ABSTRACTS

Gazsó, Ferenc
Orientations of Generations in an Unstable Social Environment

The paper draws a picture of how the changes of economic and social conditions in the course of systemic change have so far influenced the living conditions of the young generation as indicated by representative surveys done among them during the past four years. It is also presented what are their chances of schooling, professional training, and in the labour market, and how all these changes have modified the social mood, political attitudes and the reception of the unfolding new social set-up by the given generation. According to the unanimous experience of research the social mood of youth is dominated by a pessimistic sense of life. Drawn-out recession, massive unemployment, particularly hitting the young generation, the marketisation of education, the narrowing of the chances of mobility have created an unstable situation among the young generation. Youth regard themselves as one of the major losers of systemic change and sense their social position approaching the.living conditions of the lower strata under the most adverse conditions. Thus the Hungarian situation is characterised by growing generational tension, however, youth have not yet given up the hope in a personal future and in a positive change of the social and economic conditions. The paper. draws a comprehensive image of the sociological characteristics of a social set-up attractive to the youth, of the background of the negative assessment of the present state of affairs and of the interpretation of democracy evolved among the youth.
 

Váriné, Szilágyi, Ibolya-Solymosi, Zsuzsa
Social Representation of Success in the Strata of Intellectuals

Cognitive representations of social success, bearing the cultural and stratum specific features upon themselves, do change in societies striving to modernize, but from the angle of progression it is not at all indifferent how. Hungary is not an exception either, where after the changes of the 90s the results of research, informing about the ideas related to social and personal success of the intellectuals playing a decisive role in modernization, may be particularly interesting and perhaps even useful. Actually these ideas have several functions: they are indicators of a condition as well as (strengthening or weakening) motivations in the current process of modernization.

The present research attempted to explore the social representatives of success with the means of cognitive social psychology among future and practising representatives of three such strata of intellectuals (agricultural engineer, architect and economist), who have had different chances of success prior to and after the systemic change.

The paper presents only a part of the complex survey conducted by questionnaire, namely the series of factors and characteristics (causal attributions) supposed to stand behind the success of the successful individual personally known by the respondent and the success of the generalized successful Hungarian person together with the significant differences between the factors organizing the social representations of success and the genders, professions and generations standing for them. Of the two kinds of image of success the picture of the successful Hungarian was primarily conspicuous of a negative emotional charge, particularly in the sub-sample of undergraduates. The know successful individual was almost exclusively male (mostly chosen from the economic sphere), which remarkably preserves past beliefs even if otherwise there had been no comprehensive difference between genders. There has been no such difference among the various professions as contrasted to differences among generations (particularly in respect of achievement, standards of information and the ability to communicate, apparently assessed in a more complex manner by experts).
 

Simonyi, Ágnes
Without Work
(Existing and lacking family strategies of adjustment)

The research described in the paper has studied the family strategies of life, adjustment, the utilization of labour of those who are left without work for a long time. It gives an account of how the possibility of the utilization of labour, combined with resources of family, or perhaps of the locality, or even neighbourhood, may help those who are continuously unemployed, in survival under conditions when employment is impossible in the labour market and when they are under pressure of living conditions. However, modifications of the economy of family resources under the influence of unemployment are not free of conflict; human tensions and social losses also spring from the involuntarily narrow space of mobility. Constant reliance of large groups of permanently unemployed on social allocations and their adjustment to casual jobs, informal, black and self-sufficient work indicate the emergence of a lasting stratum depending on central redistribution and exchange relations outside the market as a paradox of marketisation.
 

Tóth, Olga
Changes of Attitude towards Female Employment

The paper uses the Hungarian data of the International Social Survey collected in 1988 and 1994. One of the objectives of the survey was to get acquainted with the views related to female employment. The data show that opinions have moved in a conservative direction as a larger proportion of men as well as of women would approve of a reduction of female participation in the labour market. This is particularly so in the case of women caring for small children. The paper calls attention to the discrepancy existing between reality (the actual employment of women), opinion and attitudes.
 

Frey, Mária
Unemployed Becoming Entrepreneurs

The unemployed who try to create their own job may get different kinds of support from the Employment Fund. The results of the survey summarized in this paper studied the chances of survival of enterprises founded by some unemployed. It was revealed by the survey that quite an unexpected proportion of supported enterprises, that is, almost three-quarters were able to remain operative even six to eight months after the subsidies were stopped and the improvement of their ability to offer sustenance has also improved. However, if the result is seen from the angle of how much would have been accomplished without subsidy, the picture is more disheartening: it was unnecessary to give financial incentives to more than two-thirds of the respondents because they would have chosen the way of self-employment even without support.
 

Bíró, A. Zoltán-Bodó, Julianna-Gagyi, József-Oláh, Sándor-Túros, Endre
The Economic elite in the Székler Land - 1993

The paper written within the framework of the Working Group of Communications Anthropology of Csíkszereda attempts to identify types of the emerging local economic ellte, of the new entrepreneurial stratum. It differentiates among the various sub-types of the rural as well as urban entrepreneurs on the basis of their activities and mental attitudes. It points out that the emerging economic ellte is a transitory one which opens the way for the economic elites, accepted by the local community, performing a complete social role.
 

Csanády, András
The Macroeconomic Role of Peasant Substance-economies

In the Third World the urban unemployment is a reflexion of the rural one - say their experts. We try to interprete the present East-Central-European unemployment according of this pattern, and made our investigations in a little region of Transylvania on family-fartus. There we found:

- families are working in a very broad dividing of labour with relatives and neighbours;

- they produce dominantly for own needs, and sell only few surpluses;

- their laking urban/industrial employments plays only a supplementary role in supporting the family and its farming.