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FLORIAN ZNANIECKI'S HUMANISTIC SOCIOLOGY REVISITED
Abstract
The toughening of immigration and citizenship policies in Western liberal states has coincided with an effort to define the cultural values considered the foundation of national identity. Humanistic Sociology was elaborated by Znaniecki (1963, 1968) in response to the perceived failure of immigrants to assimilate to the culture of the host society. As the sociology of cultural values par excellence, it appears timely to revisit the theoretical foundations of Znanieck's approach and examine whether it remains capable of furthering our understanding of contemporary immigration processes. The paper compares Humanistic Sociology with a number of more recent theoretical orientations which have also emphasized the central role of cultural values. Working in an age dominated by behaviourist theories, Znaniecki's humanistic approach was criticized by contemporaries because of what was seen to be its "subjectivist" bias. In hindsight, Humanistic Sociology appears to have considered balance between "objectivism" (structure) and "subjectivism" (agency) according to which agents assume a strategic role in defining their courses of action on the basis of cultural value–structures (personal ideological systems) which are formed through communicative interactions within relevant social groups. This is evident in his concept of the ideological system which provides individuals with a strategic and creative capacity: the generative power of agency.
The study attempts to systematically relate family language policies, their perception of social pressures, and parents’ axiological stances. The objective is to provide an empirical account of variance in parenting styles and associated family language policies of Polish-speaking parents in Regensburg, Germany. The data consisted of interviews conducted with 20 immigrant Polish-speaking mothers of teenagers living in Germany since infancy. Interview data have been subjected to an inductive analysis in order to identify crucial aspects of variance in stances of immigrant parents, reflected in the observed variance of their children’s competence in Polish. The outcome is a typology of parents’ axiological attitudes to parenting, involving relative primacy of values such as child autonomy, child security, parent-child relation, nation, religion, and extended family that affect the decision on in how far Polish is being passed on to children. This is followed by a typology of conative attitudes to the intergenerational transmission of Polish which does not stop at the extent to which Polish is cultivated in the interaction with the child, but also indicates dichotomous motivations for suppression or marginalisation of Polish—submission to social pressure or communicative advantages.
Personal identity is an underanalyzed level of the self, often regarded erroneously as too idiosyncratic for proper social psychological analysis. The two dominant theories of self, identity theory and social identity theory, mention but rarely explicate the concept of personal identity. In this paper I address this gap by making two moves, one conceptual and one empirical. First, I argue that values are a cohesive force within personal identity. Conceptualizing values as the core of one's personal identity leads toward understanding the cohesion experienced among one's various social identities. In the second, empirical move, I use measures of a key dimension along which values are arrayed (self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence) to illustrate how a values-based conception of personal identity influences the formation of a role identity. Specifically, theoretically relevant values along the self-enhancement/self-transcendence dimension are significant predictors of the volunteer identity, even when previous measures of the identity are controlled. I conclude by discussing the utility of values for studying a level of the self often considered too ideographic for sociological analysis.
The universality of S. H. Schwartz and W. Bilsky's (see record
1988-01444-001) theory of the psychological content and structure of human values was examined with data from Australia, Finland, Hong Kong, Spain, and the United States. Smallest space analyses of the importance ratings that individuals assigned to values revealed the same 7 distinct motivational types of values in each sample as had emerged earlier in samples from Germany and Israel: achievement, enjoyment, maturity, prosocial, restrictive conformity, security, self-direction. Social power, studied only in Hong Kong, also emerged. The structural relations among the value types suggest that the motivational dynamics underlying people's value priorities are similar across the societies studied, with an exception in Hong Kong. The interests that values serve (individual vs. collective) and their goal type (instrumental vs. terminal) also distinguished values in all samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action.
A distinct conceptualization of cultural identity that is theoretically motivated by the classic taxonomies of the self developed by cultural anthropologist Irving Hallowell (1955) and cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser (1988) is proposed. It is argued that Neisser’s Conceptual Self, situated within Hallowell’s Normative Orientation, affords a unique confluence of theoretical tradition that successfully transcends the problematic dualism between individual agency and cultural determinism. This Conceptual Self as Normatively Oriented is designated a cultural identity and defined as a form of conscious, reflexive and evaluative self-understanding pertaining to that facet of the self which knowingly commits itself to the shared values and practices of a particular cultural group. It is argued that past personal narrative is a privileged site for the investigation of cultural identity and its construction. The unique suitability of narrative analysis for the study of cultural identity is illustrated with an example from a Gros Ventre elder of the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in Montana.
There are two strands in Bourdieu's sociological writings. On the one hand, Bourdieu argues for a theoretical position one might term his “practical theory” which emphasizes virtuosic interactions between individuals. On the other hand, and most frequently, Bourdieu appeals to the concept of the habitus according to which society consists of objective structures and determined—and isolated—individuals. Although Bourdieu believes that the habitus is compatible with his practical theory and overcomes the impasse of objectivism and subjectivism in social theory, neither claim is the case; the habitus is incompatible with his practical theory, and it retreats quickly into objectivism. However, Bourdieu's practical theory does offer a way out of the impasse of objectivism and subjectivism by focussing on the intersubjective interactions between individuals.
Dans cet article l'auteur expose ses conceptions de l'habitude, de l'habitus et de la phenomenologie. Si Bourdieu reste la principale reference a la notion d'habitus, il ne manque pas de critiqes, lesquelles ne sont pas toutes justifiees pour l'auteur, qui en reconnaissant le role preponderant de l'analyse bourdieusienne en discute les differents points de vue. Il propose de revisiter l'habitus sous un angle phenomenologique, en se basant sur les ecrits de Merleau-Ponti et de Husserl. L'objectif de cet essai n'est pas de remplacer la theorie de Bourdieu par l'approhe phenomenologique mais de contribuer a ameliorer et aprofondir l'analyse sociale
Análisis de las contribuciones teóricas de Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Emile Durkheim y Max Weber a la teoría social y que Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), sociólogo norteamericano, los revisa para aplicarlo al estudio de la estructura social, desde la perspectiva de la acción. Para Parsons "la acción consiste en las estructuras y los procesos por medio de los que los seres humanos constituyen intenciones significativas y con mayor o menor éxito, las aplican a situaciones concretas". La presente edición consta de dos volúmenes, disponibles en biblioteca.
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