Uplatnění teorie modernizace na postsocialistické změny
Application of the Modernisation Theory at the Post-Socialist Changes

Summary/Abstract: Application of the Modernisation Theory at the Post-socialist Changes. The issue of societal modernization became one of the major subjects of the cooperating Slovak and Czech sociologists already in the 1960s being inspired by the incentives coming from the convergency theory. The industrial concept of modernization was of higher importance for Slovakia, while the post-industrial concepts were more vivid in the Czech Lands. After the normalization period and the ”velvet revolutions” 1989 appeared several international teams in the framework of which Slovak and Czech sociologists and other social scientists continued their cooperation in this field. Historical developments in the post-socialist countries in their early stages demonstrated clearly that positive institutional changes like democratization and marketization represent only first steps towards complex societal modernization. Even these processes had to be more cultivated themselves and their economic, political and social consequences had to be critically evaluated by using the criterion of complex improvements in all spheres of human life. This new situation required a new concept of modernization based on a broad concept of cultural changes in their interconnections with the changes in social systems as well as in the personality structures. Modernization had to be conceived as a complex historical process in which pro-modern, counter-modern and stagnation tendencies clash in the activities of people and institutions. Partial changes can be accepted as pro-modern only as a part of complex modernization. As in the post-socialist societies pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial cultural segments are intertwining, theoretical inspirations for solving their modernization problems have to be drawn from many streams of modernization theory: from its classical sources, Parsonian and post-Parsonian tradition as well from various variants of neo-modernism, especially from the reflexive modernization theory. Thus conceived modernization approach provides a serious base for analyses and evaluations of the historical processes of European post-socialist transformations in the framework of the Euro-Atlantic cultural while taking into account specificities of individual countries including the Slovak and Czech Republics. Sociológia 2002 Vol. 34 (No. 5: 411-422)

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