Volume 65, Issue 3

In this paper, we explore whether the myriad production and consumption household practices in four societies of Southeastern Europe (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia) can empirically be reduced to a relatively small number of coherent and socially meaningful combinations, which we have labelled household strategies of action. Approaching the same data from two different angles, namely, using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Two-Step Cluster Analysis (TCA), we have identified five general household strategies and eleven more detailed and specific sub-strategies. More importantly, by projecting these strategies and sub-strategies onto the social space, we have shown that these household practices are linked to the class position of households. On a more general level, it is indicated that the study of household strategies can be viewed as a way of rendering relatively static structural approaches, in this case the Bourdieusian approach to social space, more dynamic.

We use survey data from Southeastern Europe to investigate determinants which explain thriving and surviving activities of households as their response to the changes caused by the latest global economic crisis of 2007/2008. Contrary to most of the literature that investigates these types of activities as mutually exclusive, our modelling strategy identifies and then focusses on households that have used both of them in the period of crisis. Indeed, the thriving and surviving activities were often used simultaneously and they were mutually related as joint outcomes of a wider system of influences. We identify that both components of household strategies were systematically linked to the economic performance of households and to different dimensions of social capital—generalised trust and informal networking. We also find that different social capital dimensions interact and build in their influence on the success of households—i.e. more engagement in thriving and less in surviving activities.

Literature on how Roma families cope with precarious living conditions and social exclusion remains very limited. Out of all the national minorities and ethnic groups in Croatia, the Roma undoubtedly have the most difficult social position characterised by a high degree of poverty and social exclusion. Based on recent fieldwork, the aim of this article is to explore the coping strategies different Roma populations in Croatia employ to meet their everyday needs. Acknowledging the different forms of interconnected, interdependent and context-specific capital that together constitute advantage and disadvantage in society (Bourdieu 1986), this study analyses Roma’s access to economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. Along with discrimination and racism, Roma’s limited access to different forms of capital explicates the necessity of household-based, work-based, kin-based and aid-based strategies among some families living in poverty, especially in light of stricter social welfare policy measures that have been recently introduced.

How do households with inactive or unemployed members face growing risks and uncertainty? The present study tackles this problem with a case study on Croatia, a country at the bottom of the European Union’s (EU) scale of economic activity rate. The low level of activity that has characterized Croatia for more than twenty years has been accompanied by a continuously high unemployment rate, which has further increased since 2009. In this context, households with (long-term) inactive or unemployed members have had to develop alternative coping strategies. In order to identify and examine these strategies, in 2014 we conducted a mixed-method study, including a quantitative survey of 453 households and 37 semi-structured interviews. We identified six household strategies, more or less ‘successful’ in terms of the household’s material position. In this essay we further examine these strategies’ characteristics and implications, with a focus on the profiles of households employing specific strategies.

This paper brings an extended Bourdieusian theoretical framework to the analysis of the life strategies of small farmers in four SEE societies (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia). Practices and strategies of farming households are situated in two partially overlapping fields, the formal economy and the informal economy. The paper is based on a qualitative analysis of twenty-five interviewed households. It covers the structural conditions of the households’ participation in both fields of ‘play’, an analysis of household capital (economic-agricultural, social and cultural) and an interpretation of practice (i.e. the strategy dimension). The framework is extended to include an exploration of the households’ reflexivity and agency. The findings suggest that various structural limitations impede the households from developing successful practices in the formal field (unless the households have exceptional levels of agency), and that the most common life strategy is food self-provisioning, along with reliance on practices in the informal field enabled by social capital.

Fifteen years after the publication of the Srebrenica report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), the Srebrenica genocide has not become subject of more scholarly and historical research. On the contrary, academics prefer to keep their hands off the topic, confining themselves to ‘theoretical’, ‘reflexive’, or ‘moralistic’ reflections on the work done by the NIOD team. Symptomatic of the current state of inertia and diminishing professional standards is the recent book by the Dutch historian and psychologist Eelco Runia in which he attacks the NIOD report from a psychoanalytic standpoint.