The testosterone barrier in sport

World Athletics (formerly known as IAAF) has recently published the eligibility regulations for female classification that apply to running events from 400 meters up to the mile. The regulations have prevented some elite women athletes with DSD (Difference of Sexual Development) to compete or have made some of them to change their preferred running event in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. According to World Athletics, female hyperandrogenism (a biological anomaly that naturally produces a high level of testosterone) must be in some way “compensated” to respect the fair play of the competition. Nonetheless, such argument rests upon a problematic assumption: hyperandrogenic women are not “natural” women —at least when it comes to compete in sports— so their “not-normal” condition must be fixed to meet the standards. Norbert Elias’s process-sociology helps to place the case of hyperandrogenic sportswomen within a broader context of power relations. In this fashion, we see that the case becomes problematic because these women athletes are perceived as a threat/disruption of one of the vertebral categories of sport: sex/gender. The testosterone barrier is to sex/gender what the colour barrier was to race in sports: a disciplinary strategy to maintain what is considered the “natural” sports categories of a certain era.

Corporate Citizen in Political Discourse Amidst the Pandemic

The wisdom of reviewing corporations, which execute strategic programs of corporate sustainability, as an important actor of political communications in postindustrial society is justified in the article. The basic features of corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and corporate citizenship concepts, the role of strategic communications under international ESG-discourse are outlined. The comparative analyses of Russian companies, participating Global Compact Network, social investments during COVID-19 pandemic is based on case studies, transparent nonfinancial reporting, and expert interviews. Social projects and programs of X5 Retail Group, Severstal’, Norilsk Nikel, United Metallurgic Company were studied. These companies’ basic business activities were established in industrial society. As the result of the research, based on process sociology (N. Elias), mediatization (A. Hepp), and communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas) approaches, the role of corporate citizens in communicative figurations of the network society formation and their subjectivity in political communications acquiring. The focus is made on COVID-19 pandemic influence on communication infrastructures with the studied companies’ stakeholders transformation.

Ambivalent perceptions of the Other: Towards a dual-process sociology of intercultural relations

Applying theories from sociology and social psychology concerned with the intersection of culture and cognition to in-depth interviews, this paper empirically explores the Norwegian majority population’s perceptions of cultural diversities using a dual-process (DP) methodological and analytic approach. Globalization has produced a mix of new anxieties, opportunities, and curiosities, leaving most people juggling conflicting objectives of self-preservation and self-realization, and making cognitive self-regulation and behavioural flexibility valorized skills of contemporary life. Instead of identifying xenophobic and cosmopolitan attitudes at opposite ends of a spectrum, the current paper argues in line with current research and theory in studies of DP cognition that they commonly co-exist, albeit in separate automatic and discursive cognitive systems, within the same individual. As a result, people’s perceptions of cultural and ethnic diversities tend to be ambivalent and contextually malleable – for example, in cases where their deep dispositions appear incompatible with their own self-concept or dominant cultural expectations. Most centrally, the current research proposes concrete strategies to elicit responses from both cognitive systems in the context of interpretive interviews. Secondly, the paper proposes clues that help to identify from which cognitive system interviewees’ conflicting cosmopolitan and xenophobic attitudes originate, thereby enabling researchers to further delineate the specific characteristics of these attitudes, including the mode of cultural learning through which they form, their flexibility or robustness to change, their role in behaviour motivation, and the extent to which they are conscious and controllable.

REINSTATING FUNCTIONALISM IN THE FIGURATIONAL APPROACH TO ORGANIZATIONS

Over the past two decades, there have been attempts to apply ideas from figurational sociology founded by Norbert Elias in research of different aspects of organizational life. The central contributions are derived from his theory of the civilizing process and the principles of process sociology. While this research mostly is relevant for contemporary organization theory, many contributions tend to emphasize Elias’s relational approach to the neglect of his functionalism, which underlies the whole corpus of Elias’s works. Rediscovery of Elias’s functionalism opens up the way for a fruitful reinterpretation of the central concept of his sociology, figuration, and enables to find new ways of combining figurational sociology with more familiar approaches to organization theory, in particular, with contingency theory. This helps to identify the factor of technology in the theory of the civilizing process and place it in the context of the concepts of figurational sociology such as interdependence, power and subjectivity, which enhances the analytical strength of figurational approach to organizations. The paper discusses some applications of figurational sociology to date and points to new directions in the study of organizations with the use of the conceptual tools of figurational approach.

Introduction: A Process-Sociological Approach to Understanding Civilization

The introduction notes that the concept of civilization first rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century French court society and then spread outward to non-European elites and downward to the rest of society. The idea became central to European self- understandings and to the sense of differentiation from the rest of the world. The dominant notions of civilization shaped the global order through colonial offensives to transform supposedly backward societies. Analyses of the civilizational dimensions of the global order have largely ignored Elias’s explanation of the European civilizing process. The introduction explains its contribution to the classical sociological tradition and discusses its relationship with postcolonial investigations and English School studies of international society. Core elements of the method of Eliasian process sociology are explained including the connection between detached social inquiry and the secular humanism that underpinned Elias’s analysis of human societies and their inter-relations.

The Return of Discourses of Civilization and Barbarism

This chapter discusses the revival of discourses of civilization and barbarism in the recent period, specifically in connection with the 'war on 'terror' and the torture debate. It emphasizes continuities between colonial and contemporary perspectives. Drawing on process sociology, it argues that the idea of civilization has been a central part of struggles to shape the way in which people orientate themselves to the social world. Participants in such struggles use the idea of civilization to justify using force against savage enemies but also to constrain violence in those relations. The chapter argues that the torture debate illustrates Elias’s observations about the peculiar entanglements of civilized peoples. It is essential to consider those entanglements and the discourse of civilization that was used in the 'war on terror' in long-term perspective – as aspects of the process of civilization which Elias set out to explain.