Science and Technology Production

Sociological imagination and social promotion - Weak ties, disinterest and agape: contemporary reflections on the gift and community

Congreso

Authorship:

BIALAKOWSKY, ALEJANDRO MARCOS ; Sasín, Mariano ; Zapico, Manuel ; Nougués, Tomás ; Barrero, Julieta ; Bertelli, Agustín ; Ichaso, Elisa

Date:

2018

Publishing House and Editing Place:

Universidad de Salerno

ISSN:

9788895697062

Summary *

This paper intends to reconstruct certain recent reflections on the gift and community. Although this debate goes back to the classics of sociology, the Latour's conceptualizations about the relationship between calculation and disinterestedness, and Boltanski's with respect to agape and love stand out nowadays. However, prior to these perspectives, the Granovetter's seminal study on the nexus between weak ties and community is a milestone to understand the shift of views on the gift and community within sociological theory, which had had an extensive development in classic authors like Tönnies or Weber, and a critical one in more contemporary authors like Bourdieu or Luhmann. However, to address the proposals of Granovetter, Latour and Boltanski, we believe that two key issues should be analyzed.On the one hand, there is their discussion about how to study community, the gift and agape. Thus, Granovetter uses the figure of the "social tie" to understand "weak and strong ties". In contrast, Latour and Boltanski opt for the notion of "regime". While Latour analyzes the formatting of the symmetrical regimes of the gift and capital assembled in capitalism, Boltanski recognizes different types of regimes (violence, justice and love in the state of agape).On the other hand, the three perspectives reconceptualize the relationship between ?closeness? and ?distance?, in deep connection with the processes of reconfiguration of community identities. In opposition to the classical tradition, for Granovetter community is sustained by the strength and multiplication of its weak ties and its "bridges" with other social spaces. In that line, according to Latour, in capitalism the formatting of the gift "ties" existences to each other, but not in the case of those who are "close" -who turn into "perfect strangers"- but in the case of those who are "far away". Finally, Boltanski advocates for the regime of uninterested love of the agape, indifferent to calculation (of past and future), which dislocates the relationship between acquaintances and strangers. After such an analytical development, to conclude, we will trace the relationship between this theoretical-comparative perspective on the three proposals and their fields of empirical analysis and application: "community studies", the "sociology of science" and "the new spirit of capitalism". Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA

Key Words

ÁGAPEREGÍMENESLAZOS DÉBILESCOMUNIDADDON