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Immigration became an especially thorny and publicly discussed issue with the so-called Refugee Crisis beginning in 2015. The stance of the Czech and Polish governments was dominated by strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric. Still, both countries have witnessed a steady increase in mainly short-term immigration from various Asian countries such as Bangladesh or Pakistan ever since. This paper analyses Czech and Polish migration policies against the backdrop of a historically constructed notion of anti-illegal immigration policy, and category of temporary migration, coupled with the problematic nature of debt-financed migration in Asia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Czechia and Poland (2018-2021), in-depth and semi-structured interviews with migration experts, academic and grey literature, official documents, and the method of Accidental ethnography, this paper argues that silencing of actual labor immigration in political communication while employing anti-migration rhetoric represents a discursive gap typical for liberal democracies. It further concludes that rendering migrant labor as a temporary commodity and turning a blind eye on recruitment of international migrants represents a continuity practice of migrant labor subordination within the nation-state, originating during colonialism and the advent of capitalism in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how different meanings of knowledge (transnational, comparative, statistical, local, and personal) relationally stabilise the agential position for the legitimation of educational reform across state and non-state actors. Analysing the materiality and systems of reason of proposals to reform education in the pre-election debates in the Czech Republic, the focus is placed on different patterns of legitimate and legitimating actorship, assembled from global and local relations. Through an ecological conceptualisation the research identifies the problematisation and decomposition of actorship into contradictory assemblages of both traditional actors (teachers and politicians) and relatively new ones (NGOs). The relationship of the civil sector and the state structures allowed the emergence of new non-state, non-professional actors (NGOs) who aggregate their expertise from transnational data and legitimate both their position as experts and the particular educational change. This has consequences for non-experts as politicians and teachers. The transnational and European context penetrated into the Czech educational sphere not through an elite class of system actors but through the representatives of NGOs. Rhetorically saving education from degradation, NGOs engage in spreading the transnational data and externalise the legitimation of educational reform and thus become the bearers (although agentially limited) of the European space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the sources and processes of management learning in four large, former state enterprises in the Czech Republic. These enterprises have all been privatized, but have not enjoyed foreign direct investment, which is often cited as a major source of post-communist management development. The findings indicate that current managerial knowledge in the enterprises has originated from a variety of domestic and foreign sources, but that the flow of ideas has been affected by a number of important filters, arising from the complexity of the Czech context, and the motives of the enterprise managers. In particular, the paper documents the continuing role of managerial knowledge emanating from pre-1989 sources, a factor which may have crucial implications for the nature of the emerging institution of post-communist Czech management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines gender aspects of tactics of the alter-globalization movement. Focusing mainly on two transnational collective actions in Prague in 2000 and in Genoa in 2001, the research draws on participant observation, interviews with activists and analysis of the movement's alternative media. The feminist activism within the movement, the gendered tactics and their representation in the alternative media are analysed using the concept of diffusion. Although feminists are involved in the protests, and local Czech feminist activism was incited by the international mobilizations in Prague in 2000, they are often marginalized because of the emphasis on masculine confrontational and violent tactics used in demonstrations. The movement's alternative media further reproduce gender stereotypes. The visual representations of the tactics are traditionally gendered -- women are depicted as fairies, men as fighters; this is because the movement does not want to appear weak and feminine, and seeks to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a case study of a long-term public controversy over the construction of a highway bypass (around Plzeň, Czech Republic). Two principal variants of the bypass were proposed. One of them began gradually to appear preferable, increasingly attractive for experts, but remaining only on paper. In the meantime, however, the other variant became more realistic, pushed through mainly by local politicians and actually constructed. This article shows how purification of science from politics (and vice versa) played a key role in the development and ending of the case. Initial expertization of the case switched to its sharp politicization, when people got frustrated from protraction and indecisive evidence of accumulated expertise. This turned to be fatal for those who consistently staked everything on "pure facts." This article concludes by outlining some general consequences of such a development for both democratic decision making and the political relevance of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interior thermal insulation system based on hydrophilic mineral wool is presented in this paper. Basic thermal and hygric parameters of the applied materials are given. The design and development of the thermal insulation system including its verification in semiscale experiments are described. Finally, an example of the application of the designed system in the reconstruction of a historical building in Prague is shown, and the results of in situ experiments are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of organizational transformation has emerged from the foundations established by contingency theory and research. While institutional approaches to organizational analysis have preferred to focus on the tendency towards organizational continuity and inertia, recent developments have begun to consider institutional pressures leading to change, and to provide clues about how contingency and institutional theories might complement each other in improving our understanding of organizational change. The evidence presented in this paper, drawn from a study of organizational transformation in the Czech Republic, allows exploration of the relationship between transforming state enterprises and the wider processes of social, economic and institutional change. The values, motives and actions of the key enterprise managers are shown to be essential factors in explaining both the process of transformation in state enterprises, and the role of institutional factors in that process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]