<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

What is knowledge and how can we analyse it from within social sciences as social knowledge? Our socially driven intuition tells us that knowledge is a special relation that humans have with their surrounding world. Its specificity lies primarily in the fact that it implies a direct interaction with the environment. Another important and interesting characteristic of knowledge is its tendency to replace interactions with reality with interactions between pieces of knowledge produced about that specific reality. Connected to this, regarding the issue of truth, paraphrasing both Einstein and Smith, this article argues that ‘an invisible hand’ of the realities of social phenomena makes it so, that the accepted truths of a certain society are those and only those that are functional for the survival and reproduction of that society. And for this to happen it is a must that the elite designated with the production and the legitimation of ‘the truths’ exists and produces those ‘truths’ that support the ‘general interest’ of that respective society. Most importantly is to understand that the consistency of the legitimated truths with the dominant values of the society imbedded in its social order is far more important that their consistency with the empirical observations of the reality.
</abstract>

Science and Social Knowledge or What We Do Not Know About What We Believe We Know

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The article examines how deindustrialization as economic restructuring and housing regime changes evolved interconnectedly in Romania during the Great Transformation from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. This article also explores how they acted as conditions for the emergence of a real-estate-development-driven housing regime (REDD-HR) alongside other factors. The analysis is from the perspective of the geographical political economy on the variegated pathways of these phenomena across borders and secondary statistical data collected by two research projects conducted in Romania in the past two years. In the Eastern semiperiphery of global capitalism or a country of the Global Easts with a socialist legacy, after 1990, the state restructured the economy by privatizing industry and public housing. During state socialism, the housing regime supported industrialization-based urbanization, whereas deindustrialization-cumprivatization in emerging capitalism facilitated the appearance of real estate development. On the one hand, the article enriches studies on deindustrialization by highlighting the role of housing in the transformation of industrial relations; on the other hand, the paper revisits housing studies by analyzing deindustrialization as a process with an impact on the changing housing regime. Altogether, deindustrialization-cum-privatization and the changing housing sector are analyzed as prerequisites of the REDD-HR.
</abstract>

Deindustrialization and the Real-Estate– Development–Driven Housing Regime. The Case of Romania in Global Context

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Personal development has become an industry in neoliberal capitalism, used to help employees adapt to the constant pursuit of growth, such as increased productivity, creativity, time management and business development. As part of my doctoral research, I documented how this type of practice works and how it restructures individuals’ social lives and their perspectives on the world. Personal development, as shaped by neoliberalism, serves as a tool for personal empowerment and adaptation to the restructuring of the welfare state. It is also a means of promoting neoliberal values among people. However, during the containment measures during the pandemic, criticisms of this growth-based approach emerged, leading to a resurgence of ideas about personal care. Self-care developed particularly in marginalised communities, where it was defined as a form of resistance to capitalism through caring for oneself as a member of an oppressed community, with Audre Lorde (1988) defining the concept as having a power of resistance to capitalism. In this presentation, I will explore what happens to personal development, which is a key factor in the construction of capitalist ideology, if neoliberalism is coming to an end. I will also consider whether this is a good time to reclaim personal development and how it can be used to create tools for self-building beyond the intrinsic individualism of the process.
</abstract>

Searching for Authenticity: Critical Analysis of Gender Roles and Radical Movements in Personal Development Practices in Contemporary Society

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The article dissects the subject of online social support exchange on social networking sites, or SNS (mostly Facebook and Instagram) through the eyes of the platforms’ active users. Drawing on 20 semistructured in-depth interviews with SNS users from Ukraine, it discusses both the benefits of support exchange in the online realm, such as speed, resilience, unobtrusiveness, and its drawbacks, such as depersonalization, ‘ghosting,’ and privacy concerns. The text also explores the sentiments towards some of the main digital instruments of exchanging support on SNS, in particular posts and various forms of “likes,” as well as the perceived effectiveness of online social support in general. Additionally, it provides some context on how the phenomenon has been impacted by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
</abstract>

Pros and Cons of Online Social Support Exchange on Social Networking Sites: A User’s Perspective

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 68 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 67 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 67 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 66 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 66 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 65 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 65 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 64 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 64 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 63 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

Volume 63 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 62 (2017): Issue 2 (December 2017)

Volume 62 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 61 (2016): Issue 2 (December 2016)

Volume 61 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 6 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015)

Volume 6 (2015): Issue 1 (June 2015)

Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia

The journal welcomes multidisciplinary and comparative approaches in the fields of sociology, social work, social policies, anthropology, urban and rural studies. Articles that address social issues from Central and Eastern Europe from a global perspective, develop historical comparisons or critical reflections, are particularly appreciated. The core of each thematic issue is composed of research articles with empirical grounding. Methodological discussion papers and book reviews compose distinct sections. A special section entitled Romanian Sociology Today publishes recent research papers relevant for the state-of-art of sociology in Romania.   Why subscribe and read  Studia UBB Sociologia was one of the first Sociology journals in Romania, fully published in English since 2008. The majority of articles are authored by Eastern European scholars who embrace a theoretically informed, empirically grounded, comparative and critical perspective on social changes in the region.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 