Suchergebnisse

One of the directions in order to study the changes that affected the university in postcomunist Romania is to analyze the relationship between politics and university. This analysis is situated on three levels: the university, the political elites and university and the university and the state. Our study aims to offer a profile of the members of the Romanian Parliament during the period 1990-2008 in terms of academic career. Following the Bourdieu's criteria on academic relevance our conclusion is that the presence of important members of the academic space in the Romanian Parliament explains on one hand the backwardness of the higher education system and on the other hand, the creation of the private universities after 1990.

This article examines the issue of the genderedness of the philosophical canon. In the theoretical part of the article the author gives evidence of the constructed nature of the philosophical canon, which in the Euro-American space is clearly androcentric. She summarises criticism to date of the philosophical canon by feminist historians of philosophy and describes the results of their research, which is directed at several areas: uncovering forgotten women philosophers of the past; analysing philosophers' views on gender; identifying the genderedness of basic philosophical categories; criticising the dualism that characterises modern philosophical discourse; and finally, making various reinterpretations of the concepts of past philosophers. Each of these approaches has particular potential and limitations, which the author seeks to identify. In the second part of the article the author presents the results of her analysis of philosophy textbooks and books on the history of philosophy published in the Czech Republic after 1990. She conducted her analysis by comparing information on women philosophers contained in the texts of the selected books with the information available in other literature (mainly English). She also employed the typological method, and she identified five 'strategies' of marginalisation of women philosophers, whereby textbooks used at Czech universities contribute to maintaining the existing philosophical canon.

The article focuses on an analysis of the situation in which information is obtained from respondents in questionnaire surveys. From the perspective of the cognitive aspects of survey methodology the article takes a complex view of this situation and applies theoretical concepts and empirical evidence in order to explain the close connection between the interview situation and the quality of the information obtained. The interview situation is portrayed in its twofold form: personal aspects (the mental operations of respondents) and social aspects (the interaction and communication between the interviewer and the respondent). The analysis of the interactive aspects of the interview situation draws attention to the rules of standard communication, which interfere with the ordinary concept of the standardised interview and the course of mental processes. The cognitive aspect of responding to questions is analysed from the perspective of the wider understanding of context effects, the author refers to the most important theoretical concepts relating to individual effects and empirical evidence of some effects that infl uence the response process. The article takes a somewhat untypical approach to some aspects of data collection in questionnaire surveys and into the Czech context introduces the cognitive aspects of the methodology of questionnaire surveys.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the issue of innovation from the perspective of relevant sociological interpretative frameworks. The discussion starts with an assessment of evolutionary and institutional economic studies of innovation, which have contributed to a better understanding of the role of institutional and social factors in the formation of innovation resources and the performance of (innovating) firms and (innovating) nation states. The concepts of a national innovation system (Nelson), the learning firm (Lundvall) and the social system of production (Hollingsworth) are discussed to explain this contribution in more detail. They indicate a set of socio-cultural factors and circumstances that can be identifi ed not only as implications of the techno-economic power of innovation but also as the autonomous factors that shape the performance of innovating actors. The EU Lisabon strategy is faced with a similar challenge: to balance the issue of competitiveness with environmental issues and social cohesion. The current debate over fulfilling its goals (the Kok report) offers good arguments as to how techno-economic and socio-cultural resources of innovation could be theorised and governed. In this article, selected methodological frameworks and databases (EIS 2005, EXIS) are applied in an analysis of the social forms and structures of national innovation systems. The final discussion refers both to the relevant concepts (the learning economy, knowledge societies, reflexive modernisation) and the analytical data in order to suggest a concept of innovation, which understands both economic and social factors to be productive resources of current innovation performance. The suggested interpretative framework is used to assess the structural dependencies and challenges of the innovation system in the Czech Republic.

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.

The article investigates the practice of female marriages in 19th century Great Britain and United States and argues that female marriages provided model for more progressive forms of the legal marriage between men and women. Unlike homosexuality in the 20th century, the same-sex relationships between women in the 19th century often enjoyed social recognition and some women in female marriages occupied prominent social positions. Because they were considered to rest on contract, female marriages served as inspiration for the contractual view of marriage advocated by many supporters of the Victorian marriage reform. The contribution of women in female couples to the success of the marriage reform was further underlined by their belonging to influential social networks. The author also argues that while the structuralist anthropology of mid-20th century, represented through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, had limited understanding of homosexuality as a socially legitimate phenomenon, the Victorian anthropology of the second half of the 19th century was relatively more open regarding the same-sex relationships. It is contended that authors as diverse as Henry Maine, Johann Bachofen, or Frederick Engels provided impulses in their work both for a positive evaluation of the same-sex relationships and for a more egalitarian understanding of marriage.

The article presents selected results from an ethnographic study on the (re)production of gender in the classroom. In this analysis, gender is conceived as a principle manifested in interactions, a principle that structures the lives of individuals and the collective, and not as a complex of essential characteristics of an individual. Gender is analysed in relation to other categories like age and ethnicity. These represent additional re/constructed categories that influence social inequality. These categories tend to be viewed as natural sources of social difference and the legitimisation of inequalities. An analysis of the ways in which these categories are activated in the social fi eld makes it possible to go beyond the boundaries of research on the reifi cation of these categories. In this article, the author shows how these categories intertwine and connect and how the interplay between them is manifested in the behaviour and strategies of various actors, i.e. students, in the classroom.