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The book, which I have the pleasure to introduce to the readers, is one of the first collections of sociological studies which take comprehensively — though by no means in an exhaustive way — the problems of national and ethnic minorities in Poland, as well as their relations with the national and ethnic majority of the population of the country in question. The issues dealt with in this book are of great importance both in their cognitive and practical aspect. In the history of Poland, its most recent chapter included, multinationality and — connected with it to some extent — multi-religion never were matters of marginal significance, however marginalized they were from time to time for political reasons. According to the data obtained in the 1931 census: "Poles constituted 68.9% of the society, the Ukrainians made 13.9%, Jews 8.6%, Belarussians 3.1%, Germans 2.3%, while other nationalities the remaining 3.2% of the population of Poland" (Lodziriski, 1995). (fragment tekstu)

Some social scientists are sceptical of the explanatory power of ethnicity and seek to explain ethnic differences by references to non-ethnic factors such as discrimination. We challenge this scepticism by considering two theoretical objections: there is no such thing as ethnicity and ethnic categories are unable to explain social processes; and by showing how ethnic strategies affect outcomes that cannot be captured in standard ethnic penalty analyses, we offer a new way to examine ethnic penalties in unemployment. We calculate a set of net ethnic penalties and then analyse longitudinal labour-force data to examine how strategies such as self-employment change ethnic penalties in unemployment amongst six different ethnic groups in Britain. The results show that self-employment reduces the ethnic penalty for Indians, Pakistanis-Bangladeshis and others, but not for Blacks, White-Others and White-British. This supports the argument that ethnicity can provide an explanation for some of the ethnic differentials in the labour market.

AbstractThe political utility of ethnicity is typically attributed to the ease with which it can be observed. However, ethnic visibility is not universal, and I argue that its variation has political implications; namely that more visible group members support ethnic parties at higher rates because they have the most to gain (or lose) from ethnopolitical competition. Using original data from Malawi, I find that individual‐level ethnic visibility is indeed strongly associated with ethnic party support. I provide further evidence that visibility induces party support instrumentally by shaping expectations about others' ability to correctly infer ethnic belonging. I also show that the theory generalizes to the group level, with more visible ethnic groups across Africa being more likely to vote ethnically. These results qualify a central assumption in instrumental theories of ethnic politics—that ethnic identities are always visible—and help explain variation in the success of ethnic political mobilization.

The introduction by Jeffrey Reitz focuses on the evolution of Breton's distinctive institutional framework, which both extends and in some ways alters John Porter's classic analysis in The Vertical Mosaic. Reitz shows how Breton's original concept of "institutional completeness" has been extended to provide a comprehensive framework for the institutional analysis of inter-ethnic relations, creating a unified theoretical structure that has reshaped the study of inter-ethnic relations in Canada and points toward a future research agenda.

Together with the development of transformative technologies that epitomize globalization, the ongoing movements of people across borders and other socio-economic pressures are creating a fast-changing business environment that is difficult for business to understand, let alone control. Dominant social expectations that immigrants should seek to adopt an assimilationist socialization path towards the host country's mainstream are contradicted by minority ethnic group resilience. There is no evidence that these groups naturally disappear within the cultural and behavioural contexts of their adopted countries. Since ethnic minority consumers cannot be expected to assimilate, then they maintain some significant degree of unique ethnicity related consumer characteristics that convert into threats and opportunities for business. The inherent socialisation process also provides opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurship and for proliferation of ethnic minority business. Following from the extensive examination of scholarly perspectives of ethnic marketing theory, there is an acknowledged and marked divide between theoretical exhortations and what is done in practice, a relative oversight of the implications of mixed embedded markets, and a propinquity to overlook the crucial role played by ethnic entrepreneurship and ethnic networks. Opportunity valuations are difficult to enact due to a lack of intelligence about ethnic markets. Variable sentiment about the future of ethnic marketing links to different predictions on how the drivers of globalization will impact on the acculturation paths of ethnic minorities. Keeping a focus on the ethnic group as the unit of analysis, combining ethnic marketing and ethnic entrepreneurship theories provides intelligence about contemporary ethnic marketing and practice perspectives. The ultimate objective is to reduce the theory-practice divide through the development of a collaborative framework between business and scholars that converts into theory-in-use.

"In der Transformationsforschung zu den post-sowjetischen Gesellschaften, insbesondere Rußland, haben sich die anfänglichen Analyseinstrumente als nur bedingt tauglich erwiesen. Die vielfältigen Ungleichgewichte, Machtasymmetrien oder soziale Ungleichheiten, verhindern eine gleichmäßige Einsetzung des gewünschten institutionellen Rahmens auf der Makro-Ebene. Im diametralen Gegensatz zu diesen 'großen' Theorien stehen kulturologische Ansätze, die regionale, nationale, 'ethnische' Mentalitäten untersuchen. Übersetzt man sie in die Begrifflichkeit soziologischer Theorie, so werden hier Handlungskapazitäten individueller und kollektiver Akteure untersucht, die völlig unverbunden und nichtvermittelt den Systemveränderungen gegen überstehen. 'Lebenswelten' und Systemebene sind jedoch empirisch vermittelt, was theoretisch wohl am besten zu fassen ist, wenn die Meso-Ebene der Gruppenvernetzungen, als kollektive Effekte individueller Verhaltensmuster, im Blickpunkt steht. Durch die - oft allerdings nur analytisch gegebene - Trennung der Ebenen kann die 'Reichweite' vieler Theoreme oder Konzeptionssegmente besser eingeschätzt werden. Die Transformationserfolge - oder auch: '-mißerfolge' beschränken sich nicht auf die Etablierung elitärer Po]itik und vertikaler Patron-Klient-Netzwerke; es lohnt sich, das Augenmerk auf 'konservative' Vergesellschaftungsformen wie Milieus und Regionalisierungen zu richten, die sich als relative Stabilitätszonen und Integrationsmedien in Zeiten rapiden sozialen Wandels erweisen konnten. Milieus sollen nicht als 'vormoderne' Sozialformen gefaßt werden, sondern als Indiz dafür, daß mit der sozialstrukturellen Neugliederung der postsowjetischen Gesellschaft nicht nur vertikale Grenzen, insbesondere aufgrund sozio-ökonomischer Ausdifferenzierung, umdefiniert werden, sondern auch horizontale. Während der Milieu-Begriff zu Beschreibung von Alltagsorganisation verwendet wird, bezieht sich der Regionalisierungs-Begriff auf die, zentralstaatlich nicht zu bewä1tigende, Neuorganisation kollektiver Akteure beim Aufbau von lokalen Institutionen". (Autorenreferat)