Studia Socjologiczne

This is the first insight into effect of development of nonpublic and paid schools on social stratification in Poland. Logistic and multinomial regression of the Polish general Social Survey data 1998 is conducted to test hypotheses concerning effect of the fathers’s EGP category on access to various types of schools in secondary and tertiary education. Results confirm the hypotheses that respondents from intelligentsia families are overrepresented in both secondary and tertiary paid schools and have greater odds of entry in to public tertiary education in comparison to lower non-manual categories, owners, working class and peasants. Children of intelligentsia also have more opportunities to attend “better” stationary (than non-stationary) schools in comparison to other categories. This analysis provides support for the thesis about growing role of qualitative differentiation in education.

This article aims at verifying the findings by Richard g. Wilkinson and Kate e. Pickett (2009) which point to a strong correlation between the income gap and the escalation of social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett’s thesis, described here as ‘the Spirit level concept’, states that all kinds of social problems (ranging from drug abuse to lack of trust among people) are directly connected with the scale of social inequality in a given country. In this article we test this concept by analyzing the relation between the income gap in a particular country and four important problems: health condition, trust, social activity and cultural activity. We investigate this relation in european union countries.

Since 1999 studies are conducted of specific form of corruption known as ‘state capture’. This term refers to a situation in which individual agents and groups of interests are seeking to shape and affect the process of formulating regulations to their advantage through illicit and non-transparent means. In other words, state capture is an attempt of a group of interest to change institutionalized rules of the market game in a way favorable for them in order to gain political rents. This paper is a reconstruction of economic studies on phenomenon of state capture. The first part of paper is devoted to presentation of state capture in context of other forms of corruption. It focuses mainly on series of survey studies known as Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted by World Bank and EBRD. The second part of the paper is a critical analysis of state capture conception and methodology. The text points out limitations of economical research procedures in domain of corruption analysis. Methodological difficulties and restrictions of conception of state capture are discussed on an example of chosen political affair – Buchacz triangle. The paper ends with sociological reinterpretation of conception of state capture.

The article presents one of contemporary forms of Polish migration to other countries enabling migrants to gain new skills and experiences, namely the migration of Polish women taking part in the Au-pair program. The analyzed data were gathered through in-depth interviews with former participants of the Au-pair program in germany – one of the main destinations of this kind of migration from Poland.

This article provides new insight into somatization and its causes. it is the response to psychosomacontext paradigm visible in sociological idea of “functional illness”. It discusses foundations of classic meaning of sociosomatic paradigm. Based itself on the weakness of classical sociosomatic the text gives the new version of it. Is it possible to find a sociological category that would be as an equivalent of stress in the psychosomatic paradigm? Is it possible that its function and influence would be the same in the sociosomatic view? Do sociosomatic illnesses exist? This article is the first attempt to answer these questions