Ambiguous Coexistence and Social Transaction: on a Sociology of Opacity and Institutionalized Discretion

Together with concepts such as pillarization and consociational democracy, the notion of social transaction has been forged to account for national contexts where different subcultures coexist and yet simultaneously maintain their own autonomy. But while pillarization became a widely agreed-upon diagnosis of Belgian society, limited in its descriptive reach to this and a few similar contexts, social transaction, by contrast, has become part and object of a scientific practice stretching out from France as far as Canada. The paper seeks to better understand the notion’s emergence in Belgium and... Mehr ...