CIS - Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas

Majesty,
It is a great honor for the sociological community that we can count on your presence and encouragement for another year. This year, also, in the new and magnificent setting of the Royal Collections, which reflect a splendid journey through our history, represented by the Crown.
But let's leave history to the historians and go to society, which is our thing.

In 1958, in one of the first analyzes of the development of Spanish Sociology, Enrique Gomez Arboleya, advanced an idea that all of his numerous disciples have reiterated over and over again: the vicissitudes of Spanish sociology - said Arboleya - are the vicissitudes of society. modern1. He implied that sociology is another product of modernity. To put it the other way around, this time with Amando de Miguel: it was the absence of a secularized and powerful bourgeoisie that prevented the penetration of Sociology in Spain at the beginning of the last century. Without modernity there can be no sociology.

And without a doubt it is so. But not completely.

Well, it is still surprising that some of the first chairs of sociology were created, not in modern and advanced countries, but in Saint Petersburg, Rome, Buenos Aires, or even in Madrid, at the Central University, in 1899, even before than in Paris, where it will be created in 1910. Well, sociology is performative and normative, and as much as reflecting modernity it tries to produce it.

This has been especially true in late Franco Spain, in which sociology was incorporated as an instrument of social change. To add a third quote from another of the modern classics, this one from Vidal Beneyto: “sociology emerged in post-war Spain as a movement…from the bottom up and against an almost general resistance; There was distrust, almost fear, regarding the discovery capacity... of sociology. Fear of what another sociologist of those years called: "the demagoguery of facts." Social transparency as a prior step to its transformation.

A timely observation as a prologue to the laudatio of Luisa Carlota Solé Puig, which I have the honor of delivering for the second time, since I already did so when she joined the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Well, if anyone has paid deserved attention to modernity, it has undoubtedly been Professor Solé.

It has been said that feminine discourse in sociology is more applied, more pragmatic, more committed to social change, more normative. Patricia M. Langermann and Gillian Niebrugge point this out in their excellent monograph on “The founders of sociology and social theory”, in an excellent edition of the CIS. Carlota Solé fulfills this observation to the letter.

Well, she represents an entire generation of sociologists born in the 1940s, who began publishing in the 1970s, gained professorships in the 1980s, and are now retiring. I speak of the desire and hope to contribute with their studies and research to a “modern” Spain, and again the word. A Spain that had to move from authoritarianism to democracy; from a closed economy to an open one; from an intolerant society to an inclusive one, a Spain that had to leave the “times of silence” of Franco's regime to start talking about itself, which is what sociology does: teach society to talk about itself.

(A little, what His Majesty does in many of his speeches, if I may be so bold: putting a mirror up to see ourselves as we are).

And if Arboleya was the proto-father of that illustrated project, the fathers were the national sociology prizewinners Murillo Ferrol, Linz, Del Campo Urbano, Jiménez Blanco, Giner, Maravall, Moya... And the grandchildren are the one who now speaks to them, or the same Carlota Solé. Already trained in a University that refused to renew the elites of Franco's regime and, on the contrary, carried out within it the first and pioneering transition to democracy, the first meeting between the children of the victors and the children of the defeated, back in 1956.

A generation that combined the desire for an open Spain with a deep faith in the transformative capacity of science and knowledge, and it is no coincidence that in those years the most rebellious were also the most studious. We believed in the University as the matrix of knowledge and the new society, which would lead us to go outside to train as an inevitable step, not only in the cursus honorum.
academic, but in a true bildung, a formation of personality and character.

That is why I cannot help but pay tribute here to the work that the March Foundation carried out in those seventies with a scholarship program to train sociologists, which was a quarry for the future. Program whose jury included our colleagues Juan Díez Nicolas (also National Award winner) and Luis González Seara.

Well, in 1973 - half a century ago now - the March Foundation awarded thirteen scholarships, one of them to Carlota herself, another to whom I am speaking now, and others to future professors or professors: Julio Iglesias de Ussel, Jesús de Miguel , Manuel Martín Serrano, Carlos Alba, Julio Rodriguez Aramberri, Eduardo Sevilla, Benjamín Oltra, María Cátedra, Enrique Luque, Manuel Ramírez Jiménez, Juan José Ruiz Rico. Scholarships to study at the Universities of Yale, California, Pennsylvania, Cambridge, Reading, London Schools of Economics, Santa Barbara, the Sorbonne or
l'École Practique des Hautes Études. It is evident that with that scholarship program the definitive updating of Spanish sociology began.

