The concept of Beruf, variously translated as ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’, refers to the pracdce of systematic self-control in pursuing constant goals or purposes, which Weber, in The Protestant Etbic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), found in both Calvinist religious practice and capitalistic entrepreneurship and labour. But the term is not confined to these applications; it is also central in Science as a Vocation (1917) and Politics as a Vocation (1919). The general significance of the idea of Berufis that it accounts for the mechanisms required to realize in action the quality of rationality, another of Weber's characteristic terms. The connection between rational activity and calling is constant in Weber's discussion. In his early statement of the argument, however, practices of Beruf achieve rationality through the suppression of emotion. In his later discussion, Beruf is achieved through and expresses passion and emotions.

The paper seeks to assess the consequences of cultural diversity for European polity-building by focusing on the language issue. What does the European Babel mean for the project of transnational political integration ? To what extent has the shaping of the European language regime become a declared goal on the agenda of the EU ? In contrast with precedent patterns of nation-state formation, the present situation in Europe offers only few reasons to believe that some cultural standardization could be achieved by putting major political restrictions on multilingualism. Deliberate attempts at setting the institutional foundations of a culturally integrated European public sphere may end up producing unintended outcomes and lead to anti- European mobilizations striving for the protection of cultural difference. Hence, a political community of Europeans will not be based on a unitary and homogeneous public sphere, but rather reflect a complex mosaic of different cultural identities with cross-cutting political loyalties. In this context, cultural and linguistic diversity will be institutionalized, institutionalized, but to varying degrees and with different implications at different political levels.

The anthropologist starts with an empty notebook and it seems that everything he writes in it is discovered empirically. But is it? I shall argue here that the fact that the natives are ‘rational’ in Mr. Lukes first or ‘universal’ sense is not discovered empirically and that this puts Mr. Lukes' philosophical problem in a different light.

Class inequality provides fertile ground for the development of class divisions in political interests. Post-communist societies display evidence of such inequality and — despite expectations to the contrary — of its correlates: high levels of class identification, perceived relative deprivation between classes, and links between class position and economic expectations. These aspects of class formation are in turn accompanied by the endorsement of divergent political programmes by social classes. Marketisation is thus providing the conditions under which classrelated, ‘left-right’ divisions reminiscent of those in Western democracies, structure politics in Eastern Europe.

This article examines public debates on the legitimacy of banking profits in the 2008 credit crunch. A content analysis of 957 newspaper articles published in Germany and the UK in the early weeks after the Lehman Brothers collapse examines critical statements directed at illegitimate forms of financial profit in order to identify the cultural legitimacy of financial capitalism. The conceptual framework provided by the French sociology of justification points to the role of shared orders of value as a normative reference for public discourses. In both national debates, four important boundaries for legitimate profits were drawn that concerned the problems of ownership, risk-management capacities of traders, fraudulent client relations, and speculative gambling. The meaning of this classical moral criticism of banks was transformed in the context of the 2008 crisis: a line between “normal” and “excessive” financial profits was drawn, defining an area of legitimate profit-seeking that hewed to the basic assumptions of the market model. Economic theory was used as a scheme of public economic morality. The seemingly harsh critical debate effectively reproduced a legitimate image of a functioning financial market, deflecting public attention away from the structural ambivalences of financial profit-seeking and granting legitimacy to the institutional status quo of financial capitalism.

Depuis longtemps, pour beaucoup d'auteurs et non des moindres, le phénomène bureaucratique constitue un des problèmes clefs de la sociologie et de la science politique moderne. Et pourtant la bureaucratie reste toujours une zone d'incertitude rebelle à l'analyse scientifique et l'un des terrains d'élection des professions de foi et des mythes idéologiques de notre temps. Une telle situation surprend d'autant plus à première vue que très tôt, il y a cinquante ans déjà, Max Weber avait donné une brillante description du « type idéal » de la bureaucratie et une analyse suggestive de son développement historique qui semblaient avoir parfaitement préparé le terrain pour une sociologie de la bureaucratie débarrassée de tout jugement de valeur.

