharest Sociological School, Treatise on rural sociology, Treatise on geopolitics, Dictionary of rural sociology
Through this requirement, the great Eliadesque tradition of Romanian culture is expressed, a requirement that has already acquired its formula within the project of the New Encyclopedia of Romania, of an Encyclopedia of universal sociology, with the inclusion of Romanian theoretical contributions. Of the 8 projected volumes, the first two volumes have been edited. A special encyclopedic project is the one dedicated to the Romanian Sociological School, of which three volumes have already been edited, with the first Encyclopedia of the Sociological School in Bucharest to be finalized and prepared for publication in the next three years. In this way, we will succeed in overcoming the morbid phenomenon of an endemic delay between the creation of the work and its reception. Between the moment of the creation of works of universal value and the act of their reception in the form of appropriate monographs, gaps of between 50-100 years persist, which is more than a negligent indifference. Romanian theoretical culture is a unique case among European cultures in the absence of monographs of great works sometimes published more than a hundred years ago, to the reproachful unworthiness of descendants. The situation has been felt since the 1970s when the great program of restitutions in all fields of culture was adopted and therefore of recovering the effects of the Soviet occupation regime, responsible for such a dysfunction of the circulation regime of great works.
The requirement of “the Open Institute”
Through this, we wanted to initiate a framework for interactive research, a context in which we promoted a new formula for attracting associated researchers from local, national and international environments to the institute in order to launch a program of studies and debates under the generic title “From Science and National Pedagogy to the Social Study of Nations”. To this end, the project of the Peasant University and the International Seminar with the generic title “South-East European Cultural Areas and Corridors” will be relaunched, accompanied by the interactive Seminar with the theme: “A South-Eastern European Debate on the European Cultures”. In the same context, the initiative of translations of the work of ignored Eastern scholars, the bilateral seminars occasioned by the visit of foreign researchers following the model of the seminars organized together with the American historian and geopolitician Larry Watts, are also placed. We present below the Program of Operation of the Peasant University by extending the model experimented in Vîlcea.
This section refers to one of the strategic directions of the Institute's activity, namely to fully restore the connection with the great Gustian tradition, relaunching for this purpose the systematic research of the rural issue in all its facets. The main objective is to relaunch the program of regional monographic research on the Romanian countryside in its current terms. Such an approach aims to achieve the multidimensional-longitudinal diagnosis of agrarian communities in a regional profile by launching the County Barometers, the biosociological study of rural communes and small towns exposed to decoupling from the developing economy and the risk of threatening population losses. The monographic series “Life and Death in the Romanian Village” will be relaunched (which includes volumes published periodically), the “Treatise on Rural Sociology” will be re-edited (in the first edition we managed to gather all rural sociologists from Romania to work) together with the “Dictionary of Rural Sociology”, large-scale works, long out of print. The novelty of this direction will consist of the three approaches: the county barometer, the rural sociological atlas, the construction of a regional synthetic index based on five aggregate indices: human capital, critical infrastructure, socio-demographic vulnerability, demographic power and social fatigue of the couple. In the same context, monographic works dedicated to:
- small businesses,
- the phenomenon of domestic violence,
- femicide, digitalization,
- major and minor crime, but also to reformist directions such as restorative justice.
- homicide,
- mass communication (Mediapolis),
- social memory,
- social theories and the history of sociology, dedicated to comparative research.
The encyclopedic and restitutive requirement. Encyclopedias, treatises and dictionaries – Encyclopedia of the Bucharest Sociological School, Treatise on rural sociology, Treatise on geopolitics, Dictionary of rural sociology
Through this requirement, the great Eliadesque tradition of Romanian culture is expressed, a requirement that has already acquired its formula within the project of the New Encyclopedia of Romania, of an Encyclopedia of universal sociology, with the inclusion of Romanian theoretical contributions. Of the 8 projected volumes, the first two volumes have been edited. A special encyclopedic project is the one dedicated to the Romanian Sociological School, of which three volumes have already been edited, with the first Encyclopedia of the Sociological School in Bucharest to be finalized and prepared for publication in the next three years. In this way, we will succeed in overcoming the morbid phenomenon of an endemic delay between the creation of the work and its reception. Between the moment of the creation of works of universal value and the act of their reception in the form of appropriate monographs, gaps of between 50-100 years persist, which is more than a negligent indifference. Romanian theoretical culture is a unique case among European cultures in the absence of monographs of great works sometimes published more than a hundred years ago, to the reproachful unworthiness of descendants. The situation has been felt since the 1970s when the great program of restitutions in all fields of culture was adopted and therefore of recovering the effects of the Soviet occupation regime, responsible for such a dysfunction of the circulation regime of great works.
The requirement of “the Open Institute”
Through this, we wanted to initiate a framework for interactive research, a context in which we promoted a new formula for attracting associated researchers from local, national and international environments to the institute in order to launch a program of studies and debates under the generic title “From Science and National Pedagogy to the Social Study of Nations”. To this end, the project of the Peasant University and the International Seminar with the generic title “South-East European Cultural Areas and Corridors” will be relaunched, accompanied by the interactive Seminar with the theme: “A South-Eastern European Debate on the European Cultures”. In the same context, the initiative of translations of the work of ignored Eastern scholars, the bilateral seminars occasioned by the visit of foreign researchers following the model of the seminars organized together with the American historian and geopolitician Larry Watts, are also placed. We present below the Program of Operation of the Peasant University by extending the model experimented in Vîlcea.
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