Radio România Internațional

Tag: sociology

  • What are Romanians worried about?

    Most Romanians believe the country is heading in
    the wrong direction, reveals a survey conducted by the Centre for Urban and
    Regional Sociology – CURS, whose findings were made public on Sunday.




    According to the survey, this is the opinion
    shared by 69% of the people, as against 22% of respondents who said things are
    going in the right direction and 9% who could not or would not answer the
    question. Also, 41% of the interviewees said things would be worse in a year’s
    time, 38% said things would stay the same and 18% said the situation would
    improve.




    The poll indicates that the main problems facing
    Romanians are inflation (19%), the low incomes and
    implicitly lower living standards (17%) and corruption (16%). Cross-border
    issues such as migration and the war in Ukraine are a concern for only 3% of
    the respondents, on a par with those that identify Romania’s political class
    and its infrastructure as major problems.




    In terms of confidence in national institutions, firefighters rank
    first with 73%, followed by the Army (68%) and the Church (63%). NATO is seen
    as trustworthy by 42% of the Romanians, while 52% of them have little or no
    confidence in the North Atlantic Alliance. Also, only 35% of the respondents
    trust the EU, as opposed to 59% who don’t. Politicians and the government are
    at the bottom of the confidence ranking. A mere 13% have confidence in the
    Presidency and Parliament, and only 10% trust political parties.




    The obstacles faced by Romania in its efforts to join the Schengen
    area have eaten into its citizens’ optimism. As a result, 60% of the
    respondents believe the country will not be admitted this year either in the
    visa-free travel area, with only 27% of the people confident that Romania would
    join the club in 2023. Austria is blamed by 41% of Romanians for the country’s
    failure to join Schengen, while 21% of the citizens blame their own government
    and 12% say the responsibility lies with the EU Council.




    According to the poll, should parliamentary elections be held next
    weekend, half of the Romanians would vote for the 2 parties in today’s ruling
    coalition, with 31% of the respondents voting for the Social Democratic Party
    and 19% for the National Liberal Party. AUR and USR parties in opposition would
    get 18% and 11% of the votes, respectively, while the Democratic Union of
    Ethnic Hungarians in Romania would get 5%.




    The CURS poll was conducted face to face between September 12 and
    22, on a sample of 1,008 respondents and with a 3.1% margin of error. (AMP)

  • The 140th anniversary of the birth of Dimitrie Gusti

    The 140th anniversary of the birth of Dimitrie Gusti

    The Romanian Academy has held a special conference to pay tribute to Dimitrie Gusti on the 140th anniversary of his birth. The founder of the School of Sociology in Bucharest, Gusti was a magnet for prominent figures such as Mircea Vulcanescu, who drafted the theoretical foundation of the sociological system, HH Stahl, another remarkable sociologist, as well as the likes of Anton Golopentia, Constantin Brailoiu, Mihai Pop and Pompiliu Caraion.



    Dimitrie Gusti was the creator of an original sociological system that was recognised internationally, as well as an excellent manager of cultural institutions. He studied philosophy in Germany, earning his doctoral title in 1904, and later also studied law. He then returned to Romania and in 1910 joined the staff of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Iasi University. He became a member of the Romanian Academy in 1919 and between 1944 and 1946 was also the president of this institution. He also served as minister of education, culture and the arts between 1932 and 1933 and taught at the University of Bucharest and Iasi.



    Nicu Gavriluta, from the Faculty of Philosophy and Social and Political Science in Iasi, says Dimitrie Gusti was always in tune with his times:



    Nicu Gavriluta: “Dimitrie Gusti embraced the ideas of his times. Being a pupil of Wilhelm Wundt, a German psychologist and philosopher, Gusti was bound to be interested in the famous controversy between nature and spirit; natural sciences versus the sciences of the spirit. Wundt’s answer is based on the individual or social psyche, while Dimitrie Gusti said society is the sui generis reality that can explain and mediate between the two worlds. Society, Gusti proposed, must be analysed in a complex and subtle manner. This is why he placed emphasis on the frames of research. We all know that some of these frames are social par excellence, the psychological and historical frames for example. However, two other frames, the cosmological or cosmic and the biological are extra-social. Because they are extra-social, the researcher must then go out and do fieldwork and see reality for what it is. So he did, he went out and travelled through the countryside.”



    Between 1925 and 1948, Dimitrie Gusti initiated and coordinated the monographic research of Romanian villages. Also, thanks to his efforts, social service was regulated by law in 1939. Sociological research combined with practical social action and social pedagogy was laid down in law for the first time in the world. Gusti is also known for his interviews carried out in the rural areas and in which he documented aspects from the daily lives of the people in those days:



    Nicu Gavriluta: “A thorough, precise, accurate examination of reality is a compulsory element in sociological research, and its importance is undeniable even today. On the other hand, if we want to understand the more profound layers of the social system, we need to go into the invisible dimension of social reality, into those elements handed down from one generation to the next and which continue to shape a community’s thinking and behaviour in fundamental ways. And Dimitrie Gusti, as a disciple of Durkheim, relied on the idea that social reality is a system of meaningful human acts, and strived to identify meanings and interpretations. He also believed that that the original meanings of such acts disappear over time, and are replaced by other, equally important values that are created by society collectively.”



    Zoltan Rostas, a sociologist and researcher with the “Gusti Co-operative,” coordinates a team that works to promote an accurate image of Gusti’s complex personality:



    Zoltan Rostas: “The Gusti case is still open, and requires a different approach. We believe that researching and rediscovering professor Gusti’s legacy is the true tribute to his personality. And this is easier said than done, because, although we have access to information and to his works as part of Romania’s recent history, we risk getting stuck with a subjective, superficial and incomplete view on his personality. We can only discover Gusti if we discover the world in which he lived. So our path is a return to the roots of his biography and to the exact contexts that help us understand the forces that contributed to the birth of Gusti’s sociological theory.”



    The “Gusti Co-operative” is an online platform mainly designed to make available social history works and testimonies on the Bucharest School of Sociology and on social science in Romania. The initiator of the project is sociologist Zoltan Rostas.


    (translated by: Cristina Mateescu, Ana-Maria Popescu)