Conference article

Organizing and structuring of everyday life; its practices and discourses; are heavily dependent on locationality; positioning of a region; society; subregion; or a community within the globalised hierarchical structures of power. Location provides the immanent environment and frames the resources available for sustainability; prescribes micro strategies as optimal for sustainability of the everyday life; and provides discourses which inscribe meanings into daily practices. Semiperiphery is a concept used to denote those societies which went through transition (postcommunist societies); and experienced complex de-development process. Every aspect of everyday life at the semiperiphery from the early 90s until today has been affected by global transformation which had specific and often devastating impact for large parts of the population; turning many into the “losers” of transition. Prescribed neoliberal policies for transition underestimated social capacity for change and social and human costs of change. The population responded with a set of strategies to enable sustainability of their everyday life; including: conservation; re-traditionalisation; diversification of the resources bases; intensified networking; intensified migration; or intensified withdrawal into the privacy; delayed marriages; and decreased fertility rates. Those strategies; in reverse; are producing quite ambivalent effects on macro societal level: they often block possibility for change and development. One of the major obstacles is related to the quantitative and qualitative limits of the human resources. However; since the semiperiphery is an object of strategic silence; both in scientific and policy development discourses; and since this issue of population as a resource; cannot be properly framed within “North-South” paradigm; although essential for the development; it stayed largely invisible as well. Gender perspective will be addressed in relation to the specific and diversified effects transition had on both women and men.

Sustainable lifestyle; CSR; health promotion; work-life-balance; trans-disciplinary research