The Condition of Sociology in East-Central Europe (Collective Review)[1] The beginnings of sociological thinking in Slovakia were tied to the institutionalization of sociology in the Czech lands. The Slovak graduates 2 (Note2: The most sociologically informed members of HLAS’ group were Anton Štefánek, later the first Slovak professor of sociology, and Vavro Šrobár and Milan Hodža, who later became prominent politicians.) of Prague and Vienna Universities had freely grouped around the journal HLAS (1898-1904). Inspired by the sociologist and politician Tomáš G. Masaryk, they critically analyzed the political and economic situation in the Habsburg monarchy. As a side effect, they advanced sociology as the modern science about society (Klobucký, 2001).
[2] One special figure was Jan Lajčiak, a pastor and linguist with a degree from Sorbonne University. In a mountain village, he worked on his manuscript about the country’s social problems. His study was published posthumously (Lajčiak, 1921). Its well-roundedness and methodological clarity are still esteemed (Turčan, 1996; Pašiak, 1996).
[3] After the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the Sociological Seminar was established in 1925 at Comenius University in Bratislava. Mainly Czechs - Josef Král, Otakar Machotka, Anton Obrdlik, and Josef Tvrdý - influenced its work (Laiferová, 1995) until the division of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Then Anton Štefánek took the chair of the Sociological Seminar. He fostered applied sociology and "sociography", his name for sociology based on statistical description (Pašiak, 1994). His principal work Foundations of Sociography (Anton Štefánek, 1945) is a widely cited social analysis of Slovakia (Pašiak, 1980; Turčan, 1992, 1994; Falťan, Gajdoš, Pašiak, 1995). In 1945, the Sociological Department of Matica Slovenská was founded in Martin, and in 1946, the first issue of the journal Sociologický Sborník (Sociological Volume) appeared. Alexander Hirner, the most productive sociologist of the 1940s, headed the department. 3 (Note3: Although the communists persecuted and imprisoned him in the 1950s, he continued his research (Hirner, 1973, 1976) and teaching at the renewed Department of Sociology in Bratislava. During the twenty years of his pedagogical work, he educated many sociologists who are proud to have been his students (Turčan, 2000).)
[4] In the inter-war period, sociological development was intertwined with Christian social thinking, though separately in Catholic and Lutheran circles (Kvasničková, 1998, Turčan, 1998, Laiferová, 1998).
[5] The Marxist perspective was marginal in Slovakia before 1948. It was associated with the working class movement, and most Slovak adherents of Marxist sociology were politically active in Prague and used their occasional field observations in political debates. Marxist intellectuals criticized poverty, capitalist production, and private ownership and published in their journal DAV.
[6] Since 1948, the Communist Party centrals had to promote the expansion of Marxism (Kopčok, 1998). In the early 1950s, Soviet texts celebrating Marxist classics and mainly work were translated on a vast scale, starting the dogmatization of the social sciences. Marxism-Leninism became the monopoly doctrine with a one-sided emphasis on the propagandistic and ideological function of theory. Sociology was labeled a bourgeois pseudo-science (Sirácky, 1950), and sociological workplaces and departments and the journal were cancelled. Sociologists either had to change their discipline (most chose philosophy) or were deprived of any possibility to do research work 4 (Note4: In spite of their overt deprecation of empirical research, Party administrations ordered several surveys (Katriak, 1988, Szomolányi, 1990).).
[7] After 1956, first attempts were made to revive sociology; and in 1960, the Department of Social Research was established by the Institute for Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS). In 1964, the Department of Sociology at Comenius University was re-established and the Institute of Sociology of SAS was founded. In this period, the scholastic application of Marxism-Leninism was criticized and attempts were made to revive Marx’s original ideas. 5 (Note5: The young Marx’s texts, unknown until then, were studied.) The first task of the renewed sociology was to define its research subject and its relation to historical materialism. Though similar discussions always recurred in periods when Marxist-Leninism was in a weakened position, in this period there were more reform advocates than actual reformers (Filová, Elena, 1998).
