Abstract: Based on а epistemological co-production with Chinese sociologists, we propose that by addressing common concepts, a Post-Western Sociology enables a dialogue on a level footing. This type of sociology addresses concepts situated in European and Asian theories that consider the modes of creating continuities and discontinuities, as well as the conjunctions and disjunctions between knowledge spaces situated in different social contexts (Roulleau-Berger, 2016). We describe an ecology of knowledge in the Western-West, the non-Western-West, the semi-Western West, the Western East, the Eastern East, and the re-Easternized East situated on an epistemological continuum. We introduce the idea of the de-multiplication, the complexification, and the hierarchization of new epistemic autonomies vis-à-vis Western hegemonies in sociology and the new epistemic assemblages between European and Chinese sociologies (Roulleau-Berger, 2016; Roulleau-Berger & Li Peilin, 2018). Furthermore, we offer a definition of Post-Western sociology and demonstrate its theoretical and methodological application. Then, we identify some transnational theories, theoretical discontinuities and continuities, and common knowledges situated in both Western and non-Western contexts.

Abstract: In this article I study crisis as the ‘politics of others’ and through that attempt to sharpen a historiography of crisis centred on struggles by subalterned groups for meaningful lives. Analysing crisis may be an opportunity to look at the complex relations, politics and struggles that constitute large concepts – like, for example, capitalism. Crisis historiography thus is an opportunity to open up large concepts that can give rise to structural explanations of crisis, invisibilising politics and struggles, particularly those of sublaterned groups.

Abstract: The article focuses on the “demographic crisis” as a field of knowledge, where actors with heterogenous knowledge resources operationalize the government of labour power. One of the main assumptions here is that the delineation of low economic productivity as an effect of demographic collapses, catastrophes and crises undergoes a process of translation where different political strategies and tactics construct privileged and subordinate groups of labour power and in accordance to their “natural,” bodily potentials. Furthermore, the semantic instrument “in the conditions of a crisis” produces crisis-objects, which as such are subjected to a knowing process that aims to calculate and direct their behaviour in order to achieve demographic balance though increased labour productivity (not necessarily waged one). The analysis shows the ways in which the “elderly” are turned into a privileged object of demographic governing and how the governing of the labour power of other crisis-objects (e.g. immigrants) is subordinated to the meta-frame of “population aging”.

Abstract: The article analyses how the COVID-19 crisis exposed the structural inequalities and the dual position that temporary migrants occupy in Western Europe. Drawing on the case of Eastern European workers in the European Union, it traces the conflict between the need of essential workers and the threat of mobile people. It explores the tension between labour and citizenship, by showing the models of differential inclusion through labour and exclusion from social support that temporary migrants experience. By analysing cases of temporary workers in agriculture, the meat industry and the informal labour in other spheres, the article looks at the emerging “conflict of bodies.” On one hand, the significant bodies of the citizens that need to be reproduced by the labour of the migrant workers and at the same time, to be protected from the pandemic threat. On the other hand, the bodies of the workers which are key for this reproduction, but are at the same time dangerous and despite their key role, are being treated as insignificant and easily replaceable.

Abstract: The article focuses on the defence of those engaged in atypical work in Bulgaria and looks at it through the prism of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s theories on “orders of importance” and “engagement regimes”. The first part outlines the main problems of atypical work and the new reality it creates for trade unions, and presents the theoretical framework of the analysis. The second part is dedicated to the analysis of the Trade Union of Self-Employed and Informal Workers as a spontaneous organization for the protection of workers in non-standard employment. The third part describes the process of marginalization that accompanies the problems of atypical employment, persistent trade union inefficiency and rigid institutional “blindness”. The analysis is based on a study of normative documents, an in-depth interview with the chairman of the Union of Self-Employed and Informal Workers and semi-standardized interviews with labour experts.

