In what way do gender-specific interventions aimed at marginalised men reproduce and transform masculinities, and what kind of masculinity do social professionals, who carry out these projects, work with? This paper analyses how visual materials, spaces and artefacts enable professionals to deal with masculinity and gender-equality issues when working with men whom they assume hold traditional views on masculinity and gender roles. A three-year study of semi-public interventions that worked on individual empowerment, participation and gender equality with marginalised men in the Netherlands revealed that the professionals found it difficult to raise gender-equality issues. In contrast to the other project goals of individual empowerment and participation, gender-equality issues created a discomfort. The authors also discovered that gender equality in most cases was dealt with in more subtle ways than the issues of individual empowerment and participation. In this context, professionals worked with an ideal version of what the ‘new’ masculinity of the participants would look like, which we labelled ‘pacified masculinity’. The paper empirically shows how social professionals benefit from the use of space, images and artefacts to break down rigid gender roles and potentially enable men to construct other versions of masculine identity. Moreover, we argue that visuals and materiality create room for a reflection on the role of men in women’s emancipation., Iris van Huis, Marleen van der Haar., and Obsahuje bibliografii
The article confronts James Coleman’s and Randall Collins’s approaches towards action theory: reviews both their similarities (based on the importance of micro-sociological perspective for understanding social macro-level) and differences (their attitude towards the assumed rational nature of human action). Coleman supports the homo oeconomicus thesis and understands actors as beings, which make rational decisions and direct their actions on the basis of costs and gains calculations. Collins, on the other hand, emphasizes the extra-rational factors of emotions and routine. By putting up these approaches against each other two ideal type constructions arise, which are particular intellectual modes yet cannot comprehend social reality in its full complexity., Jiří Šubrt., and Obsahuje bibliografii
The aim of this study is to explore the sources of attitude constraints regarding the role of government in the economy, and to find out whether the sources of these constraints are the same as in Western democracies. Use is made of Converse’s approach to conceptualize attitude constraint where an individual’s belief system is seen to be a configuration of attitudes and values characterized by a functional interdependence, or constraint. This constraint may be interpreted in terms of the probability of being able to predict one attitude having knowledge of another. In this study, there is a review of the sources of attitude constraint and related measurement issues. Using ISSP 2006 (Role of Government module) an analysis of attitudinal constraints is presented using two attitudinal scales. This research confirms that the sources of attitude constraint in the Czech Republic are similar to those observed in Western Europe and the USA. Specifically, class, education, and other social-demographic variables are shown to have very limited effects. Moreover, Converse’s contention that attitude constraints are strongly determined by political involvement, political knowledge, or party identification is also shown to be valid for Czech society., Lukáš Linek., 1 obrázek, 4 tabulky, Obsahuje bibliografii, and Anglické resumé