The Challenge of Responsibility for Sociology

Abstract

Although leading thinkers of the late 20th century, stimulated by new social movements and public debate, have given currency in the 1970s and 1980s to a new version of the normative category of responsibility, sociology has been rather slow in appreciating the significance of this development. It is only in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, particularly in the 1990s, that the new concept has begun to attract the attention of sociologists, yet even today it is still not well understood. As a study in the sociology of morality that pursues a strand stretching from Durkheim to Habermas and beyond, this article seeks to contribute to the sociological appropriation of the concept of responsibility and to making it useful for the purposes of analysing contemporary society. On the one hand, it presents a theoretically suggestive typology of traditional individual, post-traditional individual and co-responsibility, while on the other, drawing on data generated by various research projects, it outlines a sociological analysis of responsibility as an important new master frame of our time.

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Participation publique et santé mentale : la réponse contrastée et inachevée des utilisateurs de services

“…Il existe maintenant un important consensus voulant que la participation des citoyens soit souhaitable lorsqu'il s'agit de réformer les politiques de santé ou encore pour tout ce qui concerne la planification et l'organisation des services de santé (MacFarlane, 1996). La participation du public permet en effet d'assurer non seulement la responsabilisation des citoyens envers la chose publique (Delanty, 2000 ;Kymlicka & Norman, 1995 ;Steward, 1995 ;Strydom, 1999) mais aussi une gouvernance plus intègre des services de santé (Forest et al, o 1 2000). Les avantages et les défis que pose la participation du public aux processus décisionnels ainsi que les caractéristiques des processus permettant d'influencer le système de santé ont été largement documentés (Bracht & Tsouros, 1990 ;Feather, McGowan, & Moore, 1994 ;Lilley, 1993 ;Rifkin, 1996).…”

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“…Here, contemporary social and cultural anxieties around technological developments, climate change, conflict, and other forms of risk and insecurity generate calls for responsibility without naming the responsible subject (Strydom 1999;McCarthy and Kelty 2010). In this instance, duty is collective or societal (Strydom 1999: 67).…”