Recent Issues of the Sociological Research Centers in Portugal

Brief Contributions from an Exploratory Survey

Abstract

This essay allows us to recall some relevant aspects of the history of Sociology in order to understand its most recent developments. We achieved an overview of the main research centres producing sociological knowledge, analyzing some dimensions that allow to contribute to a disciplinary sociography based on dimensions such as territorialization, with a very strong focus in Lisbon, on the main themes of research, as in a brief analysis of the Journals of diffusion of knowledge and scientific culture, analyzing their evolution and expansion in time, as well as the regularity of its publication. These constitute only two of the institutional aspects of sociological research in Portugal. In the case of Research Centres, there is an expansion, which contributes both to public visibility and to disciplinary institutionalization, which was more pronounced during the 1980s and 1990s, while the Journals registered more expansion in recent years. The main fields of sociological production of the Research Centres were also analyzed, categorizing the current research lines according to some domains of sociological production, and it became clear that each Center has more than one line of research (an average of 4.5%). It should be noted that the quantity and diversity of lines of research observed demonstrate both a range of studies on the complexity of social reality and a connection with emerging social problems.