The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of path dependence theory to explain the convergence of housing regimes among post-socialist countries, both at the beginning and in the later phases of housing-regime transformation. We especially seek to show the selected common traps that were recently created by the legacy of giveaway privatisation and the super-homeownership regime, traps that increase intergenerational inequality, which to now has been effectively mitigated by within-family financial transfers.
Living apart together (LAT) relationships are under-researched in European sociology and overlooked in Czech sociology. Based on data from 16 biographical interviews with partners living in separate households, this analysis focuses on how LAT is experienced, understood, and explained in the context of the post-state-socialist Czech Republic. Do LAT partners actively choose LAT to avoid or subvert the norm of co-residence? Or do they frame their situation as a result of external constraints and pressures? What is the role of gender norms and of the gendering of a life course in the LAT experience? Our results show the high value that current Czech society continues to place on co-residential partnerships. The study also shows that persistent gender and social inequalities, specific for the post state-socialist Czech Republic, make individual choices more difficult or impossible in both private life arrangements and when combining private life with work. A LAT partnership is not always the result of individual choices, but the relationship often is shaped by external structural and institutional pressures and gendered norms.
This article aims to show how eight women, most of them with higher education, experienced, perceived, and understood birth care in the context of the post-socialist transformation in the Czech Republic. It is based on narrative interviews and a thematic analysis of them. From a description of women’s birth-care experiences the author finds that women are most critical of the behaviour of health-care workers and the lack of communication provided by the system. Discussing the narrators’ birth-care requirements she notes the strategies women use to attain the form of care they wished. Finally, the author observes that the women she interviewed exhibit diverse understandings of birth care, on which basis the author identifies five distinct notions of birth care that differ in three key aspects: (1) women’s attitudes to medical interventions; (2) their awareness of birth care; (3) their subjectivity and position in relation to birth-care providers. These ranged from complete acceptance of the way in which birth care is provided, to notions that are critical but accepting of medicalised care, to a rejection of the medical model of birth care and the assumption of ‘a responsible consumer’ subjectivity. The article in particular looks at women’s disillusionment with birth care and interprets it in relation to clashing ideas about the relationship between birthcare provider and user associated on one hand with the socialist past and on the other with neo-liberal discourses on health.
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