DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE MEASUREMENT OF SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK SOCIALIST SOCIETY.

This article discusses different approaches to the measurement of social differentiation of the Czechoslovak socialist society. At Evian, at the Sixth World Congress of Sociology, the sociological public was acquainted with the project of an empirical macro-investigation which was carried out by the end of 1967 in Czechoslovakia. The entire investigation is the result of the efforts of a 20-member collective of workers from both the Czech countries and Slovakia. The report presented here must be viewed as an information on the basic results of this collective work, in which the author of this paper took part. The author calls attention to the fact that some theoretical postulates and interpretations of the empirical data obtained by this macro-investigation are now subject to theoretical discussions in Czechoslovakia and will undoubtedly be submitted to further critical analysis. The conclusions presented so far may, therefore, be conceived as an introductory opening of a broad problem area from the Marxist positions, rather than as some final word of Marxist sociology in the research of the social structure of the socialist societies.