Suchergebnisse

This article concerns uncertainty, which is considered by many social theorists (forinstance, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Daniel Bell, Eric Hobsbawm) to be a charac-teristic trait of the contemporary world. Uncertainty is produced by rapid, multidimen-sional changes in the conditions around us—by their instability and unpredictability—and by a lack of future vision. Continual change becomes an element of everyday life.Culture understood as a collection of permanent meanings, norms, and values loses itsordering function—it no longer serves to elucidate the world; the past does not providehelpful examples. There is an expansion of mutability, a multiplicity of possible choices,and an excess of information—which paradoxically, like its lack in an isolated society, isa cause of uncertainty, fear, and presentist thinking. In Polish society, these phenomenaare strengthened by tradition and the sense of economic insecurity accompanying thesystemic transformation.

The author draws attention to the appearance of a new source of differentiations in Polish society at the beginning of the 1990s—the clearly perceptible and subjective sense of an uneven distribution of time. She uses the varying lifestyles and associated temporal orientations observed by Polish sociologists in the 1970s as a reference point: the conservative style, looking to the past; the innovative style, or susceptibility to change; and the 'today' style, that is, an orientation toward the present moment, which is systemically conditioned and predominates in various segments of society. The systemic transformation brought major alterations in attitudes to time and change. A deficit of time became more common, and yet as society accelerated sociologists were surprised to observe an increase in groups of people suffering from too much free time. This was a sign of deep social polarization: a division between successful people, who were keeping up with the changes, and were oriented toward the future—planning, and valuing time as a necessity for the realization of those plans—and marginalized people, who were not actively participating in the changes and had too much time on their hands. For both groups, the change in the distribution of time could have negative consequences. For one group, in spite of the satisfaction of achieving goals, there was fatigue, lack of family time, limited participation in cultural activities, and lack of time for reflection. For the other group, there was unused time as a cause of apathy, passivity, and a sense of social marginalization.

In Poland, research into collective memory has a long tradition and clear cultural perspective. The author's aim is to show that this research tradition, which is deeply associated with the legacy of the Durkheimian school, was very strong in Poland in both the prewar and postwar periods, especially in the work of Stefan Czarnowski, the only Polish member of the school. In this perspective, social memory is closely connected with culture and time. In the first part of the paper, the author explains why the relations between social memory, culture, and social time are important for evaluating the Polish research tradition. The second part is dedicated to the works of Stefan Czarnowski, who started the cultural stream in Polish memory studies many years ago. The third part presents the idea of social time, and the relations between the sociology of time and memory studies in Polish sociology. The specificity of Polish studies on collective memory is little known today, especially to foreign researchers, but the tradition is worth remembering.

This paper discusses the ongoing evolution of research into poverty, with the profound and thorough reformulation of the researcher–respondent relationship, which has blurred the distinction between the researcher and research subject. The researcher–respondent roles have merged, turning the research subject into the agent and respondents into researchers inquiring into their own conditions. This process has evolved through the first British 'second-hand' inquiries into poverty, analyses of personal documents (diaries), oral history traditions, the family histories presented by Oscar Lewis, personal accounts, monographs of communities, and recent participatory approaches to poverty research such as the 'Poverty First Hand' project.

This is a chapter of a book containing the results of a study entitled 'Old and New Forms of Poverty—The Lifestyles of Poor Families,' which was conducted under the direction of Elżbieta Tarkowska in the second half of the 1990s. The author presents the social world of poor people in Poland, and two of its aspects in particular: the limitation of interhuman contacts to the family circle, and the role of institutions such as parishes, schools, and especially social support, in resolving the ongoing problems of daily life. Social policy, as reconstructed from the statements of people living in poverty, is oriented toward temporary activities and not toward shaping aspirations and behaviors, and yet the sole method of overcoming the apathy and helplessness accompanying long-term poverty is to arouse aspirations in the sphere of education.

The author considers the issue of time in Jan Szczepański's works in comparison to the issue in contemporary sociology. She analyses the role of personal experiences as an important inspiration in research into the time issue. She presents the 'fantasies' that are typical of Jan Szczepański's approach to the subject, and the idea of varieties of time, with the associated interdisciplinary view. She writes that Jan Szczepański understands time as a devastating force and 'dealing with time' in connection with transience as one of the essential human tasks.

