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This book focuses on social transformations as one of the central topics in the social sciences. The study of European social transformations is very valuable in the context of universal discussions within social sciences: explaining invariable, universal attributes of societies and examining changing attributes. The book consists of 20 chapters on European social transformations, written from the perspectives of distinguished scholars from such disciplines as economics, political science, educational science, geography, media and communication studies, public management and administration, social psychology and sociology. The temporal and spatial range of the book is wide, including such global changes as time-space compression, focusing particularly on change processes in Europe during the last two decades. The book consists of four main parts, beginning with an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches, and then focusing separately on post-communist transformations, institutional drivers of social transformations in the European Union, and European transformations in the context of global processes. The book presents current theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that complement the scientific literature on social transformations. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, and policy-makers studying how this diverse region has changed over recent years.

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reveal how "cool" as a concept is constructed by urban tweens in the post‐socialist country Estonia.Design/methodology/approachThe data consist of 42 essays written by 12‐year‐old schoolchildren of a secondary school in Tallinn in 2007. Discourse analysis was used to discover interpretative repertoires, subject positions and ideological dilemmas in the essays.Findings"Cool" is primarily constructed within three interpretative repertoires: cool as appearance, cool as leisure and cool as sports and hobbies. The main subject positions are young expert consumer, fun‐lover/pleasure‐seeker, achiever and creator. The main ideological dilemma is between individual distinction and fitting and merging into the group.Research limitations/implicationsThe essays are rather brief and normative statements of what qualifies as "cool". However, a certain degree of social desirability constitutes the value of these texts, revealing what Estonian tweens consider to be norms and shared beliefs.Practical implicationsThe paper addresses the prominent place consumerism occupies in tweens' everyday life. It opens up the world of meaning‐making of "cool" by tweens, offering an insight into which repertoires responsible marketers could use to empower young consumers.Originality/valueThe paper sheds light on tweens' complicated symbolic and material worlds in a post‐socialist context, providing a continuum of meanings of "cool" and its relationships with the consumer and peer culture.

This article analyzes inter-generational continuity and cultural reproduction in three transitional countries: Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic. We compare the levels of internalization of factor structures of self-identification and values among young people and older generations. We focus specifically on a comparison of young people representing the two main ethno-linguistic groups in Estonia and Latvia: ethnic Estonians, or Latvians, and Russians. The data are derived from representative population surveys carried out in the three countries in November 2005 and spring 2006. In general, we observed greater inter-generational continuity in the Czech Republic, compared with Estonia and Latvia. Cultural reproduction among the ethnic minorities in both Baltic countries has been most vulnerable to transitional changes: Russian youngsters differ from their parents to a greater extent than do young Estonians and Latvians from theirs.

Based on the concept of transition culture, the article discusses patterns of generational continuity and disruption in post-Soviet Estonia. We suggest a tool for meso-level analysis: factor structures of self-identification and value orientations. The empirical analysis of population survey data collected in 2005 shows that such mental structures have significant correlations with indices of perceptions about social changes and everyday social and cultural practices. Our analysis focuses on mental patterns of three generations among two main ethno-linguistic groups: ethnic Estonians and the Russian minority. The results reveal considerable differentiation between older and younger generations. We suggest that post-Soviet transition has brought about generational disruption in cultural reproduction, which is particularly visible among the ethnic minority group: Russian youngsters differ from their parents to a greater extent than do young Estonians from theirs. Moreover, the mental patterns of young Estonians and Russians have common elements.

This exploratory paper applying cross-cultural and developmental perspective analyses and discusses trust in alternative media and its relation to trust in professional media, seeking to identify the national specifics of media trust and its developmental patterns. Employing 2016 survey data of Czech, Estonian and Greek youth (aged 14–25, N = 3654) collected as part of the international CATCH-EyoU project (Horizon 2020), the study outlines the typology of media trust, comprising trust in alternative and professional media, and compares social and political predictors influencing media trust in the three countries. The study illustrates the diversity of relations between the two types of media trust, concluding that differences in selected predictors of media trust and the distribution of media trust types across national sub-samples illuminate the strong role national context plays, illustrating the varying pathways development of media trust follows in these varied contexts along socioeconomic and cultural lines.

This article explores the ways in which what we call the analogue and the datafied mindsets perceive the functioning of the datafied world. Based on a qualitative interview study of two generations of media users in Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden, we present and analyze underlying patterns in participants' media attitudes and related practices. We show that belonging to a media generation does not always produce a homogeneous mindset or a uniform attitude toward media technologies. These mindsets, being ideal-typical constructs, are not bound to individuals: the same person can display features of the analogue and the datafied mindset in relation to different parts of the datafied world. One mindset does not replace the other but rather adds another layer to the social action of the individuals. The mindsets are multi-dimensional and molded by contrasting understandings, indicating that the tenacious structures of the analogue world linger on in the datafied social space.