Only two women on that list. Nothing surprising, of course. It took a lot of courage and determination then for a woman, educated under Franco, to embark on the adventure of living and studying at a foreign university. So, let's not forget, the foreigner was very far away and that was it, he was foreign and strange.

And boy did it form. Carlota Solé already had a degree and doctorate in Economics from the UAB in 1975, but in those years there was no degree in sociology (it will be created in 1973), and for this reason she obtained a second doctorate in 1982, now in sociology, at the University of Reading, where he worked with Hugh Thomas, Stanislaw Andreski and Margaret Archer, and prepared a dissertation with Anthony D. Smith that will deal, precisely,
on “theories of modernization”.

He has also trained at the University of Berkeley with Robert Bellah and Neil Smelser, and has taught at the Istituto Universitario di Studi Europei (Torino) and at the European University of Florence.

Professor of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona since 1988, Emerita much later, she has supervised 24 theses (13 cum laude) and has six six-year research periods, the maximum allowed.

He has published 40 books and 118 articles (23 in English) in the best international magazines, of which he has ended up being a member of their editorial boards. From Ethnic and Racial Studies, from the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, from The European Journal of Social Quality, and from the Journal of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Scientific advice in which it continues.

Professor Solé has also carried out a great task of research management. Director for many years of the magazine Papers, the most important Catalan sociology magazine, president of the Catalan Federation of Sociology, vice president of the Spanish Federation of Sociology, and member of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. And she has been founder and director of the Study Group on Immigration and Ethnic Minorities (GEDIME), since 1989.

His research areas are varied but two main ones stand out: modernization and emigrations. To the first he dedicated his first book “Modernization, a sociological analysis”, from 1976. To address, since then, the issue of immigration, which he has worked on in all its facets. In fact, I suspect that it is a unique case, Professor Solé receives this National Award for the second time, since it was already awarded in 1990, when Luis Rodríguez Zúñiga was director of the CIS, for his research on "Foreign workers in Catalonia: integration or racism?" ?». I had the honor of collaborating with her shortly after, in 1996, on a book about multiculturalism that Alianza Editorial published for us. Two themes (modernization and immigration) that reappear in her two most cited works, “The Immigrant Woman, with 204 citations; Modernity and modernization, 196 citations; and The labor market and racial discrimination in Spain, with 189 mentions.”

Data that show the very notable impact that his publications have had in the academic world. As is known in some academic fields, our publications appear referenced and all cross-citations are counted in quantitative indexes that are updated practically daily. Almost like an academic income statement. And although we should not fetishize these citation indices - which disorient quite a few young researchers and are giving rise to quite a few misdeeds -, they are undoubtedly very relevant when it comes to assessing the impact that a work has had among colleagues. Well, Dr. Solé has more than 4,100 citations, with an h-index of 33, that is, she has 33 works with at least 33 citations each. And an i10 index of 73, that is, it has no less than 73 works that received at least 10 citations. Professor Solé's data is excellent.

I could make a more personal portrait of Carlota Solé, whom I have known for many years. Discreet, prudent and rigorous person, always kind and optimistic, willing and open to dialogue, and even confrontation, which is the basis of science. He never rejects a task that he performs efficiently but with (I was going to say “sweetness” but it's going to sound bad, so I withdraw the word) let's say, a silky hand.

But I'll leave it here and finish.

Carlota Solé is the fourth woman to receive the award in a list of 17 winners, and all of them in the last five years, a sign of the powerful feminization of this discipline, thus fulfilling Langermann and Niebrugge's suspicion. More than 20%, but only 20%. An 80/20 ratio, which brings us back to Pareto, but also to that “law” that says that they must work 20% more to earn 20% less. Although
At this rate the ratio will soon be 60/40…but in their favor. Half (at least) of the talent of the human species is in their hands and it would be foolish, as well as very unfair, not to take advantage of it. It seems that we sociologists are not doing it. My sincere congratulations to Carlota Solé on behalf of the community of sociologists that I have the honor to represent today.

And thank you very much Your Majesty for joining us.

Emilio Lamo de Espinosa

Numerary Academic of the Royal Academy of CC. Morals and Politics

National Prize for Sociology and Political Science 2016

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