PSR 2008
No 1/158/2008
- Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Sophia Marshman, Four Faces of Human Suffering in the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman
- Antonina Ostrowska, The Struggle with Time in Chronic Illness
- Michał Sitek, Politics and Institutions in the Reforms of Organization and Financing of Health Care in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland
- Piotr Stankiewicz, Invisible Risk. The Social Construction of Security
- Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves, Weak Civic Engagement? Post-Communist Participation and Democratic Consolidation
- Ondřej Císař, Internationalization of Social Movements in the Czech Republic: The Case of the Anti-Temelín Campaign
- Maciej Antoni Górecki, Incumbents, Post-Communists and Local Welfare: Disentangling the Aggregate-Level Economic Voting Regularities in 2002 and 2006 City President Elections in Poland
- Books Recommended
- Annual Index 2007
Abstract: In this piece, the authors detect and delineate an often neglected core concern within the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman - social suffering. They trace this concern with suffering from the early year writing within a Marxist framework focusing on the working class through middle periods concerned with the Holocaust, Jews, strangers and the Other to the later years and the preoccupation with the victims of consumerism. The authors document how social suffering has remained a leitmotif in Zygmunt Bauman's sociology but suggest how his writings on misery and suffering paradoxically point to a world of human possibility and responsibility.
Abstract: It is worth looking at chronic illness with its pain, suffering and increasing limitations from the perspective of time. By time we mean subjective time relating to the perception and dynamics of the malady in the patient’s impressions and the role which time plays in the structuring of the patient’s life and experience. The main focus of this article is the experience of progressive kidney failure (uraemia), a condition which requires regular dialysis or kidney transplantation. Due to its specific crises, hopes and periods of waiting, painstaking medical procedures lasting many hours and turning points in the disease’s trajectory, time and its passage are a particularly adequate instrument with which to analyse the experiences of patients with uraemia. These experiences are discussed against the backdrop of selected elements of health care and attitudes towards transplantation which provide the social context for patients’ struggle with illness.
Abstract: The article discusses main developments in the organization and financing of health care in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. These countries exemplify different approaches to health care reform and different processes of institutional change of health care systems. The article charts main policy developments and offers explanation of dynamics of changes. It emphasizes the role of politics and broadly understood institutions, which are often neglected in the literature on health care reform in the region. It is argued that political institutions, party politics and rivalries within the governments influenced the scope and timing of policy changes. Institutional changes were also affected by the patterns of interest representation and organizational and normative developments that resulted from decisions and non-decisions taken in the past.
Abstract: Several empirical studies of the social construction of risk have been conducted within the risk study paradigm but little attention has been paid so far to the flip side of this process, i.e., exclusion of risk from social consciousness by deliberately or involuntarily rendering it invisible, disregarding or marginalising it. This article, based on the concept of risk proposed by Ulrich Beck, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky and the findings of the sociology of scientific ignorance, introduces the “risk-concealment category”. This category applies to the mechanisms and processes underlying the social definition and construction of risk. It then presents the main functional areas of the mechanisms of risk-concealment in social practice and identifies the basic types of mechanisms which can be found at various stages of social risk definition and which lead to the social construction of the sense of security. The status of this text is projective and the possible paths of further exploration of the subject are outlined. The purpose of this article is to suggest a new research area focusing on the various aspects of risk-concealment and the underlying mechanisms, rules and action strategies. The mechanisms of risk assessment, political-economical risk definition and risk discourse are discussed.
Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyze the problem of civic and political participation in the post-communist context in light of contemporary democratic theory, the concept of democratic consolidation, and the thesis of the “weakness of civil society in post-communist countries”. It argues that the institutional approach to democratization and participation does not provide a full answer to the question of how democratic systems become consolidated and thus it needs to be supplemented by the cultural approach. The analysis of the patterns of democratic participation in post-communist countries, however, is further complicated by their background conditions, the burden of the communist past, and the model of democratization that they have undergone. Although it seems that a participatory, civil-society centred type of democratic politics would revitalize and strengthen democracy in post-communist countries, two questions – addressed in this article – arise. First, whether available democratic theories shed enough light on the processes involved in a democratic change and democratic consolidation in the post-communist context, and second, whether a weak civic sphere is a major impediment to the development of a truly democratic system.
Abstract: The paper focuses on the analysis of different types of coalition formations established and hoped to be established during the transnationally coordinated campaign against the second Czech nuclear power plant in Temelín. The case study concentrates on the role the EU played in the campaign. Due to the ongoing accession process, the opponents of the power plant saw the EU as a unique opportunity for halting the plant’s construction. They actively lobbied the European Commission to make the Czech Republic’s accession to the EU conditional on discontinuing the construction. The perceived significance of the EU explains the political strategies the opponents developed at the end of the 1990s, in order to get the European Commission involved in the campaign.
Abstract: In this paper, I examine the patterns of economic voting in 2002 and 2006 city president elections in largest Polish cities. I draw on the conceptual distinction between “conventional” and “transitional” economic voting. While the former concept stresses a general positive link between economic welfare and the results gained by incumbents, the latter, developed in course of studies on the post-communist countries, emphasises a negative relationship between welfare and the electoral fortunes of post-communist parties and candidates. Relying on aggregate-level data relating to 2002 and 2006 city president elections, I conduct analyses suggesting that both types of economic voting can be observed at the local level in Poland. On one hand, the electoral achievements of incumbents in the cities with high average wages tend to be greater than in the case of the cities with low average wages. On the other, low average level of wages favours presidential candidates affiliated with the post-communist party. Moreover, there is suggestive evidence that incumbency status interacts with affiliation with the post-communist party. The results tend to be robust with respect to different model specifications, including those accounting for unobserved heterogeneity.