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The process of remembering has always intrigued researchers because it is so fundamental to our ability to understand and make sense of the world. Think now about how your own [...]

The current deficit of trust in the working of democracy has been attracting the increasing attention of social scientists. Nevertheless, there is still a conspicuous lack of an integrative theory of trust. Existing literature is united in its recognition that the preferable democratic order should be rooted in trust relations. This assertion that democracy and trust are connected is based on the assumption that either civil society or institutional frameworks are prerequisite for achieving a healthy and stable democracy. This article argues that the communitarian and republican solutions to the deficit of trust should supplement each other. Only joint implementation of these two strategies for recovering trust can activate formal and informal mechanisms of trust production. A society that achieves an appropriate balance between the informality and formality of interactional practices is the one able to create conditions for cooperation and engagement in the public sphere. Keywords: civil society, cooperation, democracy, public sphere, trust, Trust and democracy The relationships between democracy and trust, each independently very popular topics in social science literature, have recently attracted the attention of sociologists and political theorists (Fukuyama, 1995; [...]

Change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union presents a whole new set of sociological problems, requiring a revision of old theories of large-scale institutional change. My aim in this paper is to delineate patterns and gaps to be found in sociological theories dealing with change in Soviet-type societies. After a short review of the explanatory claims of totalitarian, modernisation, civil society and institutional perspectives, I propose an analysis of such change in terms of the strategic conduct of the main agents (the state-party and society) within its institutional context. The collapse of communism is seen as a result of the evolution of the system caused by the lack of institutional arrangements which could set limits to the party- state's arbitrary rule, and -- by the same token -- could create conditions for economic efficiency and encourage the emergence of interests other than those directly serving the centre. This can be seen as a spiral process of change in which the system was long losing its internal consistency and gradually exhausting itself. This process consisted of two mutually reinforcing trends: first, changes in the relationship between political centre and society, resulting in the declining ability of the party-state to act effectively as the agent of society; secondly, the growing heterogeneity and internationalisation of society, leading to the growing incompatibility of central planning with the informational and motivational requirements of a modern economy., Four Theories of State Socialism Recent change in Eastern Europe as the biggest political upheaval of the last forty years poses a particular challenge to contemporary political and social theory. [...]

THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION C. Wright Mills Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 40th Anniversary Edition, 248 pp., $28.50 (paperback). Re-reading famous books tends to focus our attention on their relevance for [...]

Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia International Journal of Comparative Sociology Vol.27 (1986) pp. 141-160 The processes which occurred in the Philippines in 1986 were perceived as similar to the ones which [...]