The main aim of the analysis is to determine to what extent preference for specific musical genres is related to social position. The study was based on data from a survey conducted in 2019 on a random sample of Poles. The explained phenomena are six genres representing broad spectrum of musical tastes: classical music, jazz, rock, rap, pop, and disco polo. The results of the analysis indicate that the diversity of musical tastes does not come down to one dimension. Family socialization, educational level, and, in part, class position exert the highest impact not only on preferences of classical music but also on liking jazz, rock and disco polo. The class effect appears almost negligent in preference for pop and rap which lead us to general conclusion that cultural stratification does not cover all forms of activity having a selective effect. Musical preferences turn out to be extremely strongly connected with parent’s cultural capital and respondents’ level of education.

This is the first insight into effect of development of nonpublic and paid schools on social stratification in Poland. Logistic and multinomial regression of the Polish general Social Survey data 1998 is conducted to test hypotheses concerning effect of the fathers’s EGP category on access to various types of schools in secondary and tertiary education. Results confirm the hypotheses that respondents from intelligentsia families are overrepresented in both secondary and tertiary paid schools and have greater odds of entry in to public tertiary education in comparison to lower non-manual categories, owners, working class and peasants. Children of intelligentsia also have more opportunities to attend “better” stationary (than non-stationary) schools in comparison to other categories. This analysis provides support for the thesis about growing role of qualitative differentiation in education.

Lifetime biographical and publication histories of 2,326 full professors were examined. A combination of administrative, biographical, and bibliometric data was used. Retrospectively constructed productivity, promotion age and speed classes were examined. About 50% of current top productive professors have been top productive throughout their academic careers, over 30–40 years. Topto- bottom and bottom-to-top transitions in productivity classes over academic careers are very rare. We used prestige-normalized productivity in which more weight is given to articles in high-impact than in low-impact journals, recognizing the highly stratified nature of academic science. The combination of biographical and demographic data with raw Scopus publication data from the past 50 years (N = 935,167 articles) made it possible to assign all full professors retrospectively to different productivity, promotion age, and promotion speed classes. In logistic regression models, there were two powerful predictors of belonging to the Top productivity class for full professors: being highly productive as associate professor and as assistant professor (increasing the odds by 180% and 360%). Neither gender nor age (biological or academic) emerged as statistically significant. Our findings have important implications for hiring policies as scientists stay in Polish academia usually for several decades.

Tadeusz Bielicki – distinguished Polish anthropologist, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), long-term director of the Department of Anthropology of PAN in Wroclaw (1971–2001), passed away on June 20, 2022. He was born in Warsaw in 1932 and began his studies at the University of Warsaw (1950–1953). These were interrupted in 1953 when he spent 6 months in prison on political charges. He was thereafter allowed to resume his studies, but at a different university. He chose the University of Wrocław. There he graduated with a M.Sc. in 1956, earned his Ph.D. in 1959, and D.Sc. in 1968. Since 1983, he has been corresponding member and, since 1996, a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1971 he was appointed director of the Department of Anthropology of PAN in Wrocław and, in 1999, Chairman of the Division of Biological Sciences of PAN. From 1992–1996 he was vice-president of the European Anthropological Association. In 1959–1960 he studied at the University of California in Los Angeles on a post-doctoral fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation for a year, and in 1967–1968 taught as Visiting Professor at Washington State University. He has also worked as Visiting Professor at Vrije Universiteit in Brussels (1989) and the University of Texas at Austin (1991). He was one of 22 co-authors of the UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice (Moscow, 1964). He was author of ca. 150 articles and research reports, many of them published in leading anthropological journals in the U.S. and Great Britain. Professor Bielicki is best known for his indepth critique of the typological concept of race (1960s), issues related to human evolution (e.g., “Deviation-amplifying cybernetic systems and hominid evolution”, 1969), and, most notably, for his anthropological studies of social stratification. During the 1970s his research centered mainly on analyses of the tempo of growth and maturation during adolescence; since 1980 his interest shifted to the use of such data (as well as of data on rates of premature mortality among adults and on the incidence of obesity) for analyses of social-class inequalities in living standards and of inter-generation changes in the magnitude of such inequalities. For his outstanding achievements in the field of science, and in recognition of the significance of his work, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.