Journal Czech Society Archive

The electronic version of the first number of the sixteenth 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.

This article focuses on methods for measuring corruption, first describing three generations of corruption indicators and then comparing them qualitatively and quantitatively. Corruption is a clandestine activity that is extremely difficult to measure; there are no official statistics on the number of corruption cases. For this reason, corruption can only be measured indirectly, by various proxies, and it is extremely hard to state whether these indicators are reliable and indeed measure the corruption phenomena in a given country. A large number of different indicators have been developed over the years that try to capture and quantify corruption. Some authors measure perceptions of corruption, others try to use “hard data” to explore the level of corruption in a country, and even others combine different measurements, weight them, and then publish composite indicators to capture the overall level of corruption in a country.

Non-random selection of reproductive partners in the human population, i.e. assortative mating, has been a stable occurrence for decades and across societies, including the Czech Republic. Social sciences have paid primary attention to homogamy, marriage between similar partners, also due to its potential impact on society. High levels of homogamy in a society may imply high closedness of the different groups, prevent social mobility, suggest racial tensions, or lead to higher inequality.

The goal of this article is to inform social scientists, especially those of a quantitative orientation, about the basic characteristics of Big Data and to present the opportunities and limitations of using such data in social research. The paper informs about three basic types of Big Data as they are distinguished in contemporary methodological literature, namely administrative data, transaction data and social network data, and exemplifies how they can be utilized by quantitative social research. According to many, questionnaire-based sample survey as the dominant method of quantitative social research has found itself in a crisis, especially as response rates have decreased in most developed countries and public confidence in opinion polling has declined.

The electronic version of the second number of the fourteenth 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.

The goal of this article is to contribute to the study of the history of Czech sociology by examining the journal Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philosophica et Historica – Studia Sociologica (AUC StS), published by the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. After almost 50 years of its existence, this less-known periodical can be viewed as documentary evidence on the developments and transformations in a part of Czech (or Czechoslovak) sociology. We account for the journal’s main characteristics and discuss its position and role in Czech sociology. In addition to standard procedures of content analysis, we employ the innovative method of citation network analysis. Accordingly, one of the paper’s important goals is to assess the adequacy of the methods applied for addressing research questions of this kind.

The general aim of the article is to assess the ways residents of Czechia engage in particular types of action in public interest (including attending a public hearing on a local issue, volunteering, donating or signing a petition) and in such actiongenerally. A literature review concludes that the terms engagement and participation tend to be seen as synonymous. In the theory section, predictors of engagement are discussed, amongst which most authors treat education as central. This gives rise to my first hypothesis (H1): Individuals’ civic engagement will be positively influenced by their educational attainment. In contrast, since have been no detailed studies of the relationship between life satisfaction and engagement in Czechia thus far, I formulate H2: There is a relationship between individuals’ life satisfaction and their civic engagement, with more engaged citizens being more satisfied.

The article strives to contribute to the debate on the concept of corporate social responsibility by focusing on the under-researched area of the effects of firms’ grants on local and regional development from the perspective of local governments and inhabitants. This concept is typically studied from the corporate perspective. While normally ignored, the spatial dimension plays a substantial role in firms’ grant allocation decisions. The article tries to fill the gap by studying the case of spatial distribution of financial grants of the ČEZ Corporation to communities in the vicinity of the Dukovany nuclear plant, which is located at the peripheral border of the regions of Vysočina and South Moravia. The considerable amounts of money sent to local budgets are intended to compensate communities near the nuclear plant for the risks related to its existence.

The electronic version of the second number of the fifteenth 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.

Book Review: Ivan Chorvát, Roman Džambazovič (eds.). 2015. Rodina na Slovensku v teórii a vo výskume. Bratislava: Stimul, 181 s.

The electronic version of the first number of the fifteenth 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.

The paper presents to Czech social scientists an introductory review of the concept of equivalence and the method of blockmodeling in social network analysis (SNA). After introducing the central concepts of SNA such as node and tie, along with their basic metrics such as centrality and cohesion, I present the concepts of role and position. These are treated by SNA as clusters of nodes with similar ties, something I juxtapose to algorithms to identify cohesive subgroups of nodes. Subsequently, I define and compare the two most frequently applied types of equivalence – structural, which is strict but broadly applicable, and regular, which is more liberal but has limited uses.

