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This article inquires into the connection between individualisation and environmental issues. Following an introduction to the topic in the opening of the article in chapters II and III the author provides a definition of some basic concepts and asks whether and how the relationship between individualisation and environmental issues is reflected in sociological literature. In chapter IV the author formulates a general framework that in chapter V gives insight into the inconsistent conception of individualisation in environmental ideologies. The article closes with chapter VI, in which, with the aid of a theoretical sociological framework, the author formulates some themes for studying the environmental aspects of the individualised lifestyle.

The author reviews the theory of socio-economic inequality in health & concludes that the use of cultural values to explain the ubiquitous association between the socio-economic standing (SES) of individuals & their health is becoming increasingly prominent. Inspired by this, the author examines whether & to what extent several aspects of lay knowledge about & attitudes towards health can explain the social gradient in subjective health in Central & Eastern Europe. The author uses data from the second round of the European Social Survey & limits the analysis to data from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, & Slovenia. The data show that while there is a strong relationship between education & subjective health & also a relationship between education & various measures of lay knowledge about health, beliefs about health are only very weakly related to subjective health & thus fail to account for its dependence on SES. The author concludes that this may be the result of reciprocal causation between lay knowledge & subjective health. More enhanced research designs would be required in order to gain a better empirical evaluation of the causal relationships between SES, lay knowledge, & health.

The article deals with the idea of Central Europe and aims to identify common developmental tendencies of the region in the medieval period and early modern age. The author emphasizes the advantages of the comparative approach primarily in the case of the medieval and early modern Polish, Czech and Hungarian states. Alongside common developmental tendencies the author emphasizes also important differences which cast doubt on the very idea of Central Europe.

When examining the gender of institutions of parenthood, lone motherhood is a key issue. In this article the author focuses on the economic implications of lone motherhood and on the strategies that women living with children without a partner develop in order to ensure their livelihood. The author begins by presenting the theoretical background and some results from European and North American research on lone motherhood. She then provides an overview of research on lone parenthood done in the Czech Republic since 1959. Finally, the author describes the qualitative study she conducted on divorced mothers. The results show how women deal economically with marital separation and which livelihood strategies they opt for. The research methodology was based on constructivist grounded theory and the technique of interviews. From the research results the author distinguishes fi ve basic strategies that can be combined and that are based on the sources that women have at their disposal. Those strategies may differ in terms of their degree of success, dependence/independence on others, and their efficacy at different points in time. The results also indicate that the success of these working strategies depends mainly on the age of the youngest child in the family and the caring responsibilities required by that age. The author argues that while for some women heading one-parent families paid work is an option that allows them to obtain a certain degree of independence and self-confidence, its efficacy depends on the context and immediate conditions in which the women find themselves. Overstressing the employment of lone mothers as a universal solution may thus lead to new dependencies.

This text inquires into the problem of cadenced step as the disciplinary technique of the body, according to theories of Marcel Mauss and Michel Foucault. Author explores historical core of military body techniques in social context, developed by Dutch army reformers Counts of Nassau during 1590s and refined by the Prussian military in 1740s. Author interprets cadenced step inside framework of shifting paradigm of power, as Foucault analyses the sequence of three stages of power emerging during european Early modernity.

Based on a systematic study of Polish sociological literature produced in the period stretching between the elevation of Wladyslaw Gomulka to the post of the Party's first secretary in October 1956 to the first free elections in Poland in June 1989, the author of this article offers an account of the main dilemmas & the varieties of pluralism in Polish sociology during the state socialist era. The author claims that, with the exception of the Stalinist period, Polish sociologists always occupied diverse positions on 'government' & 'society', but this diversity yielded to change in response to a particular time. Generally, in 1956-1989 Polish sociology was something unique in comparison with sociology in other so-called people's democracies, as it had a considerably high status in the country & in the world, including the West. The author argues that Polish sociology did not have to undergo a revolution in 1989 & make the move from Marxist to bourgeois sociology, as since 1956 (or even earlier, since 1945) it had been undergoing continuous change & constant reform (in theoretical domain & concerning its division into sub-disciplines) & maintained a consistent level of diversity in various respects.

