The purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between forms of labour market marginalisation, understood here in terms of labour market status and job quality on the one hand, and income disadvantage, material deprivation and social exclusion on the other hand. Public policies that aim to improve labour market position and the income level of people disadvantaged in the labour market are also assessed. The authors draw on data from a survey on social exclusion in the Czech Republic focusing on people who were welfare benefits recipients in 2004 or considered their situation to be comparable to that of welfare recipients. The authors show that labour market marginalisation is transparent not only during unemployment spells (often repeated and longterm) but also in the case of temporary, low paid and poor quality jobs. The income levels of people employed in the lowest segment of the labour market and of the unemployed are similar, while the deprivation of the unemployed is greater with regard to the possibilities open to them to influence the life course and opportunities of them and especially their families. The authors point out the under-use of welfare benefits and identify measures that could improve the standard of living and human capital of people who are disadvantaged. While some disadvantaged people continue to be active in the labour market and perceive work incentives, the authors also identify the poverty traps that emerge for the fraction of them who become discouraged and welfare-dependent.
This paper explores the responses to the housing crisis in Dublin, Ireland, by analysing recent housing policies promoted to prevent family homelessness. I argue that private rental market subsides have played an increasing role in the provision of social housing in Ireland. Instead of policies that facilitate the construction of affordable housing or the direct construction of social housing, current housing policies have addressed the social housing crisis by encouraging and relying excessively on the private market to deliver housing. The housing crisis has challenged governments to increase the social housing supply, but the implementation of a larger plan to deliver social housing has not been effective, as is evidenced by the rapid decline of both private and social housing supply and the increasing number of homeless people in Dublin.
This interdisciplinary work explores current controversy over the collective identity of Romani and reasons for their social predicament. The first position, associated with Romani studies and identity politics, sees all Romani as a part of an ‘ethnic group’, and connects their plight to ‘racial’ discrimination and intolerance. Some anthropologists and social policy-makers call this ‘primordialism’ and deconstruct the notion of a unitary and natural ‘Romani nation’, maintaining most ghetto inhabitants are only classified as ‘Romani’ and their identity derives from their ‘sociál exclusion’. Matching policies are advocated. The author combines contemporary anthropological approaches to the identity construction with theories of discourse to conceptualize the debate, completing the framework with self-reflection of social science. The method of Critical Discourse Analysis is applied in examining corpora of academic and specialized writing, policy papers and media texts for the discourse construction of identity. Arguing that both discourses are differentiated instantiations of the same diagram of power normalizing ‘troublesome’ subjectivities, the author touches upon the ethical responsibility of scientists deconstructing essentialist representations of identities and circulating their ovm constructs instead.
Using company-level data from the Czech Republic dating from the years 1998, 2002, and 2004, the article examines whether the introduction of legislative measures aimed at gender equality in connection with the country’s accession to the European Union had significant effects on gender wage gaps. The main conclusion of the analysis is that within-job wage discrimination is a significant factor in the Czech labour market and that there were no substantive changes during the period studied. Women doing the same job in the same company earn about 10 per cent less than men in the Czech Republic. Much of the gender wage gap can be explained by horizontal and vertical gender segregation of the labour market. The lowest gender wage gaps are found in firms and groups of employees that are representative of or have strong ties to the socialist past. The article concludes with speculations about whether motherhood and the double-burden of women, combined with the lack of respect and authority accorded the path dependent legal system, results in legislative changes having little impact on practices in Czech society and in persistence gender wage discrimination., Alena Křížková, Andrew M. Penner, Trond Petersen., 3 tabulky, and Obsahuje bibliografii
While fertility rates in Western countries are low and the number of people who will remain voluntarily childless is increasing, more and more couples are seeking medical treatment for infertility. Fertility problems transcend the boundaries of medicine and challenge the traditional positivistic understanding of health and illness and the authority of scientific and objective medicine. The circumstances for coping with infertility are not universal and depend instead on the given society and on cultural values. Studying infertility means studying every important institution of our society: the institutions of marriage and the family, the institution of parenthood, medicine, and so on. While American and other Western social scientists have studied social aspects of infertility for many years, in the Czech Republic the topic remains the domain of medicine. This article focuses on basic concepts employed in the study of infertility and involuntary childlessness in sociology. It presents and summarises relevant concepts such as stigmatisation, social exclusion, identity problems, and gender differences in the response to infertility. It presents the debate over explaining the terms of infertility and (involuntary and voluntary) childlessness. It shows how the position of involuntary childlessness has been changing as the problem has increasingly come to be dealt with in medical terms and as high-tech medical treatments for infertility have been developed. Finally, the article opens up the topic for debate and raises the question of potential methods of research.
Studie se zaměřuje na definici a operacionalizaci konceptu školní šikany za účelem měření jejího výskytu ve školních kolektivech. Autoři poukazují na nejednotnost operacionalizace kritérií šikany, která je jedním z hlavních faktorů výrazně omezujících porovnání zachycené prevalence. Předkládají rozbor jednotlivých kritérií šikany a aplikují je na formy, jimž byla dosud věnovaná nedostatečná pozornost, jako jsou vztahová či psychická šikana a sociální exkluze. V návaznosti na to předkládají metodologická doporučení pro vyšetření školní šikany a pro zveřejňování nálezů., The paper focuses on the definition and operationalization of the concept of school bullying for the purpose of the prevalence measurement in school groups. It draws attention to the current disagreement concerning the defining criteria of bullying, which is one of the important factors that considerably limit the analyses of bullying prevalence. The authors examine the defining criteria of school bullying and apply them to the forms of bullying that have so far been under-researched, such as relational/psychological bullying and social exclusion. As a conclusion, specific methodological recommendations for the prevalence measurement of school bullying and the publication of research findings are presented., Pavlína Janošová, Lenka Kollerová, Kateřina Zábrodská., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
The spatial concentration of social disadvantage in rural areas not only poses a risk to social cohesion but also represents a challenge for public policy. This article draws on a multidimensional concept of disadvantage to study spatial aspects of disadvantage in Czech rural areas. Current studies aimed at identifying ‘inner peripheries’ as areas with an increased risk of social exclusion fail to distinguish between different forms of disadvantage. Their methodological approach blends regions struggling with various problems into one category. Contesting the one-dimensionality of peripheries, this article presents an alternative approach that allows the delimitation of multiple types of peripheral areas based on four separate dimensions of disadvantage. It is possible then to distinguish: peripheries characterised by low qualifications, lower living standards, and the absence of a middle class; peripheries with an increased risk of social exclusion; peripheries with poor accessibility; and peripheries facing demographic challenges. Differences in the spatial patterns of the four types of peripheries indicate that different sociospatial processes contribute to the emergence of different types of peripheries and this calls for varied public policy tools and measures.