Suchergebnisse

Scottish social and demographic history has seen important developments in the last two decades. Patterns of population turnover, permanent mobility, and emigration are now becoming clear. This article summarises a large body of recent literature on geographical mobility and sets population movement in its social and economic context. A relatively "traditional" economy and society in the seventeenth century, Scotland industrialised rapidly in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Despite its small area, Scotland showed considerable variation in economic structures, social relations, language and geography, notably between the increasingly urbanised and industrialised Lowlands and the more agricultural Highlands. This article stresses the importance of regional variations in mobility structures and changes, and of gender-specific differences, relating its findings to literature on western Europe in order to uncover common and distinctive features. Causes, timing and destinations were specific and contingent, and we should be wary of simple generalisations.

This article explores the possibility of renewing the comparative study of Canadian and Australian literatures through an alertness to parallel developments in mid-range magazines and middlebrow print cultures in Canada and Australia in the early- to mid-twentieth century. While scoping the possibilities of full-fledged comparative studies, its focus is a case study of the Australian magazine BP: a well-capitalized, plush upmarket publication published by the Australian steamship company Burns Philp. The BP Magazine promoted travel between 1928 and 1942 as the nation underwent a transition from settler colonialism to vernacular modernity. The magazine lays bare tensions between literary aspiration and commodity culture, sophistication and escapism, edification and entertainment, and modernity and primitiveness. The aim of this case study is to raise questions that might be asked of both national literary cultures about the role of travel, modern consumer culture, magazines, and nationhood as the scales of literary values changed during the development of local middlebrow values and tastes.

Problems of environmental protection in the USSR : attitudes and pronouncements.
The Soviet attitude to nature has its roots in historical myths, inspired and supported by the particular Russian view of Marxist theory.
From Lenin to Brezhnev, conservation of the environment and of natural resources has figured as part of official ideology : optimism reigns throughout political literature and the media, there being only a few discordant voices to add a jarring note.

Some thoughts on the crisis in Eastern Europe.
Despite a growing literature, and an increasing amount of comment on the subject, the debate on the « crisis in Eastern Europe » is by no means over. There are continuing controversies, and « Crisis or not ? », « Crisis now or in the future ? » are still vexed questions.
The texts in the current number which deal with the crisis suggest two different lines of approach : empirical and theoretical, and although productive of some very interesting results, they do not provide any definitive answer which would be acceptable to the generality of scholarly opinion.

Factors affecting Social Mobility for Women in the Soviet Countryside.
This study is based on a wide range of sociological, ethnographic, and public- health literature. The author re-examines her original position that "the peasant is a man in transition", and concludes that the proposition should undergo a gender change. Soviet rural women are not being given access to technical training, in spite of official desire. Several reasons are given for this, and the author concludes that in order to achieve their maximum potential, rural women are having to leave for the cities. The situation is not likely to change unless the biological role of women is altered.

The legal status of instructions from the Russian Federation's president is not precise; in fact, Russian legal experts and the literature consider it to be "nonexistent". Nonetheless, President Eltsine gave instructions for granting sizeable funds; and the nonexecution of these instructions may have motivated the resignation of major Federal government employees. For the Russian executive, such an instruction is a pure manifestation, extralegal but with binding force, of the head of state's decision-making power. The legal status of presidential instructions is studied herein, as well as the perception and interpretation of them by branches of the executive. The significance of these instructions in the constitutional and political context of presidential power in contemporary Russia is examined.

The meeting between a political phenomenon (the role played by political elites in forming the new regimes in central Europe) and a sociological one (the extent of sociological studies of elites in this region) calls for reading this literature in connection with the political processes that sociologists claim to observe from the outside. Centered around Poland, this critical review of all writings on elites in sociology and political science reports on the emergence of this topic as a surprising new paradigm in scientific inquiry, even though its theoretical underpinnings and methodology run back to the Communist era. Two main kinds of studies are distinguished by the author : "sociographies" of political personnel and qualitative research ; but they share characteristics such as an ambiguous use of certain theoretical resources and focalization on the national dimension of political phenomena.

