Olga Tóth
From State-Honoured Textile Workers to Palmistry: the Hungarian Women's Magazine Nõk Lapja from 1989 to 1999

The paper presents the changes of the fifty year-old Hungarian women's magazine, Nõk Lapja as they have occurred during the past decade. Not only the inner structure of the magazine but also the role models, presented by the reports, were analysed. In the late eighties and early nineties Nõk Lapja was the only popular women's magazine. It had a culture-oriented structure. The ratio of advertisements was low and articles of report-type made up one-third of the pages. By the end of the nineties the relative importance of reports decreased to one-fifth, while advertisements took up one-fourth of the pages. Esoteric materials, horoscopes and palmistry became very important columns of the magazine. The role models, presented by Nõk Lapja, have also changed. In 1989 70.5% of women, presented in the reports, were common people. In 1999 the ratio of such common people dropped to 42%. At the same time the ratio of famous women (models, actresses, pop stars) increased. Work and politics were pushed into the background by the end of the period, while traditional family life and the tricks of beauty and fitness acquired greater importance. The gender roles presented have been very much of a stereotype and feminism is given a negative connotation in Nõk Lapja.
 

Zoltán Csabina-Marianna Kopasz-Magdolna Leveleki
Trust in Trading Relationships of Firms in the Hungarian Manufacturing Sector

On the basis of an empirical survey, we addressed the question of whether, and how far firms of the Hungarian manufacturing sector rely on trust in their customer relations. Also, we attempted to explore the factors that influence the firms' propensity to build high-trust relationships with their customers. Our hypotheses - formulated mainly on the basis of Mari Sako's analysis of buyer-supplier relations and Karl Dieter Opp's theory on cooperation - were tested on a data set of the Hungarian manufacturing sector. We found that almost 40 per cent of the enterprises have high-trust relationships with their buyers. We have to add, however, that what we were able to measure in the survey is only a specific type of trust out of the three distinguished by Sako, namely contractual trust. The term refers to the degree of reliance on formal documents as opposed to oral agreements. The level of contractual trust was found to be influenced by the nature of the products, the type of the majority owner of the firm, and finally by the level of market uncertainty perceived by the respondent.
 

Ildikó Barna-Zsuzsa Himesi
Trends and False Beliefs

In Greece the issue of education, or rather of higher education attracts the attention not only of Greek researchers, but in fact it is in the focus of the whole Greek society's thinking. After having read many articles on the issue, it was astonishing to see that though many authors said that there was considerable 'over-education' in Greece and that the country's enrolment ratios were significantly higher than expected on the basis of the level of its economic development, several of the data produced by them as proof were visibly poorly established, or if well-founded, they were based on a rather limited number of countries, selected in a way which made them completely impossible to explore. In this paper we aim at presenting surprising, and hopefully interesting findings of our analysis, based on statistical data, and employing different methods of testing.