[8] Beginning in the mid-1960s, Polish sociology exerted considerable influence on Slovak sociology by providing Slovak scholars with numerous fellowships to Polish sociological departments, through the translations of Polish sociologists like Jerzy Wiatr, Zygmunt Bauman, Jan Szczepański, Maria Hirszowicz, etc., through participation in joint research projects, and because it was possible to study sociology at Polish universities. This impact lasted till the beginning of "normalization" in 1970 (Pašiak, 1997).
[9] Slovak sociology’s most intensive international cooperation and presentation came in the late 1960s, when Slovaks participated in the ISA Congresses in Evian in 1967 and in Varna in 1970. In the 1970s and 1980s, cooperation narrowed down to the socialist block. International mobility at universities was negligible.
[10] The Warsaw Pact occupation in 1968 and the Communist Party screenings in 1970 hindered the country’s democratization. Few sociologists were forbidden to teach or to do research. 6 (Note6: Martin Bútora, Zdeněk Šťastný, and Ján Pašiak.) But favorably referring to non-Marxist sociology sufficed for one to receive the livelihood-threatening label of "revisionist". This threat led to caution and cowardice. Though sociology could develop institutionally, its cognitive and critical functions were ideologically hampered. 7 (Note7: The personnel structure of research workers was controlled by the District Communist Party Committee and, at the beginning of the 1970s, also by the Central Communist Party Committee; every new scholar and even every PhD student had to be approved by the Party.) The Five-Year State Plan of Basic Research coordinated research. Its priorities in social sciences were attuned to the goals of the Party programs, for instance "diminishing differences between the working class and the intelligentsia", "the process of equalizing town and village", and "socialist personality development". Social class, defined by people’s relations to the means of production, was still the canonized concept of the basic unit of social life. In empirical research, however, quiet debates 8 (Note8: The sole discussant was Robert Roško, who introduced the concept of the anti-bourgeois class collective to suggest the concept’s limited suitability for grasping the actual problems of socialist daily life (more about Roško’s theoretical efforts in Búzik, 1999; Roško, 2000).) ensued about its analytical suitability for socialist society. Methodology (Hirner, 1976, Schenk, 1988) and later family research (Provazník et al., 1989) were less ideologically restricted sociological domains.
[11] In the second half of the 1980s, partly in response to the Party’s demand to combat "people’s false consciousness and relicts of bourgeois prejudices", public opinion surveys became more frequent, under the auspices and the strict informational control of the Communist Party Central Committee. Individual experience and consciousness was rehabilitated as a source of knowledge. Information about participatory research (Frič et al, 1988), critical studies in the sociology of science (Gál, Frič, and Bútorová, 1987), and the topic of self-help groups and social movements (Martin Bútora) contributed to socially-engaged sociology. Bútora’s research on addiction (Bútora, 1989) offered a comprehensive overview of theoretical approaches to the study of marginal behavior and self-help groups. It also served as a source of practicable examples of sociological work with and in communities.
[12] During the liberalized 1960s, numerous Western authors like Charles Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Talcott Parsons, Erich Fromm, etc. appeared in (mostly) Czech translation. In the 1970s, they were supplemented by translations of Russian overviews of Western sociology (Galina Michailovna Andrejeva, Gennadij Vasilievič Osipov, Michail Nikolajevič Rutkevič, etc.). The study of sociological classics and contemporary sociological theories (Alijevová, 1986) was an essential part of sociological education, 9 (Note9: University teachers continued to refer to Western sociological theories. Dilbar Alijevová dealt with contemporary American sociological theories (Alijevová, 1979, 1986, 1989), Ján Pichňa developed an institutionalist perspective in his sociology of labor, occupation, and organization (Pichňa, 1982), and Alexander Hirner and Juraj Schenk elaborated methodological issues and system analysis (Hirner, 1973, 1976; Schenk, 1989).) but until 1989, the impact of Western sociological theories on Slovak sociology was quite negligible. The principle that Marxist authors’ theory had to surpass any non-Marxist authors cited was very difficult to fulfill. 10 (Note10: In this period, articles devoted to non-Marxist sociology were categorized as "the critique of bourgeois theories". Some of them were undoubtedly real ideological critique, but others tried to present Western sociological theories without bias. The representation practices applied in such "criticism" deserve special analysis.) It was easier simply to avoid referring to them at all. The outcome was a rapid decline of references to Western authors: in the Slovak journal Sociológia, the proportion of references to non-Marxist sociologists was more than 40% in 1969 and 1970, but the long-term average (1971-1988) did not exceed 10% (Dianiška, 1989).
