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This paper seeks to explain the evolution of housing policy in Hungary in order to throw light on the character of redistribution under state socialism, and on the conditions under which employers intervene in the housing sphere. Changes in housing policy are explained by a model which emphasizes developments in the Hungarian economy, such as the rise of the second economy, changes in labour market competition, and the changing power of large firms, and their consequential effects on employer motivation and capacity to intervene in housing to recruit, motivate and retain their labour force. Whereas for Szelényi state socialist redistribution is inherently regressive, the model advanced here both draws attention to variations in the regressiveness/progressiveness of housing policy and offers an explanation of these changes in terms of the changing balance of forces acting on the state, and in particular the importance of large employers and the opportunities open for them to use housing to resolve their labour problems. The greater role of employers in the housing sphere in Hungary is linked to the `resource-constrained' nature of state socialist economies and to the interpenetration of economic and political spheres, and is hence argued to be a structural feature of state socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a Hungarian study of social class differences in the speech of 65 six year old children from 5 primary schools in Budapest. Speech samples were collected from stories which were elicited by a series of pictures. Five quantitative indices of context-dependence were constructed; and, on the basis of these indices, contexts dependence was related to the child's own social background and to the social composition of the school. It was found that the speech of `advantaged' children was structurally more complex and less context-dependent than the speech of `disadvantaged' children. Overall, the study demonstrates the applicability of the concept of context-dependence in a non- English speaking country, and provides yet another demonstration of the influence of social class differences on speech codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]