The purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between forms of labour market marginalisation, understood here in terms of labour market status and job quality on the one hand, and income disadvantage, material deprivation and social exclusion on the other hand. Public policies that aim to improve labour market position and the income level of people disadvantaged in the labour market are also assessed. The authors draw on data from a survey on social exclusion in the Czech Republic focusing on people who were welfare benefits recipients in 2004 or considered their situation to be comparable to that of welfare recipients. The authors show that labour market marginalisation is transparent not only during unemployment spells (often repeated and longterm) but also in the case of temporary, low paid and poor quality jobs. The income levels of people employed in the lowest segment of the labour market and of the unemployed are similar, while the deprivation of the unemployed is greater with regard to the possibilities open to them to influence the life course and opportunities of them and especially their families. The authors point out the under-use of welfare benefits and identify measures that could improve the standard of living and human capital of people who are disadvantaged. While some disadvantaged people continue to be active in the labour market and perceive work incentives, the authors also identify the poverty traps that emerge for the fraction of them who become discouraged and welfare-dependent.
This interdisciplinary work explores current controversy over the collective identity of Romani and reasons for their social predicament. The first position, associated with Romani studies and identity politics, sees all Romani as a part of an ‘ethnic group’, and connects their plight to ‘racial’ discrimination and intolerance. Some anthropologists and social policy-makers call this ‘primordialism’ and deconstruct the notion of a unitary and natural ‘Romani nation’, maintaining most ghetto inhabitants are only classified as ‘Romani’ and their identity derives from their ‘sociál exclusion’. Matching policies are advocated. The author combines contemporary anthropological approaches to the identity construction with theories of discourse to conceptualize the debate, completing the framework with self-reflection of social science. The method of Critical Discourse Analysis is applied in examining corpora of academic and specialized writing, policy papers and media texts for the discourse construction of identity. Arguing that both discourses are differentiated instantiations of the same diagram of power normalizing ‘troublesome’ subjectivities, the author touches upon the ethical responsibility of scientists deconstructing essentialist representations of identities and circulating their ovm constructs instead.
While fertility rates in Western countries are low and the number of people who will remain voluntarily childless is increasing, more and more couples are seeking medical treatment for infertility. Fertility problems transcend the boundaries of medicine and challenge the traditional positivistic understanding of health and illness and the authority of scientific and objective medicine. The circumstances for coping with infertility are not universal and depend instead on the given society and on cultural values. Studying infertility means studying every important institution of our society: the institutions of marriage and the family, the institution of parenthood, medicine, and so on. While American and other Western social scientists have studied social aspects of infertility for many years, in the Czech Republic the topic remains the domain of medicine. This article focuses on basic concepts employed in the study of infertility and involuntary childlessness in sociology. It presents and summarises relevant concepts such as stigmatisation, social exclusion, identity problems, and gender differences in the response to infertility. It presents the debate over explaining the terms of infertility and (involuntary and voluntary) childlessness. It shows how the position of involuntary childlessness has been changing as the problem has increasingly come to be dealt with in medical terms and as high-tech medical treatments for infertility have been developed. Finally, the article opens up the topic for debate and raises the question of potential methods of research.