[13] The 1970 Party screenings excluded a few Slovak sociologists from academic life as "unreliable". But the majority of sociologists were left in place, their livelihoods dependent on Party-controlled opportunities to work. This limited the formation of alternative structures in Slovakia. Oppositional activities emerged mainly in connection with the Soviet perestroika in the second half of the 1980s.
[14] In 1987, the group around Fedor Gál and Pavol Frič began promoting the idea of participatory sociology, identifying problems from the bottom up, and dialogue between the state administration and a broader public (Frič et al, 1988; Szomolányi, 1988; Gál et al, 1990). Participation also characterized Roško’s research on enterprises in Bratislava at the end of the 1980s. The focus here was on workers’ participation in enterprise management and the study of relations of control and collaboration among workers, trade union leaders, and managers. The researchers also involved the people under study in the process of validating the research findings (Roško et al., 1989).
[15] One encouraging event was Szomolanyi’s October 11, 1988 lecture on the history of the Institute for Sociology. She was the first person to publicly criticize "normalization" policy in sociology and the ideological restriction of its development. She stated that Slovak sociology had become a sterile and conformist socio-technique without deeper theoretical reflection (Szomolányi, 1990, 1995). In September 1989, at the second congress of Slovak Sociological Association (SSA), sociologists supported democratization and anti-totalitarian ideas (Roško, 1990) and for the first time elected non-Party men to the SSA Committee (Macháček, 1990).
[16] The Marxist paradigm in Slovak sociology, or more precisely, the constant explicit reference to Marxists and the use of terms like structure and superstructure, class relations, property, capital, and exploitation, ended in 1990 rapidly and spontaneously. From 1990 to 1995, the journal Sociológia did not receive any text framed in a Marxist perspective or defending the principles of Marxist ideology (Feglová et al., 1995). Emblematic Marxist words vanished from sociologists’ vocabularies. Only one article searched for the failures of the Marxist conceptualization of social life. 11 (Note11: Jiří Suchý discussed the shortcomings of the construction of social development in socialist prognosis and planning (1991).) In the 1990s, authors did not as a rule refer to articles they or their colleagues had published before 1989. 12 (Note12: Only a few authors referred to their own texts published under socialism, for instance, Róbert Roško, Dilbar Alijevová (modern sociological theories), Ján Pašiak (local communities), and Ladislav Macháček (the sociology of youth).) How are we to interpret this discontinuity and the ease with which Slovak sociologists abandoned the Marxist perspective and their own work? There are several possible explanations: (a) Ignoring one’s own work 13 (Note13: However, this "quotation gap" suggests that the older articles were not worth building on and that the Marxist paradigm and Slovak sociology of the "normalization" period did not deserve attention (Kusá, 1996a). Few authors continued their research. Dilbar Alijevová has continued her research in phenomenological sociology. She deals mainly with the topic of personal and group identity (Alijevová, 2000), framed mainly by a phenomenological and existentialist perspective. The only author who returned to his older work, reviewed it critically, and tried to reconnect it with his present interest in civil society was Robert Roško (2000a, 2000b).) might signal that its Marxist framing had been merely tactical - to mask critical analysis that could otherwise be interpreted as anti-regime. (b) A researcher might have a lukewarm relation to theory of any kind (Bohumil Búzik in: Laiferová and Turčan, 1997). (c) Political change coincided with a change of generations - key guards of Slovak sociology’s ideological purity in the 1970s and 1980s were just retiring at the end of the 1980s.
