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The study scrutinizes the relationship between professional working conditions and burnout among Hungarian social and pedagogical professionals. Despite the fact that burnout and occupational well-being have been extensively researched abroad among professional helpers – primarily health care workers –, no quantitative survey has been conducted in Hungary so far in the target group we examined. Another added value of our study is that, besides work and organizational factors revealed by previous burnout studies, it points to the role of client- and fieldwork-related difficulties in the prevalence of burnout symptoms. In our exploratory, crosssectional survey, 261 social and pedagogical specialists participated from Baranya County. Our results suggest that job and task matching problems, and difficulties related to the fieldwork and clients lead to emotional exhaustion of professionals and decreased work efficiency. Deficiencies related to work motivation cause loss of efficiency as well. The results also indicate that out of the three occupational groups involved in the research, professionals working in the field of child protection are most at risk for emotional exhaustion, and the symptom of depersonalization is most relevant to child protection and family and child welfare workers. In addition, we have shown that longer professional experience can be considered a protective factor in burnout symptoms. Our results can make an important contribution to the establishment of individual and organizational level training, support, development, monitoring and evaluation programs and/or policy-level guidelines and interventions that can improve the working conditions of professionals and reduce their risk of emotional, mental and physical strain.

It is my contention that populism could be an appropriate framework to understand and link the phenomena of global crisis of democracy and spread of postmodern autocracies. In order to substantiate this claim with the method of literature review, I have examined first the characteristics of these phenomena and then I have focused the nature of relationship between them, in particular with regard to the complex system of stability of new types of autocracies, in which, I think, populism playing a key role. Populism, understood it as an autocratic interpretation of democracy and representation, could be a particularly dangerous Trojan horse for democracy. Above all, because of its idea of a single, homogeneous and authentic people that can be genuinely represented only by populists, and because of this representative claim is a moralized form of antipluralism. In addition, populism is also an important feature of postmodern autocracies, especially of electoral autocracy. By means of populism, it is possible for these regimes to camouflage and even legitimise the autocratic trends and exercise of power, as well as the creation an uneven playing field for political contestation behind their formally multi-party elections and democratic façade. As a radical turn towards traditional forms of autocracies would be too expensive, postmodern autocrats need manipulated multi-party elections and other plebiscite techniques that could serve as quasi-democratic legitimation, as well as populism that could transform political contestation to a life-and-death struggle and, provides other important cognitive functions. Therefore, populist autocracy, as a paradigmatic type of postmodern autocracies, will remain with us for a long time, giving more and more tasks to researchers involved in them.

I started my research in Izsnyéte, Transcarpathia, in 2012 with an anthropological research group. Initially, we were curious about the coexistence mechanisms of the local settlement, the cultural peculiarities of the ethnic groups living there, but due to the war situation, we had to stop our empirical research sooner before 2015. In 2017, as a doctoral student, I continued my empirical research in Izsnyéte, where Hungarians represent an absolute majority against the state-forming Ukrainian ethnic group. The basic research concept was to choose a local settlement close to the border where two or three different ethnicities have lived together for decades. In my study, I examine the process of ethnicity production and the processes of image and change of the living ethnicities of the settlement and their applicability to each other in comparison with the data of previous research, reflecting on the changes, mainly in the light of assimilation. Already the results of the 2012 research showed spatial isolation, in many cases dissimilation was experienced among coexisting ethnicities, but with many other factors and aspects several years later, it caused diverse processes.

The phenomenon of the aging of societies is now well-known, demonstrating its demographic, economic and social impact in many countries around the world. The increase in average life expectancy at birth and the low number of children have naturally triggered the emergence of declining, aging societies. All this has led to a number of tasks for policy makers, domestic and international organizations, primarily to promote active, healthy aging. This article describes some of the results of an empirical study of 167 people conducted jointly with St. Luke’s Greek Catholic Charity in the winter of 2019 in order to assess the situation and needs of the elderly. This article presents the results of our study, which focuses on community activities, leisure, and social relationships. During our analytical work, we found that those living in residential care homes are more open to community-based activities to maintain physical and mental activity.

Present study reports about the survey results of an empirical research reflecting the wage satisfaction level of employees. The part of the empirical research done in 4 different administration bodies in 2019 with the help of an online questionnaire survey is presented, in which results are summarized concerning responses to competitiveness of the wage system, relation of wage and performance, and the satisfaction with wage and further allowances.