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Project Title
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Abstract
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Time Period
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Name
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Role
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Ageism as a generational interference: Stereotypes and autostereotypes of age groups
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This project will focus on the problem of ageism in contemporary Czech Republic. The term ageism has been constructed with the same logic as the words sexism or racism. Ageism also refers to prejudice and discrimination and as far as sexism and racism ageist prejudices are based on objectifying something what is mainly a social and
cultural construction. The width of this kind of discrimination is broad and the gravity of its consequences is huge. That is why the author claims it is necessary to explore this social phenomenon. The goal of this project is to find out what are the characters of relationships between age groups, mainly between the youngest and the oldest generation of adult population. At the first year author will focus mainly on analyzing quantitative empirical data, as from the autumn 2010 also qualitative research is planned.
Results of this project will help us to comprehend how age groups view themselves and others. The outcome will contribute to coping with interference and misunderstandings between age groups, what is important mainly in the time of ageing society where the friction among the youth and the old age may graduate.
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2010-2012
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Romana Beneová
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Principal Investigator
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Environmental Values, Beliefs and Behavior in the Czech Republic in Historical and Cross-National Perspective
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This project analyzes the development of environmental values and behavior in the Czech Republic in both historical and comparative perspective. The project seeks to make a major contribution to environmental sociology by focusing on four research themes. First, by implementing the 2010 ISSP – Environment survey, our research will measure the development of post-materialist values across postcommunist countries and compare the determinants of those values with Western democracies. Second, we test a number of theories in explaining pro-environmental behavior in the Czech Republic and crossnationally.
Third, our research evaluates whether societal beliefs about science, technology and the environment support “ecological modernization” theory, which has become a core assumption in both Czech and EU environmental policy. Lastly, the project examines beliefs about the degree of environmental injustice in Czech society. In addition to the ISSP survey, the project involves carrying out qualitative interviews, panel group discussions, and the secondary analysis of historical data.
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2010-2012
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Petr Soukup
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Principal Investigator
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Institutions in life stories. A multilevel comparative analysis of life stories of three groups of actors in the Czech socialist society (1948-1989)
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The project is built upon the previous studies of the research team (M.
Hájek and J. Kabele) and further advances them by an innovative way. The core of the study consists in the comparative analysis of a large collection (> 200) of biographical interviews with three socio-politically defined groups of actors in the Czech postwar society:
members of communist political elite, members of dissent, and „ordinary people“ (both workers and intelligentsia). The modes of institutional (pre-)determination of life stories will be studied on three levels: a linguistic level will focus on differentiating linguistic aspects of life stories; a narrative level will compare episodic, sequential and dialogical patterns of the biographical interviews; a historical institutional analysis will study how important institutions are represented, described and networked. The objective of the study is (a) to uncover the institutionally bound influence on the life narratives and (b) on this basis to make conjectures about the institutional arrangement of the state socialist society.
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2010-2012
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Martin Hájek
Jiĝí Kabele
Martin Havlík
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Principal Investigator
Researcher
Researcher
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Social Dynamics Acceleration: Uncertainty, Hierarchical/Flat Governance Structures, and History Interiorization
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The trend of accelerating social dynamics (hereafter as SD acceleration) not only brings about the timespace problem of predictability of events, but also the coordination question of stability of order. SD acceleration is depends on decreasing level of coordination costs. This jeopardizes order because its structures—game/play frameworks—arise from coordination and are maintained because any change to them is associated with relatively high coordination cost. This problem of vulnerability of variable order in modern societies is associated with our hypothesis: the sources of SD acceleration as well as coping with its externalities must be primarily sought in such constitutive arrangements of social affairs that help decrease the level of transaction/coordination costs. Methodologically, three general and interdependent arrangements can be studied as sources of SD: (A) “uncertainty economics”, (Aa) institutionalized competition of hierarchical/flat governance structures, and (Ab) interiorization of biographies and histories. Our theoretical study of the above-mentioned interdependent sources of SD will also address “lower-level”, more specific issues, enabling us to confront general solutions of SD acceleration with relevant empirical evidence.
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2011-2014
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Jiĝí Kabele
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Principal Investigator
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Sociological Technoimagination: Theory and History of Visualizations in the Social Sciences
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The research project intends to survey forms, functions, and historical transformations of visualizations (graphs, diagrams, maps, models, simulations, and animations) used in the social sciences since the early 19th century. It does not aim to produce a systematic and exhaustive account of these methods, but rather to select several crucial and illustrative moments of their development, interpret them from the point of view of history and methodology of science and situate them within a larger context of the history of modern visual culture.
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2010-2012
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Tomá Dvoĝák
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Principal Investigator
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