Suchergebnisse

'Dialogical networks' are communications that occur in mass media. One of their characteristics is that contributions of individual actors - politicians, journalists, representatives of pressure groups, etc - are distributed in time & space. (A politician can, for instance, react in the media to what another politician expressed publicly elsewhere). Another central property of dialogical networks is that an individual's contribution to a network can be duplicated, or even multiplicated (eg, what is said in a TV studio may be reproduced in several newspapers). Working in a broadly ethnomethodological & conversation analytical framework, we focus on two aspects of sequential organization - adjacency pair structures & repair structures - with the aim to clarify the respects in which they differ in dialogical networks & in everyday conversations.

The article focuses on the role of informality in the life of post-communist societies in Central Europe. Its goal is to question the current negative connotation of informal networks in the context of post-communist society. For this purpose it analyses the criteria used in the relevant literature to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' informal networks. Two main factors (the situational factor and the factor of relationship quality) are analysed from the perspective of their impact on the orientation of informal networks and their ability to predict which networks will have a positive or a negative influence on societal development. The author argues that neither of these two factors alone can fully explain the positive or negative orientation of a particular informal network in a given society. Instead he proposes a solution that combines several dimensions of both factors. In conclusion he identifies five types of informal networks in post-communist society: predatory, redistributory, helping, operating, and participative networks.

The aim of the article is to describe the relations between institutions in the public, private and non-profit sectors that are considered the most important actors of negotiation and decision-making in local development. These institutions and the relations between them are defined as a social network. A study was carried out in the small Czech towns of Blatná, Český Krumlov and Velké Meziříčí, and data were collected in 2007 and 2008. The first part of the article describes the institutional actors, the collection of the relational data, and the context of the three towns that were studied. The analytical part consists of social network analysis. Basic quantitative characteristics are used to describe and compare the social networks of the institutional actors in the local development of the three towns. The conclusions indicate the unconditional significance of local public administration institutions and the significance of other local institutions; relations to extra-local institutions are rather weak. A section on methodology at the end of the article contains methodological notes on Hellinger divergence and SNA.