Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge

The article examines the consequences of prolonged unemployment experienced in the beginning of the career in Bulgaria from a subjective point of view. The analysis is based on information obtained from in-depth interviews with people from three age groups who have entered the labor market in periods with high levels of unemployment. The negative consequences pointed out by the interviewed people include material deprivation, limited access to health services, low self-esteem, interruption of social contacts, postponement of creating a family and living in a home of one’s own, loss of hope for a better future. Along with the negative consequences, some positive ones were also identified, such as strengthening family ties, people’s enhanced motivation to deal with the arising difficulties and their striving for personal development.

<p>SAPEA’s evidence review report shows that the ageing process needs to be transformed. Europe must tackle the challenges presented by ageing in every generation.</p>\n\n<p>In Europe and around the world, people are living longer than ever before. This is one of the greatest achievements of the past century, but it also brings challenges for European societies and the EU as a whole. We must adjust to an ageing and shrinking workforce, and find financially viable ways to deliver high-quality health and social care for all.</p>\n\n<p>When it comes to predicting how people age, evidence indicates that genetic factors are relatively minor compared to lifestyle behaviours such as a healthy diet and physical activity. Policies to promote these behaviours from early childhood, and even in unborn children, contribute directly to a healthy ageing process across people’s whole lives.</p>\n\n<p>Ageing in the future will take place in a very different context from the past and will be profoundly affected by phenomena such as climate change, air pollution and antibiotic resistance, as well as ongoing social changes. Policies will only be successful if they accommodate these changes.</p>\n\n<p>Technology is already changing the experience of ageing, including wearable and assistive devices and the advent of AI. But barriers of acceptance and practicality must be overcome.</p>\n\n<p>Education improvements at a young age are vital not only to improve individual health, but also to equip our future workforce with the skills it needs to support an ageing population in a rapidly changing society</p>

The aim of this article is to analyse the extent to which differences between young people's education, employment status, and social background can explain the differences in their emigration intentions and actual experience with emigration. The goal is to create a profile of youth with emigration experience and examine the interrelation between two transitions, from education to work and from youth into adulthood, as measured by the degree of independence from parents, and also to investigate social inequalities among people with emigration experience in the transition from education to finding a first job. The analysis is based on theories of the individual life-course transition and social status theories. The empirical data were gathered from a representative survey conducted in Bulgaria in 2014 that focused on young people aged 15-34 who had left education within the previous five years. The results show that young people from large families with many siblings more often have emigration intentions and that previous emigration experience is the strongest predictor of emigration intentions. Emigration intensions are also more likely among people who have emigrated and later returned and ended up economically inactive. This fact is important in understanding the large number of young people who are not in education or employment (NEETs) in Bulgaria.

The starting point of this study is the argument that not only rankings of higher education institutions (HEIs) are inescapable, but so is the constant criticism to which they are subjected. Against this background, the paper discusses how HEIs from Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEECs) are (non)represented in the main global university rankings. The analysis adopts two perspectives: 1) From the point of view of higher education in CEECs – what are the specificity, basic problems and perspectives of higher education in CEECs as seen through the prism of the global ranking systems? 2) From the point of view of the ranking systems – what strengths and weaknesses of the global ranking systems can be identified through the prism of higher education in CEECs? The study shows that most of the HEIs from CEECs remain invisible in the international and European academic world and tries to identify the main reasons for their (non)appearance in global rankings. It is argued that although global rankings are an important instrument for measuring and comparing the achievements of HEIs by certain indicators, they are only one of the mechanisms – and not a perfect one – for assessing the quality of higher education.

A peculiarity of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy is his effort to elaborate a hermeneutic phenomenology of the Self on the roots of reflexive philosophy. Thus, the problem of responsibility, which Ricoeur debated on different occasions, appears in the context of the Self as an acting, suffering and capable subject which is not only responsible for its own acts but has also duties in respect to others. Ricoeur's hermeneutics of "l’homme capable" (the capable human being) analyzes responsibility on different levels – historical, ethical, political, juridical etc. The main thesis of the author is, that this levels of responsibility constitute the different dimensions of the will of the Self "to engage itself with" which should be recomposed hermeneutically in order to capture responsibility as an integral phenomenon. At the difference of some authors who offer only a partial interpretation of the problem of responsibility in Ricoeur's work, the following article aims to give a holistic one by reconstructing it through the complex evolution of Ricoeur's philosophical writings.