The author of this article focuses on the theoretical framework of the concept of care as a critical category of social inequality in order to outline possibilities for a redefi nition of the relationship between work and care. Gender inequalities as well as inequalities that are based on other social categories, such as class, ethnicity, nationality, geopolitical location, marital status, and so on are incorporated in the social organisation of care which retrospectively reinforces them. Feminist debate has thus far formulated demands for the recognition of caring persons mainly at the national level, but the author of the article, referring to Arlie Hochschild and Allison Weir, shows that the current challenges of global capitalism point to the need to articulate these demands in a transnational context and to embed care in the discourse of transnational justice. She critically addresses the challenges that efforts to attain recognition for caring persons by including care as a labour-market activity are confronted with owing to the current changes in the social organisation of care under global capitalism, which involves among others the employment of marginalised groups of women and women immigrants in the caring professions. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, the author formulates two normative criteria for reconceptualising care as a social engagement without subjecting it to the logic of market valuation.

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 provides an overview of the main theoretical approaches to research on educational choices and anticipated labour-market opportunities from a gender perspective. It then presents the results of three quantitative analyses of secondary data. The objective is to help facilitate a complex understanding of the mechanisms of the reproduction of gendered social
structures. The genderedness of the social institutions in the education system and the labour market in relation to the socialising trends in the family is described in three parts: 1) gender segregation in employment in the context of segregation in education – the author shows that the horizontal dimension of these social institutions plays a more signifi cant role than the vertical dimension; 2) the factors that condition girls' and boys' educational aspirations and choice of schools – the author demonstrates how secondary school choices are gendered (though the analysis did not reveal the differences between the factors that infl uence girls' and boys' aspirations); 3) the factors that condition parents' educational and class aspirations for their sons and daughters – the author uncovers several aspects of the socialising effect of the reproduction of the two traditional career trajectories based on gender. In conclusion, the article answers the question of how structurally gendered expectations cohere with individual career trajectories, and based on the three analyses formulates questions for further research and offers a revised theoretical conceptualisation of gender as an analytical category.

In the translated lecture the author tries and answers the question on what ground are we entitled to ascribe "centrality" to Central Europe. He points out that, in contemporary usage, the term "Europe" stands for three different, not overlapping phenomena: geographical, political, and cultural.

This article focuses on Czech pre-Marxist sociological journals - Sociologicka revue (established in 1930, published until 1940, and again in 1946-49) and Socialni problemy (established 1931, published 1931-1938/39 and 1947/48) - and compares how they functioned with the work of the contemporary Sociologicky casopis/ Czech Sociological Review (analyzed volumes 32 (1996) to 41 (2005)). Although the internal situation of the branch & its public evaluation were rather different during each of the two periods, the author believes that looking back at the well-established earlier period of Czech sociology can provide some comparative data for a better understanding of the current situation and its imperfections. First, the author quantitatively analyses the 'genre' composition of the old and new journals and concludes that in the earlier publications reviews and scientific polemics were more strongly represented, whilst the papers - especially those in Sociologicka revue - were less likely to be connected with any empirical research. Conversely, the old sociologists were highly involved in the public sphere, which included student education and active participation in policy making. Nowadays, Czech sociologists tend to be wrapped up in themselves; they produce better theoretical and empirical papers, but the number produced per person has decreased, and their reception is probably weaker. In the article the author also analyses the means of recruitment of the journals' editorial boards, relations within the Czech sociological community itself and its relations abroad, and other issues of the sociology of Czech sociology, past and present.

With reference to ideas presented in the theory of media malaise, the article aims to assess the role of negative campaigning in Czech elections and to analyse how it is perceived by voters, how it correlates with electoral preferences, and other important variables. The analysis is based on data from the Czech Election Survey 2010. The author draws from the causal relationship formulated in the above mentioned theory, according to which the effect of the news media and their emphasis on negative news and negativity contribute to growing political cynicism among citizens. Negative and conflicting media news, which are even more intense during election campaigns, activate the spiral of public cynicism and cause public trust in political actors to fall, as well as alignment and voter turnout (Cappella and Jamieson 1997). The author attempts to test the hypothesis: The more people watch the media and the more they are exposed to election campaign coverage, the greater is their political cynicism. Adapted from the source document.

This paper is based on a survey among 435 Czech households caring for a dependent senior in the family to inquire into the conditions and circumstances of caring for seniors in the family. The concept of 'care as a labour of love' (Graham) is contrasted with the concept of the 'defamilisation of care' (Glenn) and 'social rights for elderly care' (Fine). The author finds that more demanding family care, measured as the level of IADL or BADL, is reflected in a growing number of hours spent on family care. The author shows the significant differences in the psychological and financial burden experienced by primary caregivers in relation to how demanding the level of care required is. The article presents evidence of the existence of 'collective family care' in situations where demanding personal care for a senior is required. The participation of other family members in providing care for a senior in situations of demanding personal care demonstrates some features of family cohesion.