En principe, il n'y a pas de frontières entre la science politique, la sociologie et l'anthropologie; en réalité, les recherches sur le terrain utilisant simultanément les trois disciplines sont rares. En principe, les groupes sociaux n'ont pas d'existence substantielle; en réalité, les chercheurs finissent toujours par oublier qu'ils n'ont d'existence que relationnelle. L'étude de la politique locale dans l'Algérie rurale est un excellent exercice pour désapprendre ces manies universitaires: les conserver condamnerait à manquer l'essentiel.

Except perhaps for a few diehards, no sociologist today would think of conducting a large-scale empirical investigation of numerical data without a firm grasp of statistical methods—or at least a graduate assistant who has such a grasp. The old polemics about statistics in social research have died away and are now lost to view under a blizzard of statistical findings in journal articles and books. Asked to date the period when statistical analysis really ‘took over’ in social research, most sociologists would probably put the date around i960, when large computers and efficient programs became widely available. But the date of widespread adoption is perhaps not as significant as the date on which the leaders in the field became convinced of the desirability of using powerful statistical methods in the analysis of standardized data.

Sociological and historical enquiry in Europe has had as a continuing pre-occupation the problem of the Uniqueness of the West, the search for factors that can be held responsible for its achievements in the modern world and in particular the emergence of industrial capitalism. That search has led to a devaluation of the East and consequently a mistaken self-understanding of the West. This article attempts to outline the problem with regard to rationality, commercial literacy (book-keeping), mercantile enterprise and family participation in such activity.

The article purports to describe and explain the emergence and development of postmodernism as a multi-faceted cultural movement. Data on numbers of publications are presented to show the expansion of postmodernism and shifts in relative attention to various topics. The explanation focuses on processes in three interconnected cultural fields—the artistic, the intellectual and the academic—, which were influenced by wider social transformations.

The grip of austerity in European politics since 2008 presents a double puzzle: electorally weak center-left parties offering no definite alternative, and the surprisingly efficient pursuit of “fiscal consolidation”. To understand this double puzzle this article investigates the institutional bases of alternative economic thinking during the 1930s versus the post-2008 crisis years. Noting the recent prominence of a new social type, the European economist-technocrat (eet), I highlight the historically specific order to which the eet is indigenous: rarefied, international professional circuits that tend to work over, not through, party politics. This contrasts sharply with the nationally-based, party-connected economists who developed new economic orthodoxies between the 1930s and 1960s, including Keynes himself. Approaching the study of economic culture in the public sphere in a Polanyian moral markets framework, I argue that the linkages between European economics and financial technocracies help to explain Europe’s double puzzle. Theoretically, I argue that a focus on expertise and parties, and not just states, is central to our understanding of economic culture in the public sphere.

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.

At the heart of the $2 trillion Islamic-finance industry is a ban on interest. But why is there only an Islamic ban on interest today? After all, for over a millennium, interest was also gravely sinful in Judaism and Christianity. While scholars have addressed the evolution of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic economic morality in isolation, very few since Weber have tackled the interest question directly and comparatively.

I argue that the fate of the religious interest ban has always depended on the fate of religious jurists. When religious jurists are absent, no systematic interest ban emerges. When religious jurists emerge as technical experts, the interest ban appears and thrives. And when religious jurists come under attack or lose their traditional role in society, the interest ban withers and dies.

To conclude, I call for a reconstruction of Weber’s theory of religion and economic morality that dissolves the tradition-modernity binary.

Afro-American cults are characterised these days by a movement towards re-Africanisation, which seeks its legitimacy in mythical Africa. But this idea of Africa is the object of a continuous reinterpretation. Ethnologists which studied these cults, in particular the Afro-Brazilian ones, played a central role in the invention of a tradition which seems to have become the main pivot in these religious phenomena today. Membership in these cults by most of the researchers makes the mechanisms for the construction of a dominant model of tradition even more complex.

In many European democracies, religion was an important political cleavage throughout the twentieth century. But in Denmark and Sweden, religious differences have not been translated into political competition. Instead, class conflict has dominated. This article attempts to explain why. Our argument is that in the first decades of the twentieth century, the issue that mattered most for the politicization of religion elsewhere in Europe – the role of churches in the provision of poor relief and education – was already settled. The main reason was that in the nineteenth century, the secular state had captured the organizational infrastructure that churches used to provide these services.