Introduction: Cold War Social Science, Transnational Entanglements

Solovey, Mark; Dayé, Christian

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-70246-5_1

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The few existing reports on SPT written by former coaches have laid important groundwork (especially Alberg & Busse, 1998), approaching it from a perspective from within the GDR. Since then a new body of scholarship has emerged, excavating the formal and informal circulations of knowledge across the blocs, which, despite the restrictions of travel and communication, were still relatively common (on entanglements, see Boldyrev & Kirtchik, 2016; Mikkonen & Koivunen, 2015; Solovey & Dayé, 2021). Apart from its domestic contexts, this article will also focus on determining the role of SPT within global trends.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paying attention to each other. An essay on the transnational intersections of industrial economy, subjectivity, and governance in East Germany's social‐psychological training

Lehmbrock

2022

J History Behavioral Science

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This article examines a little‐known chapter both in the history of socialist labor relations and the history of psychology: Social Psychological Training (SPT) for industrial leaders in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on previously untapped archival sources, it uncovers the transnational genesis of SPT and its intricate relationships with Western “therapeutic culture” of the 1970s. Governmental perspectives are addressed, as well as the level of individual appropriation of SPT and possible unintended side effects of techniques that were drawn from the social psychological and therapeutical fields. This case study helps to explore the functions of psychological expertise in authoritarian political contexts, as well as the polyvalence of group methods of change, the effects of which could turn out repressive as well as liberating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The history of SPT solicits a polycentric view on therapeutic culture, capturing its diverse manifestations and interconnections between different societies and political economies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paying attention to each other. An essay on the transnational intersections of industrial economy, subjectivity, and governance in East Germany's social‐psychological training

Lehmbrock

2022

J History Behavioral Science

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“…In generalized terms, the ideological Cold War was waged between individualist neo‐liberalism and collectivist Marxism. Thus, the period of the Cold War was a stress test for the viability of sociology under changing ideological and political conditions (Solovey and Dayé 2021). The outcome of the test is the maturity of sociology as a global social science.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Global Sociology in a Divided World (1949–1990)

Genov

2021

Sociological Forum

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Unlike physics or even demography, sociology is very sensitive to its social environment. That is why the discipline was mired with controversy and confrontations during the Cold War. How did the development of a global sociology become possible in this social context? Due to the complexity of the historical situation, one cannot expect a simple answer. This article contains an attempt at systematically analyzing the globalization of sociology along four lines of analysis and argumentation. The first line follows the stabilization and growth of national sociological communities after the Second World War. Another line of analysis concerns the developmental path of the International Sociological Association from its founding at the beginning of the Cold War up until its maturation at the end of the 1980s. The mutual influence of these processes is the third line of analysis and argumentation. The fourth cross-cutting line of analysis is guided by the concepts of social actors, relations, and processes as analytical parameters of social interaction. The conclusion is that the adequate explanation of the globalization of sociology should focus on the interplay of these processes. Special attention is paid to the decisive mobilizing and organizing role of the ISA in this regard. KEYWORDS: actors in the globalization of sociology; Cold War; globalization of sociology; ISA; processes in the globalization of sociology; relations in the globalization of sociology.

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“…The Cold War was first and foremost a transnational constellation of political‐military power, and this had reverberations on the social sciences as well (cf. Solovey & Cravens, 2012; Solovey & Dayé, 2021). Yet, we do not read much about other places than the United States.…”

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confidence: 99%

Erving Goffman and the Cold War. By Gary D.Jaworski, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2023. pp. 251. $105.00 (cloth). ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐666‐93680‐3

Dayé

2024

J History Behavioral Science

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Erving Goffman (1922Goffman ( -1982 undoubtedly was one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century. He revolutionized the field of microsociology by providing both a genuinely new theoretical vantage point and a related web of concepts and conceptualizations-impression management, front stage and back stage, total institutions, and so on-to analyze everyday social interaction. At the same time, Goffman cultivated the image of a reclusive intellectual; only few photographs of him are publicly available, and apart from his brief stint as president of the American Sociological Association (he died shortly after the beginning of his term), Goffman showed not much interest in institutional work.At least, this is how Goffman is usually introduced to students of sociology. Erving Goffman and the Cold War, by Gary D. Jaworski, sets out to challenge this received image. Jaworski, a retired professor of sociology and social thought at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, shows that Goffman's interests were very much attuned to the political concerns of his times, or more precisely: to the Cold War. "In contrast, then, to the view of Goffman as a master of mundane matters," Jaworski writes, "the view advanced here is that Goffman was one of the Cold War's most perceptive and profound social theorists" (pp. 7-8). The book corroborates this thesis by a series of studies on terms that are important in both Cold War decision-making and Goffman's oeuvre: loyalty, secrecy, strategy, spies, interrogation, provocation, and aggression.Apart from a strong match between Goffman's topics and the cultural atmosphere of the Cold War, Jaworski finds support for his reading of Goffman as social theorist of the Cold War in the fact that Goffman entertained close professional relations with first-rank Cold War intellectuals, ranging from Edward Shils to Thomas C. Schelling. Also, Jaworski claims that Goffman "was the only postwar sociologist who deeply engaged with the literature on spies and espionage, the world of the intelligence community, and the problem of deception, imposters and secrets-in short, with issues that connect with the undercurrents of Cold War society" (p. 11).Chapter 1 focuses on loyalty. After discussing three consecutive waves of anticommunist investigations at Goffman's alma mater, the University of Chicago Chicago-in 1935Chicago-in , 1949Chicago-in , and 1953-, Jaworski argues that Goffman's conceptualization of loyalty went beyond the then widely shared either-or view: either good or bad, either loyal or disloyal, either patriot or spy. Instead, Jaworski shows that Goffman's work in Chicago, and especially his first book, On the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1956), revealed a plethora of strategies that go beyond this simplistic dualism: dramaturgical loyalty on the front stage, guarded disclosure on the back stage, the use of "safe channels" to express discontent, and so on. The hunt for disloyal subjects, and their strategies to survive such hunts, is also an important top...

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Introduction: Cold War Social Science, Transnational Entanglements

Cited by 3 publications

References 62 publications

Paying attention to each other. An essay on the transnational intersections of industrial economy, subjectivity, and governance in East Germany's social‐psychological training

Paying attention to each other. An essay on the transnational intersections of industrial economy, subjectivity, and governance in East Germany's social‐psychological training

Building Global Sociology in a Divided World (1949–1990)

Erving Goffman and the Cold War. By Gary D.Jaworski, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2023. pp. 251. $105.00 (cloth). ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐666‐93680‐3

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