The process of political socialization, as shown by numerous findings, is characterised as the transmission of political action and behaviour through the generations. In connection with the political changes the Czech Republic experienced since 1945, not only the prospect of generational continuity but also discontinuity come into consideration. The article deals with the influence of parents and other socialization factors on political self-identification in the Czech population. It focuses mainly on the major age groups: young people up to the age of 29, the younger middle generation of 30–44 years, the older middle generation of 45–59 years and individuals aged 60 years or older, and their parents.

The goal of the text is to analyze concordance between one’s religion and a close relative’s estimation thereof. To establish the accuracy of parents’ estimates of their children’s religion and vice versa, we ask the following question: what is the concordance of post-socialization beliefs about (un)successful transmission of religiosity between direct actors (parent/child)? We argue that the reliability of that estimate indicates the effectiveness of religious socialization. Socialization is not treated as a nonproblematic one-way process, but rather as a result of repeated mutual parent-child interactions and a host of other intervening factors (secondary socialization etc.) In this context, the level of estimate reliability is treated as an indicator of religious socialization and of the continuity of religious memory within family, which is viewed as a collective phenomenon. In other words, by imprinting values into one’s memory and worldview, the process of religious socialization shapes the ways one views the world and him/herself as well as the focus of his/her attention, or what is stored in his/her memory. Our project is conceptualized at an intersection of the theories of socialization and religious memory. Among the latter, we primarily rely on Jan Assmann’s conceptualization of memory. While many contemporary authors deal with issues of religious socialization, and some even with its links to memory, no investigations thus far have attempted to verify intergenerational transmission in terms of the reliability of mutual estimation of (non)religiousness between generations.

Cross-border cooperation between Czechs and Germans is currently evolving in numerous areas. In recent years, the mining tradition has become the common denominator of cross-border activities in the Ore Mountains region. The study deals with this aspect of Czech-Saxon cross-border cooperation primarily from the perspective of regional development and tourism. It focuses on the Silver Road and its role in contemporary Czech-Saxon cross-border activities. As a symbol of shared heritage, the Silver Road exemplifies the so-called spatial turn, i.e. the cultural-social dimension of cross-border cooperation.

The so-called opposition agreement was concluded by the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) and the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) after the Chamber of Deputies elections of 1998. It paved the way for a ČSSD minority government in 1998–2002. To present day, it continues to represent one of the most contested moments of the country’s post-communist political history. Both general awareness and the publicist discourse are dominated by a categorically negative, accusatory evaluation of the agreement as a deviation from the democratic framework, a catalyst of systemic corruption and clientelism, and a source of deep scepticism and political disaffection in the Czech general public.While scholarly literature also features strongly critical attitudes to the opposition agreement, there have been a number of works which compared it to the ways minority governments were formed and operated in other countries or which studied the circumstances of its formation and how the situation evolved. Such works have argued that the opposition agreement was a relatively standard case of minority government with under-developed institutional support.

The article discusses the relationship between educational attainment and the existence of cohabitation in the Czech Republic. Cohabitation of unmarried partners is a timely topic given a constant growth of this form of relationship in the Czech society, which almost tripled between the years 1991 and 2011. Based on data from the ISSP 2012 quantitative survey, the article seeks to demonstrate whether the educational attainment of an individual or his/her partner is associated with whether or not they cohabitate. Cohabitation is juxtaposed to marriage as well as to living-apart-together relationships, with partners living in different households.

Perception of the term “public” has undergone a complex historical development. In very simple terms “it gradually turned from the original meaning of public as a social elite consisting of independent, educated and committed citizens to the concept of plural publics, which are often a synonym for all public.” (Rendlová, Lebeda, 2002: 9). According to the Big Dictionary of Sociology the term public is currently understood as “a larger part of the society (or nation, people) involved in the outcomes of economic and social activities with a more general effect, in the solution of a certain social problem, or in social events as such.