Communication: Polish-Finnish Seminar.

This article provides information on a seminar on social change and social structure held in Vuoranta near Helsinki, Finland in November 1976. Eighteen sociologists from Poland and about twenty from Finland participated in the event. It was organized as part of an exchange programme between the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Finland. The practical arrangements were made by the Research Group for Comparative Sociology at the University of Helsinki. The Polish group was led by professor Wlodzimierz Wesolowski and the Finnish group by professor Erik Allardt. The process of preparing the papers for the seminar was somewhat unusual. The main theme was divided into fourteen separate topics, including class structure and stratification, social mobility, political systems, family, regional development, cultural participation and others. For each topic a Polish and a Finnish participant met before the seminar and agreed on the general content of the paper to be prepared, the idea being to emphasize the comparative nature of the seminar. In one case the respective participants succeeded in writing an integrated paper in which the comparative aspect was central. In general, there seemed not to be great differences in the sociological orientations of the two groups.