Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-178
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Mele
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Georg Simmel

After the cultural turn: For a textural sociology

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo de la Fuente
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Organizational Studies ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Surface Patterns ◽  
Cultural Turn

This article proposes the social sciences consider texture – rather than text − as the important legacy of the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences. The article considers texture in the literal sense of surface-patterns, as well as texture as a metaphor for the ‘dynamic’ and hard-to-capture qualities of social life. The article draws on the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the ‘practice turn’ in organizational studies and recent developments in geography and cultural research to map out different textural frameworks. While sociologists have lagged behind their counterparts in other fields in embracing a textural sensibility, the article considers the writings of Georg Simmel and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology as prominent exceptions to that rule. The article concludes by encouraging sociologists to consider the textural as a way into a ‘theoretical’ – as against a purely ‘methodological’ conception – of the qualitative.

scholarly journals Blasé Attitude, Hyperreality, and Social Media

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Le
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Jean Baudrillard ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence

Though there is much to gain through technological development, it is also necessary to critique the ubiquitous presence of devices in social life and the overstimulation they bring. The increasing mediation of reality through applications such as Instagram could blur the division between the ‘real’ world of everyday life and a ‘hyperreality’ fostered by such applications. Using concepts from theorists Jean Baudrillard and Georg Simmel, this paper presents a critique of the overstimulation of information through social media. With continuous and repetitive material being recycled online, it is discussed how a blasé attitude is used to protect oneself from being informationally overwhelmed.  

scholarly journals Brokerage in Cross-Border Mobility: Social Mechanisms and the (Re)Production of Social Inequalities

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Faist
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Social Mechanism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Different Types

Brokerage is an essential yet understudied function in social life. In one of the classics in the field of sociology, Georg Simmel differentiated three types of the “third” which help to analyse brokerage: the disinterested mediator or arbitrator, <em>tertius gaudens</em> and <em>divide et impera</em>. Studies that conceptualise traffickers and smugglers as brokers are extremely rare. Scholars lack a typology which can serve as a basis for comparative research. To advance scholarship on brokerage this article seeks to develop a conceptual-typological matrix by setting out to explore three questions: Why does brokerage exist? What kind of social mechanism is brokerage? What are the implications of brokerage for social inequalities and equalities? The analysis concludes with the consequences of different types of brokerage for the (re)production of social inequalities.

scholarly journals Georg Simmel and the “Relational Turn”. Contributions to the foundation of the Lebenssoziologie since Simmel

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-71
Author(s):  
Davide Ruggieri
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Relational Exchange ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Relational Sociology ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Philosophy Of Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The first aim of the paper is an interpretation of Georg Simmel’s sociology in “relational terms” – i.e., under the categories of the “relational sociology”; it focuses, thus, to show how Simmel’s social theory and philosophy of culture fit for the construction of a Lebensoziologie. Considering Simmel as a “relational sociologist” means to demonstrate how his contribution is decisive to the history of sociology, since he defines the “Wechselwirkung” (reciprocity, relational exchange) and its forms as the very matter of the social sciences. Simmel represents the “relational turn” in the wide sociological milieu. Since Simmel’s contribution, sociology attempted to consider and investigate social facts in terms of “relation” and reciprocity. The current sociological debate insists on considering Simmel as a “relational” sociologist in various declinations (coherent to Bourdieu’s social theory or to the social network analysis framework). In his late essays and books Simmel gives a “vitalist” accent to the analysis of social facts: the social is above all “social life”, according to the consolidated forms/contents dialectical model. Grundfragen der Soziologie. Individuum und Gesellschaft represents his last attempt to corroborate a sort of “sociology of life” (Lebenssoziologie). Even if this term does not explicitly appear in Simmel’s words, it summarizes his social and cultural theory - since the volume Soziologie - and offers some key-concepts for the successive sociological debate.

scholarly journals Politik, Ökonomie und Lebensstil in dem globalen Kapitalismus. Eine Überlegung auf der Grundlage von Georg Simmel

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 233-258
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Mele
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Extensive Field ◽  
Wide Perspective ◽  
Individual Existence ◽  
Individual Participation ◽  
Interpretive Perspective

