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Over more than fifty years of its existence, and particularly since the 1990s, the genre of Neo-Victorian fiction has gained in popularity, readership, status and prestige not only in Britain but worldwide. Its definition and delineation, however, have undergone certain evolution over the past three decades which, understandably, has included a number of substantial metamorphoses. Ian McGuire's novel, The North Water (2016), is set in Victorian England and tells a story of a fraudulent whaling expedition to the Arctic Circle. Although in its portrayal of a moral conflict between good and evil, or more precisely, between fallible responsibility and ultimate selfishness, The North Water follows the Conradian tradition rather than that of a conventional mainstream Victorian narrative, this article argues that the novel in fact represents a distinct example of Neo-Victorian fiction which complies with the more recent development of this genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. This study has two goals. Firstly, it offers a theory according to which towards the main functions of stereotypes pertain explanation and moral justification of the places different social categories occupy in social hierarchy. The content of stereotypes is therefore a priori determined by the content of some moral norms. Attention was paid to the meritocratic norm. Secondly, it informs about results of the research in which some hypotheses derived from the theory were tested. Hypotheses. Two main hypotheses were derived and tested: (1) Respondents will infer abilities and industriousness of typical members of different social categories from status of the categories. (2) In the case of status inconsistency, abilities and industriousness which will be ascribed to members of a category will be in accordance with the prestige of the category, not with its wealth. Sample and settings. One sample of adult respondents (N=642) rated prestige and wealth of typical members of 65 different social categories. A different sample (N=269) rated their abilities and industriousness. Respondents were from 196 different Czech cities and villages. The sample of categories consisted of clusters of 40 professional, 10 ethnic and 15 other categories. Statistical analyses. The reliabilities of scales were assessed by the means of Intraclass Coefficients of Correlations (ICC), the hypotheses were tested by means of correlation analyses. Results: The results for all three clusters of categories are very similar and show that the higher the status of a category, the higher intelligence and industriousness ascribed to its members are (global r=0.798). The analyses of partial correlations furthermore show that abilities and industriousness correlate strongly and positively with prestige (pr=0.725), not with wealth (pr=-0.208) of categories. Study limitation. The results of the study lead also to the finding, that for future studies it would be probably better to construe prestige and intelligence (abilities) as multidimensional than as unidimensional, as they were in the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buying can be defined as a process in which money is exchanged for service. Money is in the process most commonly exchanged for food, clothing, transport, entertainment etc. This primary function of buying is in modern societies broadened and subtly changed so that buying takes over some new functions which may overshadow this primary one. Among these new functions rank high a tendency to regulate by the process of buying both positive (relaxation) and negative emotions (compulsion, compulsive buying). At the same time, buying may serve the function of achieving prestige due to the commodities and services bought. In the technical literature, all of these new functions are theorized to relate separately to self-esteem. One can therefore ask what is the relationship of self-esteem to these three new functions of buying. It is the question we tried to answer in our research. It was a study in which we tried to analyze at the same time the relationships of the tree new goals of buying among themselves and between each of them and self-esteem. At the same time, we put to the test three hypotheses according to which the striving to achieve each one of these goals of buying will be motivated predominantly by low self-esteem. In the study there took part 251 respondents in the age range from 14 to 67 years from a general population. The respondents answered two questionnaires, the Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and Kreklová's Scale of Reasons to Buy. This second scale aims to measure the three abovementioned reasons to buy. To analyze the psychometric characteristics of both questionnaires we used PCA (Principal Component Analysis). The results of the analyses of RSES show that the scale consists of two dimensions which we named positive and negative self-esteem dimensions. The results of the analysis of the Scale of Reasons to Buy revealed that the scale consists of the three dimensions postulated, e. g. relaxation, compulsion and prestige. To analyze the relationships among the variables we used correlation/regression analyses. Results of these analyses show that the three dimensions of the Scale of Reasons to Buy correlate highly with one another and that at the same time each of them relates differently to the two separate dimensions of self-esteem. To summarize: The dimension of relaxation was not in a significant relationship with either the positive or negative dimension of selfesteem. The dimension of compulsion correlated rather highly with both dimensions of self-esteem, but when put in a regression analyzes in which the shared variances of the other two reasons to buy were controlled these relationships have got close to zero and became nonsignificant. The dimension of prestige has shown the predicted strong relationship with the negative dimension of self-esteem. Its relation to the positive dimension of self-esteem was not significant. The results are in accord with the theories one can encounter in literature. According to these theories in the modern consumer society the processes of buying has got some new functions and at the same time assumed on some functions which were in former societies associated with different activities. Among the new functions pertain the regulation of positive and negative emotions by the process of buying, and striving to achieve status and prestige by the results of it (e.g. commodities and services bought). All of these functions are in the literature hypothesized to relate to self-esteem. The results of our study show that these expectations may be partly wrong: when controlling for the shared variances of predictors, the self-esteem scale relate substantially and significantly only with one dimension or reason for buying, namely with prestige. Those persons who have low self-esteem are probably predisposed to try to heighten their self-esteem by means of the commodities and services bought. The relationships of self-esteem to the other two dimensions of buying may be spurious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labour market is segregated both vertically and horizontally by gender. Some research has concluded that gender segregation results in a lower prestige being attributed to occupations labelled as feminine (Merkel et al. 2012, Formanowicz et al. 2012). On the other hand, gender-sensitive language that uses feminine labels for better contingency with social reality is considered a basic tool for gender equality. This article explores whether in Czech society there are differences in the level of prestige attached to 37 occupations labelled as feminine and masculine. The survey results show (sample of 642 adults that a gender difference exists only in a few occupations. In fields with a real prevalence of men or women the prestige of gender-congruent labelled occupations was significantly higher. Men's and women's opinions on occupational prestige are similar; this finding is interpreted in relation to social identity theory and system justification theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]