Volume 24, Issue 4

This paper investigates Slovak migrants’ use of new media to build social capital. It draws on data from a pilot study with 36 Slovaks living in the UK, and on content analysis of the main Facebook page for Czechs and Slovaks in the UK. The data suggest that Facebook is used for sharing emotions rather than to build a community and share practical information. While Facebook and Skype are used to maintain preexisting strong ties in the country of origin, face-to-face contact and mobile phones are used to maintain ties within the UK. However, social media do not seem to facilitate the formation of weak ties prior to migration, with face-to-face contact being dominant upon arrival. Transnational migration experience forms a separate dimension within the participants’ identity, independent from social capital. The data are discussed in relation to findings from previous studies about Slovak migrants in the Republic of Ireland.

This article describes the covert seeding by political parties of forums and blogs hosted by one of the leading Slovak daily newspapers, and the techniques developed by journalists, administrators, bloggers and discussants to defend these ‘public spheres’ against perceived colonisation by professional political communicators acting under false identities. We follow a trajectory of accusatory forms and registers—a collective inquiry which gathered and evaluated evidence to support public accusations. The episode demonstrates the vulnerability of the sociotechnical systems used by the media to host e-participation as well as their capacities for self-regulation. It shows how citizens, journalists and party political communicators are engaged in complex boundary struggles for the appropriation and regulation of these new spaces of sociability in order to qualify the forms of knowledge that emerge there, agree conventions for the expression of disquiet and negotiate practically enforcable definitions distinguishing political marketing from free public debate.

The ongoing expansion of new communication technologies is inseparably linked to the transformation of political communication. The new thinking behind communication is embedded directly in the code of popular social networks. Can a formal political party successfully implement a decentralized mode of communication based on personal connections and weak social ties, or is it against the very logic of both the hierarchical organizations and the technology itself? Our case study describes the vast spectrum of various types of behavior of political actors on Twitter through computer-assisted analysis of Twitter communication in Czech Republic before the elections to the European Parliament in May 2014. The research is based on the concept of connective action, as defined by Bennett and Segerberg. Preliminary results show an emerging typology of campaign strategies, from formal and centralized campaigns on one hand to various hybrid overlaps of traditional and new forms of communication on the other.

The article focuses on a method for collecting qualitative data. The method is the asynchronous email interview. The authors assess the advantages, challenges and best practices of the asynchronous email interview method. They base their assessment on the academic literature and their own experiences using this data collection method in qualitative research on women who had experienced perinatal loss. The asynchronous email interview will never fully replace traditional face-to-face interviews, but it could gain a solid position as a qualitative research method thanks to its unique benefits.

In this article, the authors are concerned with the question of the nature of print and the impact print has on shaping the collective mentality, especially in the context of the electronic media “boom”. Based on their analysis, they state that print has, since its creation, promoted a subject-object dualism, the development of abstract, linear thinking and the shaping of a collective mentality. Print is currently already under the strong, paradigmatic influence of electronic media resulting in a qualitatively new kind of “reading”. That is to say that the electronic media cyberspace encourages the “hyper-textual” interlinking of different kinds of information in our learning or thinking, which can be referred to as “rhizomorphic”. This kind of process is bound up with non-linear “reading”, where the image dominates the word in cyberspace. The electronic media cyberspace thus dominates and shapes the contemporary collective mentality in our culture, including its approach to print.

The main theme of the paper is the role of the mass media in the production, creation, retention, protection and defense of a social order, or in carrying out revisions, or cosmetic and extensive changes to it. In the first section, the author explains the Power of the Mass Media by looking at Foucauldian leprosy/plague management. The second part, Docile Mass Media Producers Under Panoptic Control, deals with the routinization of the mass media craft. Finally, the Social Order of Docile Individuals who Feel Freedom takes a closer look at the social order and how it is created by mass media producers (as professionals in their craft).

The present article deals with issues of social recognition in the global and transnational environment. It deals with the issue of solidarity, a form of recognition that has no adequate parallel beyond nation state borders and manifests itself mainly in the transnational economy. We focus on the articulation of the extraterritorial recognition of social rights-holders at the international and transnational levels of justice. It is clear that conditions in developing countries do not allow the people there to express disapproval in ways that are typical for Western societies. We stress that states should strengthen their influence in global and transnational organizations and equally that the media should improve its informative role and should provide information on what is happening in developing parts of the world.

