<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">By exploring the professional trajectory of sociologist Gheorghe (George) Retegan (1916–1998), this article addresses the epistemological and personal reconfigurations of the field of social sciences in post-war Romania, highlighting the complex relations and professional rivalries in the field after the Second World War, and their consequences for social knowledge. My study explores Retegan’s published and unpublished works, archival documents, and an interview that Z. Rostás conducted with Retegan in the 1990s. I analyse three research ventures relevant for understanding Retegan’s professional trajectory and methodological choices: the 1948–1950 family budget research that Retegan coordinated at the Central Institute for Statistics; the 1957–1959 monographic research he coordinated at the Institute for Economic Research; and his “farewell” to sociology and specialization in demography beginning in the 1960s. My article documents Retegan’s remarkable capacity to develop research by way of formulating new questions, methodologies, and techniques, on the basis of the main elements of empirical research he learned during his training in sociology under the supervision of Anton Golopenția. Retegan’s contributions to the field of empirical social research suggest how a context that was generally unfavourable for the development of social sciences (1948–1965) could be used in a creative way for the study of the social world. Epistemologically, the survival and even innovation of empirical research under unfavourable ideological and political conditions made possible the rehabilitation of sociology as a discipline in the much more favourable context of the second half of the 1960s.</abstract>

Between Statistics, Demography, and Monographic Research: GH. Retegan (1916–1998), A(Nother) Sociologist Without A Sociology

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">By now a preferred EU instrument aimed at stirring rural development, LEADER initially constituted an alleged departure from the top-down productivist agenda of the CAP towards locally-led development. The exogenous-endogenous explanatory model legitimized the adoption of economistic assumptions into EU rural development policy. As the CAP policy genealogy conveys, agricultural policies occurred at the intersection of internal and external factors, whereas the endogenous framework evicts structural explanations for territorial marginalization. A case study from North-western Romania provides details on the implementation of the endogenous agenda from the perspective of public actors. Rather than inducing an alleged alternative development model, LEADER acts as adjuvant to other policies and, overall, as a pedagogical exercise in uneven development.</abstract>

A Knife to a Gunfight: Endogenous Development Through Leader as Contradictory Policy Prescription

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The paper follows the institutionalization of meritocracy in the Romanian higher education. Using the Romanian experience, the study explores the setting of meritocracy, highlights the revised institutional genesis that led to the adoption of a so-called post-traditional approach, and it reviews the deployment of practices that steered higher education in Romania. In support to these, a reflective stance is employed alongside secondary sources to scrutinize the techniques of control and practices which inform institutional evolution. The research attempts to shed light on the increase of doctrinal entrenchment through which meritocracy justifies academic stratification in a pauper system aspiring to world-class recognition.</abstract>

The (RE)Production of Meritocracy: Challenges from the Romanian Higher Education System Under Neoliberalism

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The environment is no longer a backdrop, but an agent pressing us to restructure our economic and political systems, down to our livelihoods. This research aims to make a critical overview of the Sustainable Development (SD) model. It looks at how market fundamentalism and anthropocentrism are driving forces in the shaping of its proposed form of education: education for sustainable development (ESD). This “new” educational paradigm aims to support the SD strategies that are globally implemented and “localized” at the nation-state level. The current SD model and the Agenda 2030 operate within a specific framework of the nature/culture divide, one that reiterates human domination. As such, this research aims to analyse the educational values within the idea of sustainable development – one that wishes to “reorient” society but instead ends up emphasizing it in its anthropocentric form. It does so by close reading and analysis of the UNECE Strategy for Education for Sustainable Development and Romania’s National Strategies for Sustainable Development, 2008 and 2018. Concluding, it might very well be the case that restructuring schooling – and governing - to bring it up to the realities of climate change requires rethinking our fundamental educational values and the nature/culture divide, as well as making nation-states less servient of markets and less growth-oriented.</abstract>

Education for (UN)Sustainable Development: Recognizing Anthropocentrism in Romania’s Sustainable Development Strategy

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Gathering social media content and analysing the heavy and unstructured text coming from posts, comments and reactions can come as a powerful tool in understanding how people react to the information they receive. In this article we present the results from a social media analysis of 10771 headlines, with their subsequent text bodies and comments posted in a subreddit destined for Romanians during the state of emergency declared in Romania, from March 16 to May 15, 2020. Our objective was to model the main topics debated by this targeted population of people that tend to use Reddit to discuss current issues and to identify the sentiment polarity towards these topics. As expected, Romanians are mostly concerned with their social condition in the context of the pandemic caused by CoVID-19, as our research has revealed a word frequency for the term “Coronavirus” prominently higher than any other preferred term. However, the analysis brings up a surprising turnaround as the overall sentiment of the text posted in this dataset is predominantly neutral with a higher frequency of positive posts compared to the negative ones. This was unforeseen by our initial expectations: a natural tendency to more negative posts than positive considering the context of the chosen study period. Moreover, when compared to the time series of the CoVID-19 infections and caused deaths in Romania, spikes of extremely high or low mean sentiment scores per day can be correlated to the fluctuations of the declared cases. Not only does this bring us closer to understanding the social impact of CoVID-19 in the current context, but the outcome of this analysis can be easily extrapolated for further investigations upon other social networking tools or for more in-depth analysis on our studied corpus.</abstract>

Masters in Complex Data Analysis, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work

The Rebellious Social Network Reaction to COVID-19

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Volume 68 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

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Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia

The journal welcomes multidisciplinary and comparative approaches in the fields of sociology, social work, social policies, anthropology, urban and rural studies. Articles that address social issues from Central and Eastern Europe from a global perspective, develop historical comparisons or critical reflections, are particularly appreciated. The core of each thematic issue is composed of research articles with empirical grounding. Methodological discussion papers and book reviews compose distinct sections. A special section entitled Romanian Sociology Today publishes recent research papers relevant for the state-of-art of sociology in Romania.   Why subscribe and read  Studia UBB Sociologia was one of the first Sociology journals in Romania, fully published in English since 2008. The majority of articles are authored by Eastern European scholars who embrace a theoretically informed, empirically grounded, comparative and critical perspective on social changes in the region.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 