This book tries to answer some intriguing questions concerning the power of agoral gatherings. The 20th century is discussed as an age of crowds and masses. The book asks why the communist system disappeared in Europe during the last two decades of the 20th century and examines the factors which determined the collapse of the main military, political, social, economic and even symbolic infrastructures of the communist system in Europe. It poses the question why the end of communism in Europe was a peaceful phenomenon - except in the Balkan Peninsula. The author also discusses the predictability of this kind of phenomenon. In order to answer these questions the book introduces and extends the notion of agoral gathering as a new concept in the area of collective behavior and interprets the large-scale political transformations in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s in terms of peaceful collective behaviors as a political alternative for post-communist countries.

This book shows what kind of theoretical and methodological bases should pertain to contemporary job analysis. The authors describe the European Questionnaire for Job Analysis as a new psychometric and econometric tool to measure the specific job requirements for work efficiency in the particular job positions in a company. Job analysis is primarily an object of interest in work and industrial psychology. However, currently there is an increasing number of interdisciplinary researchers, that is psychologists collaborating with economists, sociologists and other social science representatives, on work position analysis. The attractiveness of such research projects lies both in their theoretical and methodological mutual enrichments of collaborating psychologists and economists as well as in the subsequently increasing work efficiency and job satisfaction of the persons employed on the particular work positions.

The book presents an integrative viewpoint of behavioral economics as an approach to analyze the behavior of decision-makers in various economic situations. Special attention is paid to the significance of experimental methods, enabling for example the collection of information for a decision-maker in a dynamic decision situation, to reduce uncertainty. In addition, behavioral economics offers the possibility to study human choices in the context of the economic life of people, also considering their perception of reality in their own cognitive categories.