Vol. 11 No. 1 (2022)

Published March 31, 2022

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  • The Career-building effect of volunteering in higher education
    146-160
    Views:
    70

    Nowadays the motives for volunteering are changing among higher education students, and
    besides traditional altruistic motives, career-building motives also appear (the acquisition
    of work experience and professional knowledge, professional development, networking,
    the presentation of voluntary work in the resume). In this paper, we use data from a survey
    conducted in five Central and Eastern European countries (N=2,199) to examine through linear
    regression analysis the factors affecting the strength of career-building motives and to analyse
    through a logistic regression model the determinants of whether or not volunteering is related to the field of study. Our hypotheses are formulated based on the literature. Our results show
    that career-building motives are more pronounced among women and students who have a
    close relationship with external friends outside the university, study outside Hungary, and study
    something other than engineering, computer science or science. Voluntary work is more likely to
    be related to the field of study among teacher education students, students with an unfavourable
    financial situation, those who study in Romania, and those who have a close relationship with
    faculty.

  • How has university students’ drug use changed during Covid-19?
    161-177
    Views:
    142

    The Covid-19 outbreak and the lockdown have had significant psychological and social impacts
    on everyone’s life. Changing life circumstances and daily routines, job losses, uncertainty, have
    put a psychological strain on us. As a consequence, we may experience risk behaviours more
    often than before. The aim of the study is to analyse how risk behaviours have changed due to
    Covid-19 among university students in Hungary, and to identify the psycho-social factors along which the shift can be explained. The analysis is based on the data of ‘Covid-19 International
    Student Well-Being Study’ – a study initiated and coordinated by the University of Antwerpen
    involving 75 universities from 26 countries. Four Hungarian universities – Corvinus University
    of Budapest, the University of Debrecen, the University of Miskolc, and the University of Szeged
    participated in the study. The survey was conducted among all university students who filled
    in an online questtioannaire in Spring 2020. Our results show that all risk behavoiurs have
    declined during the Covid-19 period. However, students who had had consumed drug before
    Covid-19 have been using them more frequently during the pandemic. Our results suggest that
    the recreational use have probably declined and the problematic use have probably increased
    among university students during the pandemic. Our results highlight the fact that students for
    whom the crisis situation imposed by the quarantine was hard to handle are more likely to use
    substances more frequently, so offering them prevention and treatment options is crucial.

  • Self-contained child protection – possible ways to open up
    178-194
    Views:
    107

    The aim of the research, based on a qualitative methodology, is to gain an understanding of
    whether external/affiliated services are provided in child protection system targeting parents or
    children and young people with child protection problems. The aim is to examine the extent of a
    service focused and innovative approaches in child protection, where is the place and what is the
    role of civil services. The study, which based on 15 expert interviews, argues that child protection
    is currently characterised by many dysfunctions, as a self-contained and isolated sub-system of
    social policy, which not only fails to deliver the basic objectives of child protection in practice, but
    in many cases hides structural deficiencies and systemic anomalies. There is a need to explore
    new ways of child protection, including the use of volunteering, the services of civil organizations
    and broad partnerships.

  • The Effects of the 2011 Electoral Reform on the Results of the Hungarian Legislative Elections I. : Theoretical aspects of the reform
    195-209
    Views:
    43

    The second wave of democracy after World Wa II, followed by the third wave in the 1970’s and
    the 80’s – including the historic democratic transitions in Eastern Europe after the collapse
    of the Soviet Empire – led to the expansion of democratic electoral systems around the world.
    The design of electoral systems and of the undergoing electoral reforms has become a vital
    component of the democratization process. The study of the theory and politics of electoral
    reform led to the adoption of new theoretical and methodological approaches in order to cope
    with the challenging phenomena.
    The main goal of this paper is to interpret the concept of reform, and to unfold some of
    theoretical aspects of it in order to identify some of the main components of the concept. With the theoretical approach we can get a better understandic of the reform itself, and we can
    demonstrate that electoral reform is a complex process which should not be reduced to a simplistic
    model in which a few actors driven by a few motives can fully explain the whole phenomenon.
    The theoretical study of the reform can show that some politial events, the established party
    system (first and foremost the distribution of power between the various parties), the type of the
    actual electoral system (its advantages and disadvantages) as well as some contingents factors
    must be taken into consideration in order to have a better understanding of the nature of the
    political arena in which reform proposals are promoted and the reform itself takes place.

