Powerful European countries in late 18th and early 19th centuries supported religious minorities and expanded missionaries’ activities, thus paving the way for social changes and evolutions. Having understood international circumstances and internal situations, Iranian Jews took influential and useful steps in changing social system. The Qajar Dynasty, in line with the demands of international Jew institutions, agreed with the establishment of new Jew institutions. The present paper tries to find an answer to this question: How did the Jews change their social system during the mentioned period? The paper hypothesis is that with the support of their international institutions as well as powerful European countries, the Jews urged Qajar Dynasty to provide a suitable background for the evolution of their social system.

The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

The concept of social capital is gaining increasing popularity among economists and governance practitioners. This is due to the recognition of the fact that a high level of social capital is important for the creation of socio-economic development of countries or territories – economic areas with a high level of connections between entities, organisations and residents. The formation of social capital, understood as the ability to cooperate with various social groups and operate efficiently within these groups, depends on the political system as well as the adopted norms and attitudes, education, styles of management in business organisations and public sphere entities, family ties, motivation to act, etc. The aim of the paper is to indicate various limitations of social capital development and to demonstrate that it is important to involve different communities in its formation In addition, attention is drawn to the fact that social capital generates externalities that are essential for the efficiency and eff ectiveness of governance in territorial systems, both in the economic and public utility sphere.

The paper focuses on the social education of younger students, which I see as an important area of activity that enables a better understanding of oneself, others and the world. However, this can only be achieved if social topics include issues arising from the needs of individuals and social expectations and if expository methods of teaching are replaced by a reflective problem approach. & en “the different one” will cease to be perceived as inferior, dangerous, marked by stereotypes, and will seem interesting, worth knowing, and the world will become a space for the child to explore and discover in order to know it better and act in it more skillfully. The paper is a study report. The starting point for discussion are two conceptual categories of “the inactive bystander effect” and “the active bystander effect” taken from the Heroic Imagination Project by Philip Zimbardo, which I illustrate with the results of ethnomethodological studies conducted among 7–9-year old children during their classes about social issues. The research objective is to reconstruct the features of social knowledge and the process of its acquiring in the classroom. The paper includes a theoretical part that explains the idea and nature of social education with the emphasis on so-called new thematic areas resulting from the needs of individuals and social expectations. Then the paper describes the concept of the studies. The next section presents the research outcomes and highlights several areas of analysis, including lesson topics on social education, methods of their implementation, and the social importance that is revealed during communication practices. The final part contains research conclusions and summarizing reflections.

Contemporary school is exposed to a number of tensions and conflicts arising from the difference in expectations of everyday interactions. in particular, this can manifest itself in difficult situations for which shall be the student's social maladjustment or a threat to social maladjustment, because the multiplicity of involved actors can express different beliefs about the same substance and procedure changes desired and their effectiveness. The solution thus understood the conflict of expectations may be an institutional alliance, instead too far-reaching assumptions about the collaboration.

One of the key issues in contemporary urban studies is to consider the city from the perspective of culture and consumption, which are treated as new drivers of urban development and economic prosperity, the essence of urban ways of life, and arenas for the implementation of urban policies. In a consumer society, cities become important nodes where collective and individual consumption takes place on a massive scale. The urban system organizes capabilities and provides the resources for consumption, thus facilitating various kinds of lifestyles. As a result, the urban space operates as an arena of competition, where different consumer orientations and social categories strive physically and symbolically to occupy ground, produce meanings, and create belonging in the spaces and places that constitute the city. In applying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a “social field,” the aim of the article is to show how the space of social positions corresponds to the space of cultural practices. Drawing on the study of cultural and leisure activities in Wrocław, four general categories of urban residents are revealed and characterized by their distinct positions in different dimensions of the social space. The analysis also points to social capital (social networks) as an efficient new principle of cultural differentiation. The paper closes with the author’s concluding remarks and guidelines for further research.

The article includes considerations and author’s proposals concerning the regional dimension of social policy. This aspect of social policy has not been investigated widely so far. The scope of regionalism and its forms are linked with the dominant social doctrine in a given country. They reflected in the ratio of territorial self-governments’ own incomes against those of the state budget, and in the institutional freedom they have in the area of benefit structuring, that is in decentralization. In the case of Poland, the political changes connected with the doctrinal ones hamper the development of regional social policy. This may have a negative impact on the coordination and implementation of social policy actions undertaken on different government levels and on the adjustment of social benefits to the needs of a region’s residents.