Georg Simmel’s paradoxical concept of Lifestyle opens up an extensive field of issues and a wide perspective on individual existence in contemporary society. On one side it makes possible to understand several aspects of the “aesthetisation of everydaylife” that characterize the current global consumer culture. On the other side help us to focus on different aspects of individual participation in the political and social life of the community and entails many nuances that are not immediately accessible from the point of view of the classical concept of citizenship. Such a richer interpretive perspective becomes viable if the concept of lifestyle is understood in the Simmelian meaning of the Individual Law: an ethical principle that makes sense of a plurality of sphere of activities otherwise severed – as the rationalized modern life imposes upon individuals.

scholarly journals “Dangerous modernity!”, or the shadow play of modernity and its characters: instrumental rationality - money - technology (part 1)

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 670-696
Author(s):  
D. G. Podvoyskiy
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Money Economy ◽  
Institutional Organization ◽  
Shadow Play ◽  
Technical Rationality ◽  
Human And Nature

The article is an essay on the critical analysis of one of the fundamental issues of social theory of the 19th - 20th centuries - alienation and its manifestations in modern societies. Alienation is interpreted not in one of its special meanings (such as alienation of labor, etc.), but in the broadest way - as the transformation of products of individual and collective activities into an independent force that subjugates a person and transfers him from the position of the subject to the position of the object of social relations. Such a definition makes alienation a universal feature of social life. However, in different societies and in different historical periods, alienation can have variable specific forms. The historically specific manifestations of alienation in modern societies can be explained by referring to the classical theme of their genesis. The originality of their institutional organization is largely associated with the originality of their culture and spiritual life (in particular, with the radical demarcation between human and nature, subject and object in the modern era). The multifaceted phenomenon of scientific and technical rationality, the product of the post-Renaissance Western-European culture, becomes a source of social realities and practices fraught with alienation. The article illustrates it by a number of examples, including the logic and mechanisms of the capitalist money economy. The author refers to the heritage of world philosophy and social thought, which problematized and conceptualized the considered issues in various ways: the Frankfurt School, existentialist philosophers, pillars of theoretical sociology - Karl Marx and Georg Simmel.

scholarly journals La vita individuale

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluca Valle
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Individual Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual

The individual life, analysed by Georg Simmel, provides analytic tools for an understanding, not only of man in early industrial society, but also of the man of today. Imitation and distinction, fashion and theatre, the circulation of money, or the models of individuality expressed by Goethe and by Rembrandt, represent "aesthetic solutions" to the quest for identity that lacerates modern man in the face of the crisis of absolutes and the polytheism of values. There is a deep weft, indeed, in the writings of Georg Simmel that justifies a revision of the current academic definitions of "sociological impressionism" and "journalistic philosophy". This is a unified mesh created by constant references to aesthetics, understood as a philosophy that explores the structures of meaning of individual and social life. This bringing together of fields of investigation traditionally considered as remote and incommensurable – such as sociology and aesthetics – makes Simmel's meditation one of the most stimulating adventures in contemporary thought.

Garfinkel and Goffman via Simmel: parallels and divergences

2018 ◽  
pp. 46-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Hammersley
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Interaction Order

This chapter compares the orientations of Garfinkel and Goffman. Their work is often regarded as similar, being concerned with the study of mundane patterns of social interaction. However, ethnomethodologists usually insist that there are fundamental differences between them. Their orientations are examined via a comparison with the work of a third sociologist, Georg Simmel, who was an important influence upon Goffman. While Garfinkel does not seem to have drawn on Simmel’s work, there are interesting parallels: in particular, they share a concern with the constitutive role that social interaction plays in social life. It is argued that, despite similarities between the orientations of Garfinkel and Goffman, the differences are more significant. For Goffman, the aim is to generate conceptual frameworks that illuminate everyday behavior, whereas ethnomethodologists resist the bringing in of new concepts, being concerned instead with explicating the processes by which social phenomena are produced in their own terms. Other differences relate to what is taken to be the context of social interaction, with Goffman treating the interaction order as mediating the effects of outside factors, whereas ethnomethodologists insist that the context of any process of social interaction can only be what is constituted as context within it.

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