Research Group for Societal and Social Policy

Introduction

The work of the Research Group is centered around the exploration of historical and contemporary processes that create as well promising potentials and as serious limitations for the ongoing attempts at social modernisation. The processes in question are seen as determining the scope for manuevering in societal policy and they are perceived as key factors also in calling forth institutional responses in social policy. Empirical work is put into this broader framework, and concentrates on three areas. Firstly, by researching the ’systemic change’ in social policy, the Group’s main drive is to explore the novel institutional arrangements that have developed in reflection to new market-based conflicts of interests and that have given rise to fundamentally new structures of redistribution. Secondly, there are ongoing investigations to map the mutual impacts of the distribution of welfare and the emerging new needs of the postsocialist labour market. Peculiar emphasis is given here to the overt and covert mechanisms of  social ’inclusion’ and ’exclusion’. Thirdly, a series of investigations attempts to explore the specificities of postsocialist poverty. In these studies, special emphasis is given to Roma poverty and to those processes of institutional discrimination that have proven powerful in ethnicising contemporary poverty throughout the region.

Head of Research Group

  Szalai, Júlia, D.Sc.

Researchers

Associated researchers

Research administrator

Former researchers