Suchergebnisse

After Estonia's systemic change and restored independence in 1991, Estonian civil servants must re‐conceptualise their relationships with other spheres of society and with what they see as the 'Public Good'. They are involved in the adoption and creation of new value judgments, professional identities and views of ethical and unethical conduct. This article presents an empirical examination of these processes. Carried out from June 2005 to January 2006, it makes use of group interviews (N = 58) and a national e‐mail questionnaire (N = 960) of civil servants. According to the results, the officially adopted Civil Service Code of Ethics is seldom relied upon. The idea of civil service as a vocation, preference for self‐regulating measures, suspicion towards external control and avoidance of media publicity are indicative of the respondents' view of the overall role of civil service in society. The paternalist attitude inherent in this discourse is considered in this article to be in line with the specific functions of a state still completing its systemic transformation.

The article discusses problems related to illicit drugs in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia against the background of the postsocialist transitions of the 1990s. Besides the drug problem, the political and market reforms of the 1990s were accompanied by a surfacing of a variety of social problems, some of which had already been present during the authoritarian socialist regimes. Gaining reliable and comparable statistics on drug-related harm has become very difficult due to changes in treatment system and health statistics. Nevertheless, all available evidence suggests that the use of illicit drugs has grown rapidly in all four countries, it now being close to the Western European level. As a result of international impulses rather than domestic interest, strictly restrictive drug policies have been adopted. Drug problems are aggravated by a marginalisation of a large part of the populations. Accordingly, their reduction may require a more general revision of the four countries' economic and social policies.

This study inspects the reasons as for why voluntary associations end their activity and dissolve as legal entities. The empirical data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with former leaders of 30 organizations in Estonia and Finland. To appreciate the sector's diversity, the analysis makes a distinction between associations with mainly expressive, and those with mainly instrumental functions. Causes for the associations' dissolution fall into four different categories related to (1) the association as a social entity, (2) resources, (3) goals and (4) environment. Reasons belonging to the first category of internal, social reasons, such as problems of leadership, internal organization and membership recruitment were the most common ones. However, several reasons often intertwined. A comparison between associations of different types showed that expressive associations were most often threatened by causes in the first category, while they were surprisingly immune to the other ones. Instrumental associations are dependent on other actors and external circumstances, and the reasons for their dissolution are likely to be related to problems with resource acquisition, goals or environments.