[17] Since 1989, the turn to empirical research has been striking. Surveys, polls, public opinion studies, and life history collections started immediately. They indicated sociologists’ belief in and hunger for authentic, uncensored data. They stressed the need to "use the unique historical opportunity to observe the current changes"; and "to record the vanishing witnesses" of historical events whose interpretation until then had been ideologically skewed (e.g. Kusá, 1992). The introductions to many articles and volumes justified their descriptive character by the duty to preserve the fullest possible description of facts for future research. The realist stance - belief in the possibility of mirroring social reality - dominated the articles in Sociológia in the first half of the 1990s; they had a minimum of explicit theoretical framing. This descriptive tendency was probably strengthened by (a) the traditional division of labor between Slovak and Czech sociologists in joint research projects, where Slovaks tended to transfer the theoretical work to their Czech counterparts (Búzik, 1997: 27-28) and (b) the new model of research cooperation with Western sociologists. This cooperation was often reduced to the translation of already elaborated questionnaires and the organization of data collection and processing. The scarcity of articles published in co-authorship by Slovak sociologists and their foreign partners supports this assumption: as late as 1995, Sociológia had published only one article of this type (Bačová, Homišinová, and Cooper, 1994). Later the situation improved.
[18] Ján Sopóci first raised the question of the paradigm. He suggested that, aside from the eclectics, the most numerous group worked "without any explicit theoretical perspective and is willing to state openly that they could do well without any theory" (Sopóci, 1993). Later, Búzik advocated the legitimacy of eclectic approaches (Búzik, 1995) and argued that the present Slovak sociology was characterized by numerous theoretical perspectives that were not clearly articulated, not consistently used, and rather pragmatically combined. We can even speak about intuitive programmatic eclectics. Such a characterization fits the traditional quantitative surveys as well as the proliferating qualitative studies. 14 (Note14: Here we do not deal with qualitative studies separately, because - in agreement with various authors (Becker, Howard, 1998, Seale, Clive, 1999, etc.) - we do not think they can be considered a single paradigm, nor to be a clear alternative to (similarly wrongly lumped) quantitative research.)
[19] If we define the sociological elite by their ability to control access to informational 15 (Note15: In the first half of the 1990s, the situation was quite different. The Internet was not accessible at universities or the Academy and many strategically important addresses, terms, etc., especially those connected to fund-raising, were accessible only to a few people included in the directories of donor institutions and were not disseminated freely throughout the sociology community.) and financial sources, then it includes sociologists who are at the head of research and educational institutions, as well as the members of various scientific approval and examination commissions, funding awarding commissions, editorial boards, etc. We can include among the sociological "power elite" also those whom journalists consider the core source of information or the reference point and whose references influence their colleagues’ access to the media.
[20] In 1989-1990, the scientific "power elite" underwent substantial changes. Staff immediately used the opportunity to choose persons for management positions (who were previously chosen by Party bodies). Positions were changed or subjected to votes of confidence by secret ballot with the entire staff participating. In secret balloting, Róbert Roško was "100% confirmed" as the head of the Sociological Department of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology. The staff of the Department of Sociology (Comenius University) voted for Juraj Schenk (instead of Marcel Sloboda). Juraj Schenk was confirmed as Department Head in two elections. Schenk is concerned with sociological methodology and complex quantitative data analysis and modeling. He is the author of several methodological monographs. In 1992, he qualified as a university professor and is still the only university professor in sociology 16 (Note16: Soňa Szomolányi has recently qualified as a university professor in political science. She heads the Political Science Department at Comenius University. Martin Bútora and Fedor Gál also qualified as university professors in political science at Prague Charles University. Fedor Gál left for the Czech Republic in 1993.) in Slovakia. After the re-establishment of the Institute of Sociology, 17 (Note17: After Róbert Roško’s refusal to run for the position of its Director.) the staff of the Institute elected Ľubomír Falťan its director. Falťan is now in his third term of office, confirmed each time by secret ballot. 18 (Note18: Ľubomír Falťan acquired his PhD in sociology in Poland. His critical attitude toward the "normalizing" practices of Andrej Sirácky kept him from being approved to work in the Academy of Science until 1988.)
