Tibor Huszár:
Jászi's Dilemmas

Oscar Jászi stands in the centre of this study on the institutionalization of Hungarian sociology at the beginning of this century. He was a productive writer and a gifted organizer who effectively promoted the publication of the first sociological periodical in Hungary. His attempts to secure an academic appointment failed. His study trip to France contributed to his realization of how the impossibility to separate science and politics hindered progress in sociology. His voluminous 1912 study on ethnic relations in Hungary clearly indicates the dilemmas of a sociology that simultaneously pursues political objectives.
 

Mária Székelyi-Róbert Tardos:
Expectations, Attitudes and Economic Progress

On the basis of a secondary analysis of the 25-year-series of longitudinal dala on American households from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA), the authors estimate the influence of expectations and attitudes (concerning the future, the plannning of future activities, the control of one's life-course, etc.) on economic outcomes. They find that people who expect to be economically successful will generally be so. The findings of previous research on this topic have been controversial and their evaluations anything but unanimous. The authors conclude that expectation-attitudes are instructive in determining people's economic positions. Contextual factors such as family milieu and the nature of the spouse's attitudes also play a certain role. Discussing the socio-political implications of their findings, the authors emphasize the effects of the symbolic environment on economic progress in society.
 

László Füstös-Árpád Szakolczai:
Changes in Values 1978-1993. Continuities and Discontinuities in Hungary in the Course of the East-Central European Political Transition

Beginning in the late 1970s, the Centre for the Sociological Study of Values at the lnstitute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under the direction of Elemér Hankiss conducted a series of surveys on the value systems and priorities of Hungarians with the purpose of mapping their distribution and explaining their changes. The collaborators in this project were Róbert Manchin, László Füstös, and Árpád Szakolczay. The present paper discusses four questions. The first concerns the smoothness of change in the course of these fifteen years, taking into consideration that the shift to the new regime is generally assumed to have taken place without major dislocations in Hungary. Confronting this general view with the available data, the authors examine the kind of values have changed in such a gradual fashion. Secondly, the authors consider whether a transition in the opposite political direction would not have conformed to certain existing values, and whether certain trends, perceptible during the old regime, could survive the changes. Thirdly, apart írom these issues of continuity, particular attention is paid to those values for which the year 1990 represented a clear break. Finally, the question is raised whether the emergence of any significant trends between 1990 and 1993 can be documented or rather stability in trends, preferences, and structures and even a perceptible return to former ways of acting and thinking predominate.

The analysis assesses the changes in the value priorities of Hungarians between 1978 and 1993 and attempts to ascertain if there were any major shifts in the structure of value preferences during that period.
 

Marianne Kaszás:
From Charity Organizations to State Care

This paper discusses social child care in Hungary around the turn of the century, at a time when it had outgrown the capacities of charity organizations and forced the state into active involvement in social child care. After a brief survey of the 19th century antecedents, the paper describes closed and open forms of social child care: educational institutes, financial aid and provisions made for abandoned children. The first government measures provided state funds for charity organizations and established laws decreeing the foundation of state orphanages. This development continued with the provision for foundlings by the authorities an culminated in the establishment of the first Hungarian Royal State Child Shelter in Budapest.