The author reflects on time in contemporary culture—on changes in the experience and perception of time, and also on how temporal categories are used in analyses of social and cultural issues. She points out (1) new phenomena connected with the temporal regulation of collective life, and (2) new divisions and social differentiations in which a major role is played by the time dimension. The distribution of time and the manner of valuing time is changing, as is free time. The disappearance of calendars and extension of the present is accompanied by an excess of activities and lack of time in the world of wealth, and a simultaneous excess of time in the world of poverty and marginalization. These are traits of contemporaneity. An 'unequal distribution of time' appears in a 'society of varying rhythms.' Such phenomena are visible in Poland as well.

This article contains portions of a report on research conducted in 2015 by the individual in-depth interview method with inhabitants of Ochota and local activists. The authors decided to look at the specifics of metropolitan culture in Poland—at changes occurring in the infrastructure of cultural life, cultural practices, and forms of participation in culture. The first part of the article is devoted to the history of the district and the characteristics of its inhabitants. In analyzing the answers, the researchers noticed the phenomenon of Old Ochota—a district with a long, rich history, in which many signs of local patriotism could be observed. They discovered that the local cultural offerings were rich and they raised the question of whether culture could be an instrument countering social exclusion. They decided that participation in culture only minimally serves such an aim. The offerings satisfy the needs of elderly people, who constitute a large part of Ochota's population, but they do not reach children and young people in general. The interviewees also perceive that there are various marginalized social groups that should be encompassed by new forms of activeness and grassroots social self-organization.

The author considers unemployment in Poland in the first years of the twenty-first century as a cause of the growth in poverty and the ensuing social exclusion. These phenomena are connected but not identical. They are also defined differently. In contrast to various conceptions of poverty that seek its causes in the values and behaviors of individuals, the category of social exclusion stresses the social dimension—the impacts of a society that excludes and marginalizes. The author writes about the meaning of work in Polish society and gives examples of unemployed people's feelings in connection with not having work, drawn from their own writings. She would like to see these viewpoints taken into consideration in sociological research.

The author characterizes the spread of nowist culture as a global phenomenon consisting in the compression of the time frame and the emergence of an extended present absorbing the past and the future into the compact time of global society. These results of the impact of technological development, the spread of communication technologies, new media, consumption culture, the market, and advertising have a negative influence on the life of the individual, the permanency of culture, and the transmission of knowledge. The author claims that we must therefore discover anew the value of permanency. Local factors have a modifying influence on global processes. In Polish society these are historically conditioned elements of the presentist culture (the communist heritage, the domination of peasant culture, the weakness of urban culture, Catholic culture) and the effects of the systemic transformation. When time was discovered to be an economically measurable value, its place came to be occupied by work. People higher on the economic ladder are characterized by a deficit of time, in contrast to lower income groups, who rather suffer from an excess of time. The author emphasizes that time could become a source of social inequalities in nowist culture.

This article is devoted to the relational-symbolic dimension of contemporary poverty, which is personified today in homo sacer, that is, the excluded person. Relations between the world of wealth and the world of poverty are dominated by contempt, rejection, and a sense of alienation. The result is the perpetuation of social inequalities and problems of identity in increasingly numerous spheres of impoverished people. These are challenges that contemporary society must meet. Science and public discourse are thus concentrating less on describing the symptoms of the problem and more on what excluded people themselves think and feel. Researchers are trying to hear the voices of the poor; qualitative research and analyses of memoir materials are useful to this end. In turning to such sources, the author presents the viewpoint of poor people, their feelings and subjective appraisal of their situation, and their strategies for dealing with poverty.

One of the most substantial interdisciplinary topics in the study of contemporary culture is change in social time, which is expressed in the compression of time (and space) and changing relationships between the past, present, and future. Research and analysis situate the present in an exceptional position in contemporary culture, providing us with the term 'culture of the present.' At the same time, however, we are dealing with a phenomenon labeled the 'explosion of memory'—an astounding multidirectional and multifaceted rise in interest in the past. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the structures and mechanisms of collective memory, as well as how the past is defined in contemporary culture, from the perspective of time as a social and cultural phenomenon. Questions should be asked regarding the mechanisms that unite the dominance of the present in culture with a rising interest in the past. The perspective of social time reveals that the 'culture of the present,' the current dominating forms of memory intensification, and the heightened awareness of the past, are influenced by the same or similar factors. These include new media and communication technologies, as well as consumption and popular culture, which change the structure of time, condense the time horizon, alter the manner in which the past is experienced, and modify the mechanisms of collective memory.