A key aspects of the radical structural political and economic changes after 1989 are interlinked with a profound transformation of the rural environment.Pointing out strategies for survival adopted by agricultural farms as the dominant type of agricultural institutions in former Czechoslovakia, the writer attempts to show the relation between changes carried out at the national level and those at the local one. She analyses differences in transformational processes of 'neo-collectivist' farms and their conversion into co-operative farms of landowners or share-holders. She also attempts to describe different levels of adaptability to the free-markets laws and new economic mechanisms enabling application of more autonomous operations and more diversified economic procedures in order to gain profit and accumulate capital. Furthermore, she identifies factors predetermining and influencing the future of co-operative farms in terms of becoming prosperous, or preserving the status quo or going bankrupt. She relies on the results of case studies carried out in six different co-operatives in south-west and west Slovakia. According to the authoress, the process of decollectivisation in Slovakia - in case it may be called decollectivisation at all -- is rather a kind of reshaping collective forms of entrepreneurial activities. This development is not easy and straightforward. The economic effectiveness of transformation and moral and symbolic effects of the new system of ownership have deeply influenced social relations not only within the co-operatives but also in the rural community as a whole.In general, the economic climate does not very much favour the agricultural sector and farmers, including those in co-operative farms. However, despite their hard situation, they more or less successfully direct the transformation processes. In the background to the post-socialist transformation processes there is, next to many regional and local varieties of natural conditions, also the historical 'heritage' of pre-socialist rural economy. This seems to be the reason why 'neo-collectivist' farms, although they exist in the same region, enter the transformation processes from different starting points and why they try to solve the transition to market economy applying a kind of hybrid procedure, combining the new - profit and capital making models with the old ones inherited from the pre-socialist and socialist collectivist systems. Thus, the differentiated strategies may lead to successful or average or negative results in dependence on professional and organisational skills as well as on adaptability and ethic qualities of managers and professionals heading the farms.
The contribution deals with the value as a topic in the social sciences discourse.The authoress concentrates on a group of questions concerning the transformation of values as a result of modernisation, the on-going globalisation and, in the Slovak context, a post-communist transformation. She mentions the place given to the research into values by Slovak ethnography and stresses that despite the fact that there are only few earlier research studies concerning the issue of values, some of them have delivered large numbers of precious facts enabling to draw a picture of cultural standards based on the ideas, phenomena, objects, etc. Thus, these earlier ethnographic works might serve as a 'starting point' for the development of the topic - the process of constituting values in the pre-modern pre-industrial world of the Slovak countryside. Although the 'pre-capitalist world' of Slovak small towns and villages was slowly dying away at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (at certain places only in the first half of the 20th century), it was still an omni-present principle of the Slovak micro-cosmos. Concentrating on a corpus of empirical data of the village of Cicmany it was also possible to draw a picture of the village and its inhabitants, and then seek to interpret what values they had, how these values related to how they could satisfy their material and partially also non-material spiritual needs, or whether the local people had their own concept of what was desirable in their social environment. Obviously the approaches to the assessment of their own values reflected the features of a pre-modern society, others changed during capitalist, socialist and post-socialist processes of modernisation. The authoress has highlighted cultural aspects of pre-modernity, which still had a great influence on the everyday life of the village of Cicmany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In his everyday life, a villager of the pre-modern world, preoccupied by his worries about getting his everyday living, had much respect for standards, conventions and authorities. He firmly stuck to an idea that the division line between the good and the evil was predetermined. He judged events and actions according to whether they complied with what the usual state of affairs should be. Any deviation from the accepted norm caused dissatisfaction, criticism, or was taken as an offence against morality. In this context, an easier way to being knowledgeable of traditionalist pre-modern world values leads through an identification of negative attitudes rather than positive ones. They seem to be more clearly expressed in a disapproval of certain events, phenomena, actions, and objects which do not compare with habits and expectations than in an approval of them.
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