[21] In November 1989, Soňa Szomolányi gained a high civil reputation for her involvement in and support of the university students’ strike and demonstrations. Sociologists, most strikingly Fedor Gál, who headed the movement "Public against Violence" (VPN), but also Martin Bútora, Zora Bútorová, and others who were active in the protests of Winter 1989 and the subsequent political negotiations gained a similar reputation.
[22] In 1990-1991, the composition of the editorial board of the journal Sociológia reflected the changes of the elite and the overlapping of criteria for scientific, civil, and political prestige. The members were also ministers of the Slovak government and the Czechoslovakian president’ advisor. In the second half of 1990, the editorial board was composed nearly solely of people from the academic milieu.
[23] Ján Pašiak was put in charge as editor-in-chief of the journal Sociológia in 1990. Ladislav Macháček, a continual member and editor of Sociológia from the journal’s foundation on, was put in charge as editor-in-chief in the mid-1990s. Since 1990, the journal has had foreign advisors from Italy, the United Kingdom, the USA, Austria, and Japan.
[24] Scientometric criteria are the second way of defining the scientific elite. The first half of the 1990s was characterized by the underestimation of degrees and other standards of an academic career. Besides the economically determined declining interest in studying for a PhD, the academic middle generation was too involved in flourishing survey research to aspire to scientific degrees. After the provisional years of exemption, the Supreme Accreditation Commission stipulated that any institution offering a PhD had to have a supervising guarantor who had earned a Dr.Sc. 19 (Note19: The Dr.Sc. - the so-called Big Doctorate - is the highest academic degree for scientific activity. The applicant has to fulfill scientometric criteria like a certain number of published books, articles in ISI periodicals, references in the quotations index, and tutored PhD students.) or Professor degree. The Institute of Sociology (SAS) did not fulfill this precondition and ceased to be a place of PhD studies in 1999.
[25] In the first half of the 1990s, even academic sociologists considered it more meaningful to mobilize the public with their newspaper articles or research reports for the expert audience (DG XII European Commission) than to write for the small audience of the scientific journals. Despite this practice, there were a considerable number of foreign references. There are many references to the analyses of political situation during and after the division of Czechoslovakia and to electoral behavior (Soňa Szomolányi, Zora and Martin Bútora, Vladimír Krivý). Because of this practice, even the cited authors had a strikingly small number of articles published in the scientific journals covered in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), even in the Slovak and Czech ones. Slovakia’s domestic Sociológia is covered in the SSCI, so the proportion of Slovak SSCI articles has grown, but there are still few articles by Slovak authors published in foreign (except for Czech!) sociological journals. Even those who often publish in foreign journals had only one or two articles published in foreign SSCI journals, and none of these were in the truly sociological journals (e.g. Bútora Martin and Zora, 1993, 1999; Wightman and Szomolányi, 1995; Falťan and Dodder, 1995; Piscová and Dodder, 1995; Radičová, 1994).
[26] In the 1990s, savings measures and the state’s weakening economic functions led to a decline in outlays for science and education from 0.48% in 1993 to 0.38% in 1998 (Slovensko, 2000: 640). The result was a loss of jobs in science and research organizations. Several branch research institutions were gradually cancelled or significantly reduced, including the Research Institute of Culture at the Ministry of Culture, the Research Institute for Economics and Organization of the Building Industry, the Journalist Research Institute, and the Institute for Education and Information in the Ministry of Education. The savings measures led to the cancellation of the majority of full-time jobs of sociologists working in industrial enterprises (often together with the shutting of the enterprises themselves). The sub-disciplines of the sociology of labor, work, and organizations nearly ceased to exist in Slovakia. The SSA Section of the sociology of work was cancelled. Academic research institutions still existed in the 1990s, but in a leaner shape. For instance, the number of staff members at the Institute for Sociology has fallen from 39 in 1990 to 25 in 2000 (Laiferová and Búzik, 2001).