Semi-structured individual in-depth interviews were conducted to explore and compare which social norms with regard to the debt-incurring process are important to Poles with various experiences of indebtedness. Thematic analysis within a constructionist framework identified the social norms important in the borrowing process for Poles and revealed, as expected, a number of differences between people with various indebtedness experiences. Model borrowers have a significantly different approach to debt than unreliable debtors and non-borrowers. Model borrowers seem to be oblivious to the negative sides of loans as well as indicate fewer reasons for justifying not repaying obligations than others. For unreliable debtors, loans are a quick way to solve financial problems. They borrow money out of necessity rather than to finance any larger, long-term investments and have their own private rules for borrowing. Non-borrowers, although aware of borrowers’ higher standard of living, emphasize that debt is associated with permanent stress and psychological burden. Model borrowers, unlike the others, declare that in their immediate vicinity are only those who use and pay their loans in a timely manner.

Our article considers social remittances and social change in Central and Eastern Europe. We show how migration scholarship can be embedded into the wider study of social processes and relations. ‘Social remitting’ sometimes seems to be little more than a slippery catchphrase; however, this article defends the concept. If it is defined carefully and used cautiously, it should help the researcher to think about what, in addition to money, is sent from one society to another and exactly how, thus shedding light on important and insufficiently studied aspects of migration. A close-up view of the processes by which ideas, practices, norms, values and, according to some definitions, social capital and social skills are transferred by migrants across international borders helps researchers to understand more pre-cisely how migration contributes to social change or, in some cases, prevents it from occurring. Our article reviews some of the most interesting arguments and findings presented recently by other scholars and discusses aspects of social remitting which particularly interested us in our own research. The context of our research is social change in Poland: we attempt to understand how migration has con-tributed to wider patterns of social change since 1989 and exactly how it intertwines with other social trends and globalisation influences. This entails a careful focus on both structural conditions and agency and therefore on social remittances.

The article discusses how to research the impact of migration on social change in sending countries, without using a development studies framework. It argues for greater attention to the lives of ‘stayers’. A comprehensive approach to migration impact should begin by using mainstream sociological re-search to identify overall social trends in the origin country, before considering migration as one de-terminant of change. The case study is social remittances in contemporary Poland. Social remittances are understood to include not just foreign ideas, but also those resulting from migrants’ reflections on their own changing lives. One way to investigate how such social remittances ‘scale up’ to create cul-tural change is to consider the meso-level of regional migration culture. Taking the example of changing gender roles, I discuss Polish sociological and migration scholarship before presenting my own quan-titative and qualitative data on stayers’ opinions about maternal migration. I show how stayers in re-gions with high levels of migration can become persuaded to condone maternal behaviour which is at odds with traditional views on gender roles and the importance of the extended family. Migration cultures are, however, not so visible in other parts of Poland or in Polish cities. The final part of the article employs the concept of migration sub-cultures – pockets of migration exposure and expertise among particular social groups. Examining the case of Wrocław, a prosperous city which might appear to be untouched by migration influences, I argue that such sub-cultures are probably more prevalent than might be assumed.

The author supports the claim that attempts to formulate a universal definition of the term “populism” are not worthwhile, because the sense of the term is usually determined by a specific social context. Understanding the utopian nature of populism provides a better understanding of the utopian nature of democracy and allows for a humble departure from dreams of a perfect social order, because, as has been shown in numerous survey studies, the contemporary shift of social mood, attitudes, and opinions toward some version of populism is a relatively simple consequence of the deficiencies of democracy in its neoliberal version.

The literature shows that researchers used a wide variety of types of guilt manipulation. A common feature of these studies was that the subjects were not able to doubt their guilt. Additionally, these methods did not take into account the psychometric measurement of this emotion, as well as the possibility of simultaneously inducing other feelings, such as sadness or anger. In a carefully designed experiments, we found a method that is approachable to arrange, which additionally seems to be free from these methodological flaws. In our study participants were shown an arranged message suggesting that the experimenter’s work has been destroyed. In experiment 1 (N = 44), we showed that the method proposed by us significantly affects guilt. In experiment 2 (N = 89), we replicated our result, additionally demonstrating that our procedure significantly affected only the emotion of guilt (compared to other emotions) - which is a novelty. It also has been shown that complying with the request of the victim (conditional forgiveness) makes us feel less guilty, but it does not restore liking to this person - which was established by previous research. The discussion section summarizes the results, indicates their limitations, and proposes directions for future research.