Social policy in East and West finds itself today in the middle of a fundamental transition. The former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the successor states to the former Soviet Union are attempting to create the institutions needed for a modern market economy and a modern democratic welfare state. At the same time, the mature welfare states of Europe are struggling to solve the contemporary financial crisis of their systems of social entitlements. Because of fundamental economic and demographic trends, these systems will become increasingly difficult to sustain over the coming decades. The contributors overwhelmingly agree that it would be mistaken policy to simply copy the institutions of Western welfare states to the eastern economies in transition. Instead one can learn much from the experience gathered over the past half century in Western welfare states.

The need to ensure that people are technologically literate has become an issue of major significance with an ever increasingly technological world. In order to more clearly understand the various dimensions of technological literacy, this book looks at secondary-school pupils conceptions of technology and the nature of their interactions with technological artefacts. The book takes a qualitative methodological approach to understanding and describing these experiences. Of key importance is that the empirical data were collected from the perspective of the pupils themselves, an important requirement of the methodological framework adopted. There have been many studies around pupils and technology, but nearly all are based on a priori categories constructed by experts, rather than being constituted from the pupils perspective. As such, this book contributes towards filling a gap in the literature and should be useful to anyone concerned about the current levels of technological literacy in society and who is looking for a framework that can help them to make an impact on improving the levels of technological literacy of young people.