[27] In spite of financial problems, the number of universities, students, and teaching positions increased. In 1991, the Social Work Department was established at the Pedagogical Faculty of Comenius University with sociologists in the staff; and in 1992, the Department of Sociology was established at a new Trnava University. Jozef Matulník heads the department. Since 1997, the annual number of graduates in sociology has doubled; there are now more than 30-35 graduates. 20 (Note20: Both sociology departments are younger than the institutions of the Academy.) Former sociologists also work and head the Department of Political Science at Comenius University (Soňa Szomolányi, Iveta Radičová). New universities (there are now 13 universities) offered new positions at their departments of social science, which provide sociological education for non-sociologists. But research there is negligible. In spite of increasing economic hardships, universities and academic institutions have preserved their autonomy in the thematic orientation of research and the organization of work and personnel; but they cannot grow.
[28] The Ministry of Defense created job opportunities at the newly established (and twice cancelled and re-established) Office for Sociological Research in Military Service, with Karol Čukan at its head. The Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Family continues to operate the established Research Institute of Labor and Social Affairs. The Institute provides research and social policy analysis commissioned by the Ministry. In 1994, the Ministry established the Bratislava International Center for Family Studies (since 2003 Bratislava Centre for Work and Family Studies), which employs eight full-time and part-time researchers with academic backgrounds.
[29] Non-academic working opportunities for sociologists are in marketing research, consultation services, social services, volunteer work, and large firms’ personnel departments. Many non-governmental organizations employ sociology graduates and conduct surveys and social analyses. The latter’s skill in and sources for disseminating their research findings often help them overshadow academic research. The leaders are the Institute for Public Affairs (IVO), founded by Zora Bútorová and Martin Bútora, and the Center for the Analysis of Social Policy S.P.A.C.E, founded by Iveta Radičová and Helena Woleková. The most important output of the IVO is its annual "Global Reports" - comprehensive volumes of analysis of the country’s economic, cultural, and social issues (1996-2001). They are co-authored by sociologists (Vladimír Krivý, Soňa Szomolányi, Roman Džambazovič, Iveta Radičová.) and published concurrently in Slovak and English.
[30] Public opinion research developed rapidly in the 1990s. Besides the state-funded Institute for Public Opinion Research of the Slovak Statistical Office (subordinated to the Central Committee of the Communist Party until 1989), numerous commercial and non-governmental agencies started marketing and public opinion research. Historians of sociology will definitely focus on the intriguing case of the Institute for Social Analysis (CSA) established by Comenius University in 1991; it was staffed by leading scholars who formed the public opinion research group during their work for the Coordination Center of VPN. The Center later transformed itself into a privately operated research agency, FOCUS.
[31] Commercial agencies are organized in the Slovak Association of Research Agencies. Stiff competition triggered debate on how to evaluate sampling quality in public opinion research. Proposals to establish a Sociological Chamber, supported by the General Assembly of the SSA in 2000, have not yet found general agreement on the issues of licensing and supervising public opinion research competence and of methods of preventing the misuse of institutionalized tools.
[32] In addition to the education and research institutions and the journal Sociológia (see part 5), Slovak sociology also has a stable institutional pillar in the Slovak Sociological Association. The SSA became the legal body of Slovak sociologists in 1969. From 1969-1992, the SSA’s international contacts were administered through the Czechoslovak Sociological Association. 21 (Note21: Czech sociologists did not have a sociological association; they organized directly in the Czechoslovak Sociological Association, whose headquarters were in Prague. From the perspective of information dissemination, the Slovak/Czech partnership had an asymmetric character.) In 1993, the SSA became a regular collective member of the International Sociological Association. The SSA elects its Committee for terms of two years. Since 1990, the SSA presidents have been Juraj Schenk (1990-1992; 1993-1994), Gejza Blaas, Ján Bunčák, Eva Laiferová, Ladislav Macháček, Dilbar Alijevová, and Ján Sopóci (2002-2004).
