Sociology. Thought and Action

The article applies Alfred Schutz’s phenomenologically grounded sociological perspective to explore how people in wheelchairs construct and maintain their significant social reality through subjective meanings, one of the key elements of everyday life being the wheelchair itself. Their personal narratives are based on qualitative in-depth interviews and suggest that due to the different schemes of interpretation applied towards ‘reading’ the same sign – in this case the wheelchair – different individuals assign different meanings, which to them signify different realities. This variety of meanings given to the wheelchair depends on the stock of social knowledge available to each person with a disability, which includes the cultural and symbolic meanings of disability that prevail in a society, as well as the type of disability – congenital or injury-/illnessacquired. The meanings also vary based on personal experience of interactions with other disabled people prior to injury, or on a lack of such experience. Among people with disabilities, such factors (facets) are involved in the formation or adjustment of attitudes towards the wheelchair during the re-socialisation process.

Keywords: motor disability, wheelchair, disabled, subjective meaning, phenomenological sociology.

Using theories of intergenerational solidarity and conflict, and data from the Demographic Research Institute’s 2009 survey, ‘Gender and Generations’, this article analyses childcare support provided by grandparents in Lithuania. The survey results revealed that the most active grandparents are aged between 50 and 65, and that half of those grandparents participating in childcare also have a job. The most important factors determining grandparents’ participation in childcare are gender, marital status, subjective health and whether grandparents and grandchildren live together or separately. To assess the connection between grandparents’ well-being and their role in childcare, the Demographic Research Institute’s well-being index, linked to demographic processes, was employed. The results show that childcare provision is related only to some aspects of grandparents’ well-being; this article discusses the distribution of various aspects of wellbeing by the provision or non-provision of childcare and by other crucial predictors: the age, gender and employment status of grandparents.

Key words: grandparents, child care, well-being, multiple roles.

Abstract. The perception of criminal justice in society is a controversial social problem. Traditionally, criminal justice issues have been treated as a matter of professional interest for criminologists, criminal justice experts and other professionals from related fields. But is expert knowledge the only valid kind when it comes to criminal justice topics? This question, though rhetorical, is aimed at stimulating discussion about the co-existence of different types of social knowledge on criminal justice, and their impact on various discourses concerning crime and punishment in society. In this article a group of researchers from Vilnius University makes use of phenomenological methods to analyse three different types of discourse on criminal justice: professional, political and public. The professional discourse on criminal justice is scrutinised from the perspective of penal law, the political discourse from the point of view of macroeconomics, while the public discourse is analysed using ideas drawn from psychology and media studies. The analysis of these discourses seeks to examine the social construction of criminal justice, and the particularities of its reception among professionals, politicians and a wider public.

Keywords: criminal justice, discourses, economic circles, psychological reception, mass media.

Planned housing developments are a new phenomenon in post-Soviet cities – cities marked since 1989 by the rapid and wholesale transformation of housing markets, from a situation of overwhelmingly state-owned provision to the development of real estate markets. In this article I explore how this type of dwelling transforms urban space, reflecting the new provisions in the period, but also revealing a dual relationship with socialist space. Planned housing developments are characterised by the continuity of the ‘soviet’, i.e. by modern functionalist urbanism’s architectural practices; but in their symbolic dimension such developments are also associated with an inversion of collective housing practices. This symbolic aspect of planned housing developments can be described in terms of privacy and sameness. In this article I argue that these housing practices are naturalised and affirmed as desirable through representations of space, including representations produced within marketing, mass media and the legal system. Drawing on the concepts of police, politics and the political developed by Rancière and Swyngedouw, the article raises the question of whether in post-socialist Vilnius these new developments indicate the consolidation of a post-political condition.
Keywords: new housing developments, urban sociology, political.

The main issue discussed in the article is relationship between urban spaces and subcultural identity: what empirical analysis of subcultural places say about social processes in a city? The present study is empirical reconstruction of the dynamics of musical subcultures as spatial phenomena in a post-Soviet city (Klaipeda, Lithuania) and covers two decades of rapid urban changes. In this issue of the journal is published the second part of the study, mainly focusing on spatial and stylistic differentiation of two subcultures - rock and electronic dance music – from 1997 till 2010. This period witness two stages of subcultural dynamics. In 1997–2002 subcultures leave public spaces and escapes from social control, what leads them to exploration and appropriation of new spaces for ritual performances. Rock music and the electronic dance music subcultures appropriates their own spaces in the city and don’t mix identity rituals together. 2003–2010 are marked by inner differentiation of subcultures, fragmentation, ideological purification of subcultural identity, and seclusion of ritual spaces. These transformation processes of subcultural identity and places in Klaipeda are interpreted within the bigger context of urban and ideological changes.
Keywords: subculture, youth, urban space, subcultural identity, ideology, Klaipeda, post-Soviet, social changes.

This article analyses social inequality and political processes in post-Communist Lithuania, using the neo-Weberian class theory of Robert Erikson, John Goldthorpe and Lucienne Portocarero (EGP). The opening section considers why the analysis of social structure, which was a central concern in classical sociology, has been so neglected in Lithuanian sociology since the restoration of independence. There are just two exceptions to this trend, discussed in the same section – Rūta Brazienė’s 2002 thesis and the 2005 volume edited by Arvydas Matulionis. The first part also compares inductive (data-driven) and deductive (theory-driven) methodologies of social structure analysis to substantiate the advantages of the latter for this article’s empirical analysis. The second part outlines EGP class theory, considered as a creative continuation of Weber’s classical analysis of social structure, and as a genuine alternative to Marx’s theory of classes and class struggle. EGP class theory is compared with two other approaches – Erik Olin Wright’s neo-Marxist class theory, which emphasises exploitation relations between classes, and American social stratification analysis, which focuses on the measurement of socio-economic status (SES). The third section offers a neo-Weberian examination of post-Communist Lithuania’s class structure, represented by four different EGP class types. Diachronic and synchronic comparisons and historical analysis are used to point out the features of Lithuanian class structure that are shared with other similar countries and those features that are nationally specific. To this end, data from Round 4 of the European Social Survey in Lithuania (conducted at the end of 2009) is used. In the last section, which applies statistical methods of correspondence analysis, a slightly modified EGP class model is used to explore manifestations of social inequality (conceived in Weberian terms as an unequal distribution of ‘life chances’), as well as the voting and ideological orientations of the Lithuanian electorate.

Key words: Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) class theory,

The aim of this essay is to articulate and explicate the relations between sociological theory and the phenomenological approach. This is done in two parts: the first looks at Schutz’s attempts to articulate a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude; the second explicates the methodological postulates formulated by Schutz for the construction of social scientific constructs. It is suggested that the nature of the conventional sociological inquiry in Lithuania must be reconsidered if the subjective view of actor is to be retained as relevant to both philosophical and sociological inquiry.

Key words: a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, Alfred Schutz, social theory, phenomenology in Lithuania, the three relevant horizons of social action: philosophy, sociology and culture.

Abstract. This article argues that Simmel’s theories about modern society and culture provide important insights into the issue of the autonomy of the systems that we live under. It begins with a discussion of his ideas about a sense of unity between the self and the external world. It continues by examining the process by which such a sense alters as life fragments into the autonomous formal systems associated with modernity. This leads into an analysis of these forms and their internal functioning. The article concludes with an outline of how these considerations may be relevant to conscious efforts to bring about progressive social change. At issue is how far such critical practice can have an effect on its own terms and how far it is incorporated into a closed system incapable of affecting its environment.

Keywords: action and agency, autonomous systems, personal life, social change, social critique, social forms, socio-cultural theory.