Sociologické publikace: původní odborné články

The presented essay has been inspired by numerous writers who have one thing in common: they distrust of conceptual dualisms and incommen-surabilities that lie behind the modern social science thinking. That is why the dividing lines between knowledge and power, sociology and society, methods and ethnomethods, or truth and falsity are not approached here as part of the solution (as a resource of explanations) but as part of the problem (as things to be explained). It is argued that sociologists construct the authoritativeness of their knowledge in such a way that they arrange a power play, a plain superiority in numbers. They do so deftly and unnoticeably, yet unwittingly, under the guise of ascetic recluses distanced far away from ordinary life. The argument is illustrated by the case of "objective hermeneutic", a qualitative research strategy of German origin, used typically within so called biographical research. I claim that the case of objective hermeneutic (and the case of qualitative methodologies in general) is only particularly obvious and vivid demon-stration of what is much less obvious and visible elsewhere, throughout the field of social science.

This paper is an attempt in theorizing the welfare state institutional regimes. It is argued that, e.g., the social security schemes are concievable as more or less convincing institutional representations of reality; they can be read as a sort of "texts". Now, as a consequence of coming a "chaotic" post-modern era, bringing about a simultaneous growth of mass character and individualization of social life, the "realism", or "cogency" of these representations are challenged. The way to an institutional universalism has become complicated. Social security claims based on the status of "citizen" on one hand and on the status of "employee" on the other hand need to be reconciled in some way. Two fundamental ways of mixing these two statuses and related technologies - i.e. two ways of keeping the universal character of basic social security schemes - are discussed.