Description

• Title:
  Winners and Losers of the Process of Transformation as an Etic Category versus Emic Biographical Perspective
• Creator:
  Kaźmierska, Kaja
• Contributor:
  University of Lodz, Poland;
  Kaja Kaźmierska, PhD, Professor at the University of Lodz, head of the Department of Sociology of Cul­ture, Faculty of Economics and Sociology at the University of Lodz, Poland, and director of the Institute of Sociology. She specializes in biographical research, identity, and biographical memory. The author of books: Polish Wartime Experiences and Shaping of Ethnic Identity. Analysis of Borderline Narratives (IFiS PAN, Warsaw 1999), Biography and Memory: The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors (Academic Studies Press, Boston 2012). She has edited a selection of texts entitled Biographical Method in Sociology. Anthology of texts (Nomos, Cracow 2012). The co-author (with Katarzyna Waniek and Agata Zysiak) of the book Tell the University. Academic Lodz in Biographies Inscribed in the History of the University of Lodz (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Lodz 2015) and recently published (with Jarosław Pałka) Soldiers of the Polish Army. Oral History (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Lodz 2018).;
  kaja.kazmierska@uni.lodz.pl
• Description:
  One of the common and schematic descriptions in the perspective of the 1989 breakthrough are two ways of dealing with it by people who are respectively called winners or losers of transformation. These stereotypical characteristics are not only the tool to draw the general image of effects of the transition, but are also based on the specific way of interpretation deeply rooted, for example, in neoliberal thinking. Yet, from the perspective of an individual—so-called Schütz’s man on the street—the categorization of winners and losers not only simplifies the description of social reality, but also it cannot be easily biographically justified because the etic categorization is not always relevant to the emic perspective. In other words, the life history of an individual, showing the main phases and events of biography, and life story—the way that one interprets his/her biographical experiences— may not correspond to each other. The analysis of these two aspects of biography (what is lived through and how it is interpreted) shows how people have dealt with the process of transformation. In the paper, it is presented on the basis of one case study.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.;
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
• Date:
  2019.11.22;
  2019
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Relation:
  Qualitative Sociology Review; 4;
  15
• Subject:
  Biographical Analysis;
  Emic;
  Etic;
  Process of Transformation
• Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/11089/30874 ;
  1733-8077;
  10.18778/1733-8077.15.4.11
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  check license
• Type:
  image