International Review of Sociology

Social media messages are taking a central role in spreading hate speech against women. Insults, threats, verbal attacks published on social media pages, and in online comments are showcases of aggressions moved on the net without filters and controls. According to VOX (Italian observatory on rights)[1] 2020, women remain the real target for discriminatory messages: 63.1% of negative tweets are in fact directed against them. A form of violence that seems unstoppable, as evidenced by the facts that many news continue to report incessantly. The sentiment analysis enables analysts to associate a polarity (positive or negative) to the Tweets published …

“…[O]n the road the police picked us up… and that same night we were here in Jakkalsdrif behind the wire… ‘Because we are not going to have people wandering around being a nuisance’.” John M. Coetzee’s novel Life & Times of Michael K. describes the attitude towards Jakkalsdrif Camp’s residents. By establishing this camp, the authorities aimed to cope with what they perceived as an unbearable situation: people who wander around and are therefore uncontrollable, undermining the social order. At the same time, however, the camp people’s new visibility was seen as a threat by the residents of the adjacent …

What are relational goods? This concept was discovered in the late 1980s and the interest of scholars in it has grown enormously since then. It is a type of goods that are neither material things, nor ideas, nor performances, but consist of social relationships, and for this reason they are called ‘relational goods’. This contribution aims to clarify this concept, used by various disciplines (mainly: sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, political science), then specifying what are the benefits that relational goods can give to a ‘good society’, and in particular to a mature democracy. Two sociological mainstreams, one based on rational …