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Social capital in Sweden and Hungary: Comparative analysis along the dimensions of trust, values and interpersonal relationships
5-28Views:191This paper examines and compares the Swedish and Hungarian society along three dimensions: interpersonal (generalized) trust, interpersonal relationships, and values of cooperation. These are all crucial components of social capital, could be seen as its most relevant domains, which, in a macro perspective, express the cohesion and integration of a given society. Thus, the above-mentioned indicators provide deep insight into the social fabrics and dynamics of Sweden and Hungary, as well as the potential changes. The empirical analysis is based on data obtained from waves 1–10 of the European Social Survey (ESS). The relevance of the analysis is due to the specific representation of Sweden in the Hungarian political discourse and in some parts of the media. According to this framing integration and cohesion of the Swedish society is in an increasingly poor state, whereas in Hungary things are going much better. Our paper aims to shed light on this issue along the dimensions presented above. Our results show that, in terms of the dimensions of social capital examined, Swedish society is not in a bad state at all, and in fact presents a significantly more favourable picture than Hungarian society on the basis of the same indicators.
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Reframing of Particular Trust
5-27Views:140The paper strives to reconsider the theory of particular trust, i.e. one’s trusting feelings towards her/his most intimate relatives, friends, and personal relations. By doing this, at first, the paper sheds light on two distinct interpretations of particular trust in the literature. One of these approaches addresses particular trust as a kind of core disposition of the self, and it describes how one’s trust towards her/his bonding relations establishes the given subject’s generalized trust towards others, in a broad sense, to people as such. The other interpretation argues that particular trust is important for group-level social dynamics. It claims that if members of close-knit and exclusive groups, dominated by particular trust, are interacting only with each other, and avoiding out-group relations, then broader social cooperation and collaboration are constrained, social integration and cohesion are limited, and on macro level there is an unfolding distrust. As it seems, the above-described readings of particular trust are contradictory. The current paper stresses that just one of these interpretations is coherent and consistent – the first one.
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Trust, distrust, self-trust
3-18Views:224The current paper attempts to embrace trust and distrust as emotions, as well as showing trust or distrust as cognitively justified decisions in one coherent theoretical framework. It links these emotional and action-like domains together by the notion of self-trust which is interpreted as a form of rationale. The argument claims that self-trust of those people who are able to trust others functions in a completely different way in compare to the one of distrusting subjects.
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Informality: the Culture of Treating Others Instrumentally: An Essay about the Dynamics of the Relationship between Social Relations and Trust
49-64Views:128The current paper, without scientific systematization and artistic meditation, tries to address
life itself (the normatively understood ‘good life’) in an essayist way. It strives to draw up some
core pillars of a research program about a commonly known everyday phenomenon, informality,
more precisely its distorted form which is inducing social inequalities and injustices, and which,
because of this, should be seen reflexively and critically. The proposed argument is a theoretical
reflection on József Böröcz’s still actual and progressive scientific endeavor to create a framework
for the sociology of informality.