[33] Though sociologists like Ján Pašiak, Ľubomír Falťan, Dušan Urda, Martin Bútora, and Zdeněk Šťastný did not receive official certificates of rehabilitation, the end of the communist regime removed long-term obstacles to their academic work. Their rehabilitation was done by the staff’s spontaneous election or support for their appointment to the top positions in institutional management. For instance, Falťan was elected Director of the Institute for Sociology. Pašiak was made Editor-in-Chief of Sociológia. Bútora became Czechoslovak President Havel's advisor for national minorities issues in 1990-92.
[34] Bútora and Bútorová 22 (Note22: Martin Bútora and Zora Bútorová are the Slovak Ambassadors to the U.S. (1999-) and honorary presidents of IVO.) successfully founded three research agencies (the Center for Social Analysis, FOCUS, and the Institute for Public Affairs). They are the most prolific authors. Besides their great number of titles, they also published several texts in both Slovak and English (Bútorová et al., 1995, 1996a, 1996b). Zora Bútorová is the most cited Slovak author in SSCI journals (55 references in the fields of political science and gender studies). The increasing number of their articles comes close to the field of political science or practical political engagement (see the selected bibliography of English-language publications).
[35] In the 1990s, several authors studied the history of pre-war sociology in Slovakia (Turčan, 1992, 1994; Laiferová, 1998; Kvasničková, 1998). However, the history of Slovak sociology has become more a specialization than a general source for present research. Some authors speak about the discontinuity with the pre-war tradition (Turčan, 1997). Some argue that our sociology has continued its inter-war tradition in at least three ways: First, academic sociologists show a high degree of practical engagement. Second, they deliberately identify sociology with collecting data usable for the "organization of public life". And finally, they mistrust theoretical sociology and doubt the necessity to develop it (Kusá, 1997).
[36] Sopóci was the first to suggest that the declining interest in theoretical issues could be the result of involvement in international survey projects, which pay scholars well for doing auxiliary technical tasks (Sopóci, 1993). Especially in the first years of Slovakia’ independence, journalists and politicians were especially sensitive to the asymmetrical relations between domestic and foreign researchers. They thought the translation of questionnaires and the use of pre-existing scales were connected to information campaigns misrepresenting the situation in the country. Some critics assumed that the finding that the Slovak population has less democratic and more authoritarian attitudes than their neighbors had been "ordered" by the foreign research contractors. Some encouraged the Ministry of Education and Science to "think seriously about whom it allows to work at the University and in the Academy". Offended sociologists took such opinions and remarks as additional evidence of authoritarian attitudes that could threaten academic autonomy. Even though administrative interventions did not follow, their widely published opinions had impact.
[37] As elsewhere, quantitative approaches are pervasive and used in most research. It would take too much space to refer to even a small part of them, so we deal only with (the less extensive) qualitative research.
[38] Qualitative sociology had little problem entering Slovakia. The Slovak Grant Agency for Science VEGA and the journal Sociológia accepted and supported its first projects (Kusá, 1992). Qualitative research mainly takes the form of collecting life history narratives and family histories, conducting non-standardized interviews, and analyzing media discourse. In academic sociology, it is linked to Zuzana Kusá (e. g. Kusá, 1992, 1997b), (Harmadyová and Bunčák, 1998) and Findor Andrej (2000). It is attracted to the subjects of the elite and poverty. Outside academia, a diverse research prospers under the label of oral history. Oral history projects collect and preserve the memories of selected social groups and periods. The Milan Šimečka Foundation fulfilled an important fundraising and organizing role in this field. The first large project "History and the Present of Czech and Slovak relations" responded to the division of Czechoslovakia. It resulted in the five-volume collection of life-history narratives of inhabitants of both the countries (Radičová and Fialová, 1994).
[39] The next oral history projects of the Šimečka Foundation collected the memories of the Jewish and Romany survivors of the Holocaust and of the victims of communist persecutions. The next oral history projects organized by BICFS and SPACE focused on female politicians’ experiences and resulted in the big collection of the narrativ