Using a representative survey of the Czech population, we demonstrate that intergenerational within-family financial (wealth) transfers represent the main mechanism in the reproduction of ...homeownership in Czech post-socialist society. The provision of a transfer or the lack of one largely determines the housing tenure of Czech young adults. Without transfers, the children of homeowners are significantly less likely to also become homeowners. We also show that the probability of an adult child receiving a transfer and the size of the transfer are closely linked (a) to the adult child's within-family socialisation and (b) to the fact of whether the parents had also received a transfer from their parents in the past and how large that transfer was. These findings have important implications for how housing markets operate and for social inequalities. For example, if an established history of within-family transfers is a predictor of homeownership in future cohorts, this may mean that an important part of society will be systemically and predictably excluded from access to homeownership and a fixed axis of reproduced housing wealth inequality may form.
The goal of this paper is to predict, by using microsimulation modelling under alternative market scenarios, housing wealth inequality in Czech society up to the year 2050. These predictions can be ...useful for assessing the rationale for attempts to use housing assets as a way of supplementing state pensions; and thus add to existing studies on asset-based welfare (ABW) that focused only on the recent and past situation. The models predicted small increase in housing wealth inequality among the future elderly but larger increases in inequality in the society as a whole. Rise in wealth inequality was especially steep when consumption of housing assets by future elderly was accompanied by an interruption of financial transfers to the next generations. Reduction of intergenerational transfers may thus significantly enhance wealth inequality in a society and thus pose a risk to social peace. We showed that similar outcome may appear in broader number of countries, including those with much lower homeownership rate.
The paper investigates how socialist architecture - both as location and visual text - functions as tool of political criticism in the late socialist cinema of Hungary. Through the textual analysis ...of the living space in the socialist bloc in Péter Bacsó's A Pianino in Mid-Air (Zongora a levego"ben, 1976), Béla Tarr's Family Nest (Családi tu"zfészek, 1977) and Prefab People (Panelkapcsolat, 1982), Péter Gothár's A Priceless Day (Ajándék ez a nap, 1979) and György Szomjas's Wall Driller (Falfúró, 1985), the study dwells on the elimination of domestic space in the films which, as argued below, corresponds to the families' disintegration and so to the failure a coherent, socialist society.
This article is to review the development of the LGBT+ movement in Czechia after 1989. The analytical section introduces three distinctive phases: (1) the movement's establishment and development ...during the 1990s, (2) the period culminating (and declining) with the adoption of the Registered Partnership in 2006, and (3) the period characterised as a restructuring of the movement towards the goal of equal parental and marriage rights. The article analyses the development and changes in the organisational structure of the movement (according to Císař, Ondřej. 2013. "A Typology of Extra-Parliamentary Political Activism in Post-Communist Settings: The Case of the Czech Republic." In Jacobsson and Saxonberg, 139-168). It uncovers heterogeneity, mostly concentrated around short transitory moments in each phase which allow the establishment of short-term, often informal, self-organised organisations oriented less on transactional activism, typical for NGOs of the region and time period.
The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the ...late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet."
The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of
material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It
traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material
world of the ...late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender
roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary
aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive
frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens,
Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces
to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing
so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of
their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets
and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the
hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these
various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life
considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the
efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally
organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community.
Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense
impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial
imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the
Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of
modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda.
Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of
Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and
society "Soviet."
The activities of John Wheatley's Catholic Socialist Society have been analysed in terms of liberating Catholics from clerical dictation in political matters. Yet, beyond the much-discussed clerical ...backlash against Wheatley, there has been little scholarly attention paid to a more constructive response offered by progressive elements within the Catholic Church. The discussion that follows explores the development of the Catholic social movement from 1906, when the Catholic Socialist Society was formed, up until 1918 when the Catholic Social Guild, an organisation founded by the English Jesuit Charles Plater, had firmly established its local presence in the west of Scotland. This organisation played an important role in the realignment of Catholic politics in this period, and its main activity was the dissemination of the Church's social message among the working-class laity. The Scottish Catholic Church, meanwhile, thanks in large part to Archbishop John Aloysius Maguire of Glasgow, became more amenable to social reform and democracy.
Analyzing the sociology in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Great Change in 1989, the article aims to present the main epistemological questions that Post-Western sociology raises for ...the discipline of sociology as a whole. The focus is put on a paradoxical feature in the development of sociology in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe: before 1989, under conditions of Marxist monoparadigmality, relative isolation of scientific cognition, and political and ideological pressure, sociological research in these countries was characterized by methodological rigor and conceptual innovativeness, while after 1989, in the context of institutionalized plurality of paradigms (polyparadigmality), and intensive scientific exchange, the dominant tendency is—for social scientists in the countries in question—to borrow methodologies, theories, and concepts from the Western sociological tradition, without analyzing the epistemic relevance of these loans with regard to the societies in which they are applied. This paradox is examined in terms of sociological production in two research fields: the general sociological theory of society and sociology of youth. Comparing studies and analyses carried out in these two fields in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Great Change, the article demonstrates that Post-Western sociology is a valid
research posture
for a wide variety of sociological practices regardless of the concrete national, theoretical, or institutional frameworks in which researchers are working. Sensitivity to the context of research is what permits Post-Western sociology to eliminate cognitive hierarchies and inequalities and restores the epistemic autonomy of each cognitive practice, emphasizing the inevitable cultural variations in the interpretation of one and the same phenomenon and the impact of these variations on methodology. In this sense, Post-Western sociology raises important epistemological problems regarding the relationship between maintaining the disciplinary principles of sociological knowledge on the one hand, and the application of those principles in different epistemic contexts on the other hand. The main question could be formulated as follows: how does Post-Western sociology enrich the deontological and epistemological principles of the discipline and in what way does it contribute to developing its scientific project?
Youth political participation via state-sponsored institutional settlements has always been considered a goal of youth policies, representing a means of creating politically active and caring ...citizens. Throughout Europe, however, the number of politically active young people seems to be diminishing, with youth frequently described as apathetic and disengaged. While a growing body of academic research has concentrated on exploring the reasons behind political inactivity, this article explores the motivation and activities of some of the young people who are involved in institutionalised youth organisations, asking if the meanings behind institutional political participation are undergoing a process of change together with the rest of the society. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews, participant observation and analysis of documents (including online communication) collected as part of the research project MYPLACE, we examine the meanings young people attach to their participation. We show that the character of these organisations and motivations behind participation are miscellaneous; sometimes strikingly similar to the forms of participation not traditionally associated with political activism but rather ascribed to disengaged youth.
PDF