ABSTRACTSchool-to-work transitions are embedded in the institutional structures of educational systems. In particular, vocational education has been linked to greater horizontal gender segregation in employment. Similarly, research on higher education has uncovered how stratification at the tertiary level can promote gender segregation in the labour market. This paper investigates how gender typical employment is conditioned by the institutional features of the educational system in Bulgaria. Despite the post-socialist transformations of Bulgaria's educational system and its labour market, horizontal gender segregation has remained rather moderate from an international perspective. We use data from a 2012 nationally representative survey. We find that the educational system shapes the gendered occupational trajectories for men but it does not hold the same explanatory power for women. Neither vocational nor higher education has a significant effect for women. In contrast, men with vocational education are more likely to work in male-typed occupations and, in line with the literature, higher education steers men toward gender mixed and a-typical occupations. Our study points to the importance of educational institutional factors in shaping gender (a)-typical career paths. The Bulgarian case, in particular, offers insights into the mechanisms that can potentially decrease horizontal gender segregation in the labour market.

This chapter describes the implications of the global crisis in Bulgaria seen in the frozen economic situation and great political turbulences. The achieved financial stability and the low tax levels did not lead to the expected increase in foreign investments and to more stability of the labour market for the most vulnerable groups—for the youngest and the oldest parts of the labour force, especially for individuals with low education, among them with Roma ethnic background. For whole regions of the country—like the North Western region—the infrastructure investments could not immediately create better job opportunities. In times of crisis, disagreement between the political parties on sensitive reforms prevents them being carried out. Three lessons to be learned from the political instability caused by the global financial and economic crisis in Bulgaria are described. The first lesson is connected with the crisis government (2009–2013), which did not pay sufficient attention to achieving a proper balance between investments in infrastructure and social protection of vulnerable groups. The second lesson has to do with the government (2013–2014), which in a short period of time became unpopular because of the non-transparent way of making decisions, although it did raise the social payments for the minimum wage and childcare allowances. The third lesson concerns civil society itself and the ability of citizens to effectively control the government when making unpopular and non-transparent decisions.

The book’s introductory chapter justifies its overall theoretical, ecological framework, its scientific and cultural assumptions, and the range of the philosophical, interdisciplinary, and particular issues arising in the context of the ecology of virtual realities. The second chapter outlines a complementary perspective on virtual reality, disclosed by the philosophy of information, the proper categorical structures and relations to which the complex dynamics of virtual reality boils down. Chapter 3 extensively deals with the architecture and the design of virtual reality, the augmented reality, cyberspace, and the prospects for its future. Chapter 4 examines the auto/regulation of the virtual public sphere, considered as a digital ecosystem. The fifth and final chapter introduces us into the machinery underlying the phantasmagorical logic of virtual financial markets.

The article explores two types of gender pay gap determinants. The first type refers to job characteristics, which are described here by sector, occupational status, and unionization. The second type refers to human capital, and is analyzed through proxy variables such as educational attainment, experience, gender, and age. In this article, we answer the question "How do these factors determine the gender pay gap?" We run Mincerian equations using nearly 300,000 observations from the Structure of Earnings Survey 2002 and 2006 in Bulgaria. In order to focus the analysis on the career stage with highest gender pay gap, we try to define three stages of career development. We then estimate gender effects on the defined different career phases (early, mid-, and late careers), and we determine that the greatest gender pay gap is observed in the mid-career. Hence, we continue the analysis by studying differences in pay for men and women in their mid-careers. As expected, men are better paid in regard to most determinants. In particular, the trade union effect is much stronger for men, and private companies tend to pay men more, holding all other factors equal. The only advantage women have is higher returns for each additional year of education, which could lead to higher wages for women after acquiring tertiary education than for men. However, the results show no such tendency. Therefore, the final stage of the study is devoted to the gap among mid-career employees with tertiary education, and we find that job characteristics are key determinants of the gender pay gap.