Abstract: In early 2019, the World Health Organization identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health. At the end of the same year and in the beginning of 2020, a pandemic of the new coronavirus was announced. Despite the recognized and widely proclaimed success of the achievements of science and technology in the twentieth century, at the beginning of the new century vaccines and immunoprophylaxis – one of the greatest achievements of medicine and public health – became a target of mistrust. More and more parents in more and more developed countries are refusing to immunize their children, fearing that vaccines are not only unnecessary and ineffective, but also dangerous. Experts, for their part, believe that vaccines have become “victims of their own success”: when pathogens are not present in everyday life, thus gradually leaving the collective memory, the practical reasons for combating them are difficult to justify. Institutions and citizens are entering a battle for public and individual health. The article outlines the problem of growing distrust of immunization practices and vaccines in particular. It presents the genesis of anti-vaccination attitudes and movements and the points of tension between national and international health authorities, on the one hand, and citizens, on the other. It also suggests a possible interpretive framework for studying the phenomenon. At the centre of the analysis is the crisis of expertise in modern Western civilization.

Abstract: Paving the crisis refers to the processes of entanglement of financial capitalism and infrastructure established by the European Union through the logic of political and economic development outlined in the EU development funds. These processes replace the principles of political legitimacy and accountability with the imperative for financial accounting and the incessant transfer of capital between public and private actors. This imperative leads to the constant articulation between political power and economic capital which, in the Bulgarian context, acquires the specific form of networks of corruption and practices of transferring private risk to public institutions and resources.

Abstract: This text is the first part of a lifetime unpublished book by Galin Gornev, professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of BAS, who died in 2021.

Abstract: The Fourth industrial revolution, called digital, is associated with a radical transformation of society (digital society emerges) and a social reality that is twofold: offline and online social reality. The digitalization of social life is deterritorialization, which poses in a fundamentally new way the classical problem of sociology, “How is social order possible?” Unlike natural science, whose subject is a-historical, the subject of sociology (society) is historically determined, and for this reason with each historical turn a new sociology emerges, which, however, does not make the previous one meaningless. Digital sociology as new is not a negation of “old” sociology, just as quantum physics is not a negation of Newtonian physics. Digital sociology seeks its place in post-non-classical science and faces serious challenges related to the place of man in a social world inhabited by intelligent machines or non-humans as social agents.

Abstract: Based on the latest empirical data from a nationally representative survey of employers, the present text proposes a sociological reconstruction of undeclared work. Spontaneous associative notions and quantitative assessments of Bulgarian employers are analyzed, which provides an opportunity to expand and deepen survey research on undeclared work. New semantic accents in the definition of undeclared work are derived and its connection with the gray practices at the workplace is exposed. The current text has revealed typical for employers models of thinking and evaluation of undeclared work as an element of socio-economic relations in societies in transition.

Abstract: The article analyzes the changes taking place in the professional autonomy of general practitioners (GPs) in the context of health care reform since the late 1990s. Using the concept of professional jurisdiction of Andrew Abbott and data from an empirical study conducted among GPs in Tryavna and their patients, the analysis shows the change in the three levels of professional autonomy (diagnosis – treatment – follow-up) with bureaucratic principles. The observed changes transformed medical care into services and patient attitudes into client. The article problematizes relationships between the state (reform), the primary care doctors (GPs) and their patients through the prism of professional autonomy and focuses on the question of whether the criticized health reform has not become a convenient routine.

Abstract: Based on the data of Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) – wave 7, the current article argues that some degrees of bias in the cognitive test’s outcomes are possible concerning Bulgaria. It is due to the fact that the set of stimuli-words was not considering the language interpretants in Turkish and Romanes but it may bring an interpretative confusion and additional barriers towards memorizing. Since there is not possibility to use control variables such as “mother tongue” or “ethnic identity”, a set of three other indicators was checked for a possible significant bias: the number of years at school; the number of books at home; and the size of the household. The respondents show significantly lower cognitive skills in all cases where the socially vulnerable ethnic groups are overrepresented: never attended school or up the 4th grade; less than 10 books in the household; and households with five or more members. There are two possible methodological solutions proposed: a control variable based on language spoken at home and a new design of stimuli-words, set on animals, musical instruments or other tools, where there are no too many synonyms and language interpretants.