This paper is concerned with a rather neglected issue in sociological analysis: honour as a value and regulating principle of social life. The attempt is made to study honour from a perspective which pays attention to both the carriers of honour and the social order itself, its maintenance and reproduction. It focuses on a group of Spanish traders who were fervent Catholics who claimed and were reputed to be men of honour. The article shows that honour was incarnated in two external domains: the family house and lineage, providing status-honour, and the trading routes, which brought our group fame as courageous and trustworthy men. Engaging with contemporary debates, it is contended that neither trust nor ethics need be brought to the exchanges from the outside, as is the case with modern capitalist forms, for they are a function of personalised social bonding and embedded in honour itself.

The article analyzes the emergence of moral concern for animals in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England. This concern was fuelled by a developing aristocratic discourse on civility that was accompanied by a drastic increase in the factual visibility of violence inflicted on animals in the growing cities. In opposition to interpretations based on the concepts of discipline and distinction, the article elaborates the way in which the emergence of moral concern for animals was class-structured without being class-interested.

Time use surveys are distinguished by their use of a specific type of questionnaire, the daily activity diary, first developed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, standardized in the framework of a multinational survey headed by Alexander Szalai in 1965–66, then generalized for use in a great number of countries. The diary allows for quantifying the duration of relatively noninstitutionalized activities such as household work and leisure activities.

The main research results obtained with time use studies are presented as they relate to three main themes: debates on the leisure civilization, changes in work rhythms, and gender roles and the synchronizing of social time within the family.

The Verstehen controversy, which stems from Wilhelm Dilthey, has today become an academic question. But, recently, cognitive sciences and new developments in action theory provided an interesting renewal of the topic. The classical problem of explanation vs. understanding has been reformulated in terms of explanation by causes vs. explanation by reasons. The paper relies on these new issues in order to clarify the original distinction by making explicit its three basic dimensions: ontological, logical and ethical. It also draws some consequences of taking into account the normative facts in sociological analysis.

By examining the history of the development of the tobacco industry, a key state industrial sector in China's reform era, this article shows how market-building processes and state-building processes have produced and reproduced each other in economic transitions from planned toward market economies. First, the market competition between state-owned tobacco firms and non-state tobacco firms in the early 1980s resulted in the establishment of a vertical bureaucracy, through a statemonopoly institution. Second, new market dynamics resulted in the transfer of monopoly power from the central government to the local governments. During this process the horizontal bureaucracies governing the tobacco industry in localities were driven into market competitors, while the vertical bureaucracy was greatly undermined. The evidence from the Chinese tobacco industry shows that the project of market-building for postcommunist countries is not a unilateral process. To obtain a complete understanding of transitional economies of postcommunist countries, I suggest that the key is the interaction between state-building and market-building, with a focus on how the specific market dynamics have rebuilt the state structures.

This paper examines the nature of civic culture and the strength of civic attitudes in postcommunist and western countries. In particular, it seeks to explore the internal consistency and durability of civic culture using World Values Survey and European Values Study data. It discusses three perspectives on the strength and durability of civic attitudes in East and West, (the historical roots, the legacy of communism, and the postcommunist transition perspectives) and explores to what extent the pattern of civic attitudes in the two regions matches the predicted outcomes of these perspectives. The paper finds that the attitudes associated with civic culture do not form a coherent syndrome, neither at the individual nor at the societal level. It further finds only marginal support for the historical perspective, which accords a great degree of persistence to civic culture. It therefore concludes that civic culture is not the monolithic and durable phenomenon that some cultural theorists claim it is.

In an effort to identify the social sources and environmental consequences of axial thinking, and in particular of rational naturalism, three civilizational centres are compared: Ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Greece. Analysis of a series of societal features suggests that 1) axial thinking in the form of reflective intellectual networks arose in areas where a pre-axial priesthood was organizationally and functionally weak; 2) for the emergence of axial naturalism free-lance intellectuals in the midst of social revolutions appears to have been a crucial factor; 3) axial innovations were grafted onto a more archaic distinction of nature and culture; and 4) notwithstanding the form or context of Axial thinking, environmental treatment remained exploitative as a consequence of state-led political and economic issues.

This article was originally published in 1915; it stands out as a rare example of an attempt to sociologically understand the main features of the war conducted with universal conscription. The process in which the machinery of war made itself more and more autonomous is analysed. The same process made the nations at war more and more similar, despite the ideological claims of radical differences.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the meaning of giftgiving and reciprocity in modern society and thereby following the pointers left by Marcel Mauss. A critique will be made of the dichotomy of self-interest and normatively orientated action that forms the basis of sociology. For this conceptual dichotomization has caused forms of social interaction that cannot be localized either on the side of self-interest or on that of morality. It is the logic of the gift and the reciprocity thus evoked that in our view accompanies and structures all forms of interaction, from the social micro to the macrolevel. It is shown that in modern societies gifts and reciprocities form their own orders of interaction, and not only on a microsocial level. The principle of reciprocity even accompanies as a rule transfers owing to (state) compulsion as well as economic, selective exchange. As a basic principle of processes of sociation it is, fundamentally, present everywhere and in some areas it is explicitly and openly in effect (for example in welfare state transfers). Sociology has for too long overlooked the fact that this principle cannot be traced back either to normativist or to utilitarian explanations and nevertheless represents a principle of construction of modern societies.

This article considers six factors that are currently shaping the religious life of Europe. These are the Judaeo-Christian heritage, the continuing influence of the historic churches, the changing patterns of church-going, new arrivals from outside, secular reactions and the growing significance of religion in the modern world order. Any assessment of the future of religion in Europe must take all of these into account, not least their mutual and necessarily complex interactions.

The article is focused on one specific aspect of organized crime during the period of social transformation of Bulgarian society. It views the capacity of organized crime to offer additional power resources and encouragement for the political elite, whose power and domination have been threatened by the changes. The analysis is based on the thesis that to sustain and to strengthen their power and domination the elites have applied the strategy of increased secrecy and informality of power sources and of the means of their exertion via the establishment and control of criminal structures. The applied research methods include participant observation, in-depth interviews and document analysis.

This article argues that Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s theoretical framework contains some elements of modernization theory threatening to neglect the contingencies of social processes and the possible breaks within historical trajectories. This is demonstrated via an analysis of the history of the US-American South that cannot be interpreted with an Eisenstadtian framework without seriously misrepresenting this particular region. It is argued that the development of “Dixie” was not a predetermined process which led to a smooth integration into US-society, but a path which was decisively influenced by many unforeseen factors and events in various periods of its history.