Social Stratification in Central Europe

Jiri Vecernik (1941) studied economics and sociology in Prague and Brno. Since 1990, he is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Department of Economic Sociology which he founded. Between 1991 and 1993, he was the editor-in-chief of the Czech Sociological Review and he launched its English edition which he edited again in 2002-2009. He cooperated with the Luxembourg Income Study, ILO, OECD and the European Commission. He published in the areas of labour market and social policies, income inequalities and poverty, subjective well-being and value orientations. He wrote or edited several comprehensive books about Czech society after 1990: Markets and People: The Czech Reform Experience in a Comparative Perspective (1995), Ten Years of Rebuilding Capitalism: Czech Society after 1989 (1999), Czech Society in the 2000s: A Report on Socio-Economic Policies and Structures (2009), Work, Values, Well-being: Czech Reality in a European Context (2016, in Czech).

- 1. Introduction: Countries, Datasets, and Themes in Focus. - 2. Regime Change and Developments in the Main Dimensions of Social Structure. - 3. The Development in Subjective Well-Being and Its Social Stratification. - 4. Setting Social Status in Couples and Partners' Budgetary Discretion. - 5. Cultural Participation and Cultural Activities Stratified. - 6. Pre-retirement Socio-economic Status and Well-Being of Older Persons. - 7. Conclusion: New Opportunities for Empirical Research on Social Stratification. - Appendix.