  • Reflecions on the society of control – Footnotes to the Delezoguattarian machine
    210-228
    Views:
    51

    The present study revolves around the concept of the Deleuzean machine. It undertakes to
    introduce the machine from Deleuze’s concept of the societies of control. Thus this paper is not
    a presentation of the critique of the Freudian and Lacanian notions of desire that the machine
    is introduced as a late capitalist abstract agent, but a genalogy of the machinic mechanism – as
    a logic of operation – is outlined from a new perspective. The emphasis of the study is not on
    psychoanalises and capitalism, and on schizoanalysis as a critique of them, but ont he operational
    logic of the societies of control: the articulation of controlling freedom. Fort he latter, concepcts
    such as territory, de- and reterritorialization, as well as the operating principles of cybernetic systems are shed light on. By examining this concept, therefore, the ways of understanding the
    social, economic and political processes of ourt time can be shed new light.

Thematic articles

  • Community resilience and social support relationships – An analytical approach and research results based on long-term series analysis of communities affected by the red sludge disaster
    6-31
    Views:
    51

    vOne of the most serious consequences of disasters is the disruption or even the loss of social
    support relationships. Hence, this paper analyses the social support relationships in the
    framework of community resilience based on face-to-face interviews with direct (180 people)
    and indirect (180 people) victims of the red sludge disaster, using data for 2013 and 2020.
    (Hungary, Devecser district).
    The focus was analysed according to four types of social support relationship: reciprocal,
    donor to recipient and incomplete/disintegrated. At the time of the disaster, we identified a high
    level of support activity and a strong reciprocal-donor type of aid model. In contrast, in 2013, we
    found an incomplete/disintegrated - reciprocal model with low support activity, and in 2020, a
    reciprocal- incomplete/disintegrated model with medium activity.
    Based on a detailed statistical analysis of different social support types among the red
    sludge disaster’s victims the paper explores and presents the social support activities and
    their various patterns with respect to their roles in the resilience of communities. The different
    patterns of social supports relationships that emerged in each period examined varied widely,
    though – with different intensity – they were primarily influenced by the fact how people were
    affected by disaster’s damages (directly and indirectly). Nevertheless, by 2020, other factors,
    such as residence, age, and economic activity had already an equally strong impact on different
    types of social support relationships as the affectedness by the disaster of 2010. We found that
    communities responded to the red sludge disaster in 2010 and to the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020
    in a reactive way by activating their social support relationship.

  • The effect of Covid-19 epidemic on the industry of a Sub-Saharan Country: a perspective on sports industry in Nigeria
    32-48
    Views:
    67

    Kutatásunk során a Covid-19 járvány Nigéria gazdaságára és sportiparára kifejtett hatását elemeztük, a kapcsolódó szakirodalom áttekintésével. Megvizsgáltuk a sportgazdaság Covid-19 járvány alatti helyzetét Európában és az Egyesült Államokban, majd kiemeltük a nigériai speciális viszonyokat. Bár a sportgazdaság nigériai vonatkozásában kevés szakirodalom áll rendelkezésre, több mint 60 tudományos közlemény elemzésére került sor. Ezek alapján megállapításra került, hogy a Covid-19 járvány nemcsak a globális, de a nigériai gazdaságot is negatívan érintette. Ez különösen jelentős volt a sporthoz kapcsolódó direkt és indirekt
    foglalkoztatás területén, tekintettel a nigériai gazdaság egy-szektorú jellegére. Vizsgálataik alapján szerzők javaslatként fogalmazzák meg, hogy figyelembe véve a nigériai társadalom korfáját, jelentős befektetések lennének szükségesek a sportiparba, mely a szektor átalakításával is együtt kellene, hogy járjon.

