Prestige examines whether social prestige is still an important axis of the stratification hierarchy. It appears that prestige has lost some of the close connection with social position it had in estates societies. Prestige distribution patterns have changed and individualized gradations emerged, while agreement in the occupational prestige in Poland is lower than in the West and still declining. However, low consensus in occupational prestige rankings does not entail a disintegration of respect norms as such: personal prestige is still a relevant factor in designing life strategies and people do care about respect. This volume presents empirical evidence that all social classes recognize the motivational, integrative and satisfying functions of prestige.

The present collection of articles is based on data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and analyses the changes in European societies. The first part of the volume is devoted to relations between legitimization, subjective well-being, voting patterns, and the role of social cohesion in determination of political culture. The second part addresses methodological questions designed to quantify the reliability and validity of certain measures in interviews, coverage errors, measurement errors, and non-response, as well as the understanding of questions in multi-country surveys in the context of the comparability between countries.

This book discusses the viability of "importing" the middle class to Poland. The 1990s were a step forward in the formation of the Polish middle class and, systematically yet barely discernible in daily life, the process was triggered by an increase in consumption and affluence. However, the changes of attitudes, life goals and value systems distinct for the Western middle class are ambiguous and rather slow in Poland. They ensue mainly from the changes in new social structures and the behavioral rationality of consumers. It appears that the middle class in Poland will not emerge as an exact copy of the original middle class - rather, it will be its contextually modified variant, affected by Polish cultural traditions.

This book aims to provide empirical evidence regarding the consequences of changes in European societies, focussing on migration and related phenomena of discrimination and xenophobia. The comparative analyses cover all countries of the European Social Survey in the period 2002-2014. They reveal that native members of so-called vulnerable groups, such as the unemployed, retired, permanently sick or disabled and the elderly, were more likely to experience threats and to exhibit anti-immigration attitudes. The contributors further examine social openness defined in terms of marital homogamy, social trust in the context of legitimization and social conditions of sleeplessness. A final methodological section presents the results of a mixed mode experiment involving the face-to-face mode.