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.
This article focuses on welfare surveillance as a sociological sub-discipline and a specific issue that has emerged in the past two decades in relation to the neoliberal revolution and the transformation of social systems in the West. The paper has three main goals: (1) a theoretical conceptualisation of welfare surveillance based on an analysis of existing empirical research; (2) an analysis of socio-practical manifestations and impacts of welfare surveillance; and (3) a contextualisation of the implementation of welfare surveillance within the Czech social milieu during recent social reforms. Within the scope of the first two goals, the author shows that welfare surveillance is theoretically construed along the lines of a specific combination of social justice and neoliberal governmentality, and that welfare surveillance enables the application of specific illiberal practices to welfare applicants and recipients in order to effectively discipline and normalise them, which results in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of recipients. Given that there is relatively little research on surveillance in the Czech Republic, the article opens with an introduction to the issue of surveillance.