In this article, the authors try to define the general conceptual framework of classical strategic thought in order to assess its relevance for the development of contemporary Strategic Studies. Our argument brings out the fact that classical strategic scholars tended to conceptualize strategy as the scientific study of conflictual actions between unitary actors, omitting by this very fact to study the sociopolitical dimensions of conflicts, the impact of military technology or the influence of organizational and decisional processes on the conduct of war. Nevertheless, classical strategic thought still offers an invaluable body of literature to understand the evolution of ideas on war, and a possible way of enriching strategic studies through the use of its distinctive comparative historical perspective.

The Interaction of Development Strategy and Economie System as a Source of Periodic Socio-Economie Crises in Poland.
This paper attempts to examine the interaction of development strategy and economic system as a possible source of socio-economic crises which have appeared in Poland several times since the end of W.W. II. The purpose is to draw attention to this particular source of difficulties and no rigorous analysis of economic fluctuations in that country is here intended.
In Section II references are made to the existing literature on the nature of cyclical fluctuations under the centrally planned socialist system. Section III discusses Poland's experience until the end of the 1960's and Section IV developments since the beginning of the 1970's. Finally, in Section V some brief comments are offered on the degree of instability of the development process in Poland.

The question of the autonomy of art is discussed through a comparative study of two artistic milieus - the Foksal gallery opened in Warsaw in 1966 and the "Collective Actions" group which appeared in Moscow in 1976. These artists' work develops inside the socialist system which functions differently in Poland and in Soviet Russia. The strategies adopted by the artists to create and defend an autonomous zone of creation are particular to the socio-political and cultural situation of each country. The way these artistic milieus identify themselves in the complex cultural landscape and the position they take towards the public space determine the form of their practice - the Foksal gallery's institutional critique and the "Collective Actions" group's more ephemeral and marginal practice of actions. Self-reflexive and inseparable from the mechanism of its exhibition, their work explores its relation to the space, to the spectator, to the context. In order to understand its specificity, the problem of autonomy is analysed under two angles: as the autonomy of a confined zone of creation and of distinctive artistic means, and as the autonomy of the relations and interactions inside a social group.

Identity and practices: The case of Russian Judaisers
Subbotnikiy a religious movement among Russians, came into being in the central Russia during the 18th-century and still exists. It differs from other iconoclastic movements (Dukhobors and Molokans) owing both to its exclusive adherence to the Old Testament and to its Jewish religious practices and interest in the literature of Russian Judaism. This simultaneous reference to two different principles - to the Old Testament and to the authority of Jewish oral traditions - led to tensions in this movement, which split between "Karaïm-Subbotniki" and "Talmudist-Geres". A dispute in the late 1990s in the Jewish community in Volgograd is studied that involved new tendencies in Judaism: on the one hand, the representatives of Israeli cultural organizations and later of someone sent by the Lubavitch Hasids; and on the other hand, the traditions of Subbotniki, who, till quite recently, formed this community's core. This analysis distinguishes two ideal types of communities: "textual" communities (a term borrowed from Brian Stock) and "personified" communities.

The EU's fifth enlargement to include Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) has led to new policy instruments, which will become a common feature in future enlargement rounds. Drawing on policy transfers literature, new forms of governance and sociology of organizations, the EU's role and its administrative conditionality are closely examined through civil service reforms in Central and Eastern Europe. The introduction of the Twinning exercise as part of a 1997 reform package is analyzed, as well as the procedural changes necessary for facilitating the temporary assignment of member states' civil servants in Eastern and Central European administrations. Using semi- voluntary forms of coordination among member and applicant states is a new trend in decision-making at the EU level. Nonetheless, enlargement policies do not allow for the full transfer of member states' institutional models or structures toward candidate countries. The EU's conditionality on administrative capacity at the sectoral level has gained momentum since civil servants from member states have been associated with the accession process.

The privatization of the apartments for the benefit of their legal occupants has made the once Soviet residential buildings into multi-owners properties (or condominiums). This article explores the appropriation of a new legal and economic model of building management by ordinary people living in Moscow. In line of literature that places the emphasis on the historical and social forces driving the economic exchanges, we note that some individuals are more likely to seize the new model. To show this, we start off from an in-depth, comparative case study of two women hailing from different social milieu that got involved in their building's affairs. In turn, these extreme cases function as a magnifying prism of ordinary situations, and help us shed light on intermediate cases as well. They underline how social and residential trajectories shape the ordinary interpretation and uses of law. We take them as an original way to study social construction of condominiums in post-communist Russia. Adapted from the source document.