Volume 12 (2020): Edizione 2 (May 2020)

How is equality expressed in political rituals? How do we know whether we are witnessing equality? How is equality connoted symbolically? Such questions consider the appearance of a phenomenon that, probably, does not yet exist. This article aims at exploring symbolic constructions of equality in Norwegian political rituals from the theoretic standpoints of intersectionality and democratic equality. To achieve this aim, I analyze symbolism of three ritual dimensions: surroundings, participants’ actions and time (use and division). The methodological tools are ethnographic observation and interpretation. My analysis indicates that, in the Norwegian political context, equality manifests in symbols of transparency, openness, availability, solidarity, care, love and access to power possessors for citizens. These symbols are embedded in habitual forms of punctuality, physical contact, singing and emotional expression.

This paper analyzes the relationship and correlation between propaganda and the mass media on the example of turbo-folk music as the most influential cultural model in the 1990s in Serbia. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence and spread of turbo-folk music through various propaganda techniques and through the mass media. The primary aim of the research is to understand the related propaganda and the media, while the starting hypothesis is that turbo-folk music served the political interests of the ruling elites as a distraction from the gloomy political and economic situation in which Serbia was. My intention is that turbo-folk music could be considered as the primary cultural model of that age, just as much as the culture of escapism.

The study examines the organisational design and organisational effeciveness in Ecobank Nigeria Limited in Delta State. The instrument used for data collection wasorganisational design questionnaire and the data were analyzed using chi-square. The findings of the study revealed that there is a significant relationship betweenpoor technology, inappropriate organisational size and staff mix as well as poor responsive and adaptive organisational (internal) environment and organisational effectiveness in Ecobank Nigeria Limited in Delta state. The study recommended that organisation should increase the level of their technology, organisational size, staff mix as well as imbibing the culture and practice of anticipating, scanning, monitoring of internal and external environments with an eye to responding and adapting to appropriate changes and trends to actualize their organisationalset goals.

This paper analyses gambling within the notion of culture. Examining its origins, we find out that gambling is strongly intertwined with culture. Due to human development and cultural complexity, the perceptions of luck, taking risk and chance change over time, but still have an important impact on gambling activity and detecting its codes. Historical evidence of gambling shows that gambling developed with different intensity, and has been mostly affected by European colonization. Gambling culture can be distinguished depending on the historical backgrounds, institutional structure and religious backgrounds (among other factors). The secondary analysis was prepared by taking raw data from the World Value Survey (2014) and analysing the correlations between gambling components. The selected components prove to be significantly correlated with the Taking Risk factor (secularization factor) and represent a significant contribution to the finalization of our findings. The final results propose four types of gambling culture present today, i.e. Simple Gambling Culture, Denied Gambling Culture, Transitioning Gambling Culture and Pro-Gambling Culture. Simple Gambling culture has the least gambling characteristic, whereas Pro-gambling Culture is a newly introduced term which represents the contemporary gambling cultural orientations.

This paper’s main aim is to observe and confirm youth unemployment as a structural phenomenon in certain EU countries, including Slovenia. An innovative contribution is that it complements the prevailing economistic discourse with a sociological one. In the introduction, a brief history and overview of youth unemployment is presented. Slovenia is only briefly mentioned as having one of the relatively longest-lasting youth unemployment rates in the EU. In sections 2 and 3, approaches from economics and sociology are relied on while discussing three ‘types’ of EU countries with regard to different structural unemployment rates. From a sociological view, the longterm nature of youth unemployment is described, together with its impact on the social structure and (possible) socially destructive and economically destabilizing consequences. In section 4, analysis of “every-day life” indicators, namely, young people’s perceptions of work and life, reveals some surprising facts that depart from previous findings. In short: young people are more satisfied with their work and lives than older generations.