The paper deals with the state of the social sciences after the boom of internet services in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. The results of our survey, based on 512 responses from the economics and history departments of major Czech public universities, show that internet services are considered a quality factor for academic output; however, the issues of plagiarism, a lack of resource criticism, inadequacy of impact factor-based evaluations, poor academic training for the new generation of social scientists, the failure of state academic policy, and the generation gap make further development in the Czech social sciences rather problematic. As a result we recommend creating a better communication link between policy makers and scholars, reforming the current state policy which encourages lower quality academic output, and improving academic training, which requires a more individual approach, and also placing higher demands on social scientists.

This article presents our research into cultural differences in the motivation of Generation Y knowledge workers. The goal of our research was to verify whether the motivation of young knowledge workers (members of Generation Y) could be assessed only in relation to the specifics of their generation, or whether it is necessary to take their national cultural background into account as well. The research carried out among two hundred respondents in four countries has confirmed that it is essential to take into account both generation differences and cultural differences.

This paper looks at the possibilities of using biographical research in social work focusing on the elderly. Social work with the elderly uses or should use biographical data to create individual plans for clients or for the purpose of sensory activation. Narrative interviews are a form of interaction between a senior client and a social worker. The social worker supports the senior’s narrative so they can view their life for themselves and explain its meaning from their own perspective. The use of sensory activation in social work is only possible when the individual’s identity is supported by a sufficient amount of environmental stimuli, which can be achieved only by acquiring and analyzing data on the life events of the individual. The paper contains examples of the use of biographical data in social work with the elderly, which is essential for further structuring their lives.

The aim of the current study was to monitor the changes that individual participants experienced as a result of taking part in a peace education program. The findings of prior analyses led to the understanding that participating in a peace program does not always ensure positive changes and may even cause a regression in attitudes. The present study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, the researchers learned about the processes that participants underwent during a peace education program and accordingly, a reinforcement program to restore/rehabilitate any negative attitudes was formed. In the second stage, the effectiveness over time of this reinforcement program was evaluated. The study’s findings show that engaging in reflection about the workshop content, especially when it is oriented towards positive thinking, is effective in reinforcing attitudes among participants who underwent a positive change in attitudes, and at the same time helps to rehabilitate attitudes among those participants who underwent a negative change. It is recommended that future peace education programs include at least three parts: preliminary preparation, the program itself, and follow-up/reinforcement activity after completion of the program.

Slovak education policy is an example of the kind of transformations occurring in the education spheres of postcommunist countries. While at the end of the 1990s, it seemed that education policy was still attempting to ensure that Slovakia caught up with education levels in western countries, the period that followed brought with it a shift towards neoliberalization of the education sector and towards the economization of education. Slovakia’s entry into the EU was accompanied by the total assimilation of the neoliberal agenda within education and since then it can be said that Slovak education policy has followed a path towards so-called perpetual neoliberalism. The aim of this article is to show how education policy has developed within Slovak politics, in terms of how it is gradually adapting to neoliberal ideas. The article analyzes government documents from 1998 onwards, particularly Slovak government programs, which document the process of neoliberalization in education.

This paper provides a close reading of Erwin Straus’ “The Upright Posture” from a disability studies perspective. Straus argues that the upright posture dominates the human world. But he excludes those who dwell in it otherwise. By reviewing phenomenological disability literature, this paper asks what a disabled phenomenology would look like, one rooted in the problem of inclusion from the outset. Disabled phenomenology addresses ‘subjectivity’ critically, asking: what socio-material arrangements make subjectivity possible in the first place? This project is, I argue, equal parts political economy and existential phenomenology. I conclude with some suggestions for future research.

This article explores various interpretations of philosophical counselling. These interpretations are determined by the nature and status of the key concepts from which they are derived. The first is “critical thinking”, which a number of authors have based their conceptions on; just two examples are mentioned in the article—Elliot D. Cohen and Tim LeBon. Many philosophical practitioners, especially those whose philosophizing is influenced by Socrates, use critical thinking, and indeed believe that it is what philosophical practice is all about. Pierre Grimes is another example of someone who has been influenced by Socrates. Eckart Ruschmann and Ran Lahav believe that interpreting world beliefs is the basis of philosophical counselling. Others think philosophical counselling stems from interpretations of the concept of “wisdom”. The article also discusses Ran Lahav’s more recent views and those of Gerald Rochelle. The concept of “virtues” is discussed in relation to the work of Arto Tukiainen, Lydia B. Amir and Jess Fleming.