2015/2

Levels of trust in political institutions and political actors are constantly low in the Czech Republic. This paper deals with the perspective of professional politicians, which is an unexplored topic in the Czech context. At the same time, we supplement the traditional view of political culture with an approach based on interpretive and constructivist sociology. We focus on the construction of symbolic boundaries by Czech politicians. We pursue a combination of narrative (Ricoeur) and critical discourse analysis (Wodak) based on 21 thematically oriented biographical interviews with politicians from three traditional political parties (ODS, ČSSD, KSČM) who have been actively involved in politics since the early 90's. The findings suggest that the politicians use symbolic boundaries as a cultural instrument for legitimizing their identity, status and practice of "traditional" politics. By defining others, the politicians are able to construct a reality in which they are on the same boat with citizens while standing on the command bridge.

This paper is focused on changing rates of church affiliation and church attendance in the course of intergenerational and intragenerational transmission on the cases of four post-communist countries of central Europe: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. It is a generally accepted fact that the rates of traditional forms of religiosity in the Czech society declined continuously during the second half of the 20th century, while such an enormous decline was not indicated in other post-communist countries of Central Europe. These differences and their causes are main question for this analytical work. Contemporary religiosity is dependent on rates of its reproduction between generations. Inter- and intragenerational transmission was influenced by two basic factors: First, by an anti-religious policy, which varied between the communist regimes, and second by the resistance of some people and families against that concrete anti-religious policy. The rapid secularisation of Czech society was due to those two factors.

The article reflects the position of a foreign trade enterprise called Artia within Czechoslovak music industry. The primary goal is to reveal the modus operandi of the music industry in international trading on the example of Artia. Given its export orientation, Artia was a specific organization dealing more than other Czechoslovak record companies with commercial success instead of ideological and aesthetical issues in its editorial policy. Such an approach was dramatically challenged in the period of "normalization" (1969-1989) when ideological requirements on record companies were reinforced in the system of management and control of cultural production in Czechoslovakia. Artia, therefore, is a suitable object for exploring the relationship between ideological and commercial aspects of cultural production in Czechoslovakia from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Since the beginning of the 1990's there have been relatively large changes in the reproductive behaviour of the population of the Czech Republic, including a significant increase in the proportion of children born out of wedlock. The paper describes the development of fertility rates among unmarried and married women in the years 1989–2014 in detail. Attention is paid to three main influences which are responsible for the proportion of children born out of wedlock, and obviously above all to the rates of nonmarital and marital fertility (by age and by birth order). The analysis shows that although there has been a convergence of the rates of fertility of married and unmarried women since the beginning of the 21st century, the reproductive behaviour of these women is still significantly different (average age of mother at birth of (first) child, distribution of birth order).

The electronic version of the second number of the thirteenth edition of the review Our Society (Naše společnost). Our Society issues Center for Public Opinion Research, Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.