     

  • “Can’t you see that we are in trouble?” – The environmental protection-related ignorance, its appearance in visual attentional patterns, and some possible explanation/interpretation
    49-69
    Views:
    33

    The environmental crisis is an outstanding topic nowadays. Given that it is basically caused
    by human activity, this issue is worth examining at all levels of society. The present study
    investigated the individuals’ visual attentional patterns and the possible attentional biases related to pictures displaying environmental problems, in comparison to undisturbed nature
    and social scenes as control stimuli, within the framework of a reaction-time task. Changes
    in participants’ mood and their self-reported environmental awareness were also measured.
    However, only the negative social scenes resulted attentional bias, the environmental topics
    were not able to do that. Albeit the mood of the participants deteriorated during the experiment,
    it did not have any correlation with any other variables, and either did the environmental
    awareness. We displayed the stimuli during the task only for a short period of time, thereby we
    targeted to reach automatic attentional responses. Our results reflect to the fact, that the topic
    of the environmental crisis is not suitable to do this. This phenomenon propounds the demand of
    explanations behind this phenomenon (like the possible evolutionary background).

  • Environmentalism of university students in relation to their materialism, life satisfaction, views on politics and pandemic
    70-97
    Views:
    70

    Recently, an increasing focus has been made on studying environmental problems and the
    related social phenomena. Understanding the environmentalism and its influencing factors
    in the case of higher education students can greatly help the preparation and identification
    of sustainability policies and educational practices in higher education institutions. In this study, we investigated environmental attitudes and pro-environmental behavior of
    students at 17 Hungarian universities as a function of a number of hypothesized influencing
    factors. These included materialistic values, life satisfaction, political views, and views on the
    Covid-19 pandemic. According to our results, these were all related to environmentalism. More
    environmentally conscious students were less materialistic, less right-wing in their political
    views, more satisfied with their lives, and also differed in their views on pandemic issues. Beside
    a weaker impact of environmentalism and political views, life satisfaction was largely influenced
    by the relative financial situation perceived by respondents.

  • Europe’s most visited countries’ coastal areas affected by overtourism
    98-122
    Views:
    39

    Tourism has a constant impact on the environment and on society, taking these impacts into
    consideration reveals that these are not always beneficial. Negative impacts include increased
    pollution, inappropriate construction, conflicts between local society and tourists, crowding and
    congestion. The objective of my research is to study coastal areas affected by overtourism in
    southern European countries. By examining tourism in the European countries that received the
    most international tourists in 2019, I illustrate the importance of 3S tourism (sea, sand, sun), the
    mass of tourists it attracts, and its effects. The tourism of France, Spain and Italy, with their sunny sandy coasts, are presented by summarising data sets from various international databases.
    I analyse the cases of some destinations from the three countries that are the main focus of the study, based on previously published articles. Coastal areas that have been associated with the
    overtourism phenomenon by other authors are also presented.

  • Beyond „Green finance” – Sustainability aspects of capital markets
    123-137
    Views:
    40


    The accumulation of capital constitutes an enormous obstacle to the sustainability transition.
    The role of the capital throughout the whole evolutionary process of civilization is undoubtedly impressive, as it has continuously delivered innovations in our everyday lives. Nevertheless, as
    we argue in our study, a dominant part of capital accumulation has not fulfilled this function
    in monetary and material terms as well recently; or performs at a low efficiency concerning the
    ecological damage generated. Sustainability calls thus for an investment environment in the
    near future that allows for the social benefits of capital accumulation through the expansion
    of the material services delivered, limiting the accumulation of material stocks, resulting in
    significant adverse environmental impacts remarkably in the same time. We will introduce
    and compare the gains of savings and capital accumulation considering the monetary and the
    material dimensions of our socio-economic system, unveiling the relevance of the capital market
    in sustainability transition in this way, beyond green finance.