The scientific conference “Stratification Changes in Serbia” was held on 14th and 15th December 2012 at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Philosophy. The main goal of the conference was to clarify new tendencies in the positioning of individuals and social groups in the social structure of Serbia. This was also an opportunity to present preliminary results of the large research survey realized in 2012 by the Institute for Sociological Research on a nationally representative sample of 2,557 households. Most conference participants used findings from the latest survey, comparing them to the data collected in 2003, but other relevant data sources were also tapped.
New tendencies in social structuring were identified on the basis of changes in economic status, patterns of social mobility, value orientations, strategies in the labour market and so on, connecting them to the effects of transformation processes on the reproduction of basic social relations and life conditions. Within five plenary sessions the following themes were discussed: 1) methodological reassessment of the concept of social structure; 2) spatial aspect of social structuring at the rural, urban and regional levels; 3) different dimensions of structural positioning, such as economic strategies, education and class-kinship principles; 4) changes of social structure related to the dominant social values, particularly in the cultural subsystem and 5) political orientations and activism of social groups in Serbia.
The conference was organized within the project “Challenges of New Social Integration in Serbia: Concepts and Actors”, more precisely, the subproject “Changes of Basic Structures of Serbian Society”, with financial support provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.