Professor Anthony R. Oberschall delivered his inaugural speech entitled „Sociological reflections on a family history” on the occasion of the ceremony during which he was awarded a honorary doctorate by our University on 27 September 2017. Anthony Oberschall is professor emeritus of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). After receiving a PhD at the Columbia University as a student of Paul Lazarsfeld, he taught at UCLA, Yale and Vanderbilt.

His work has focused on issues of survey research, empirical sociology, social conflicts, conflict management and peace making, and the theory of rational choice. Besides having studied conflicts, he was a consultant on the Kofi Annan plan for Cyprus and an expert witness for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Anthony Oberschall was interviewed by Júlia Sipos.

Why did you choose a topic on family history when you could have talked about numerous achievements in research for which you ar recognized internationally?
Professor György Lengyel suggested that I choose this subject for the occasion as it could be more exciting for a broader audience. Two relatives had an important public impact in Hungary. Dr. Magda Oberschall was an outstanding historian of art who wrote the well-known book on the St.Stephen crown and other works on art history. Her husband was be Olympic silver and bronze medal winner István Bárány. They separated in 1947-ben and Magda fled to Rome with her daughter Judit. Here she worked as researcher, and also made arts and cultural programmes for Radio Free Europe in Munich. Ilma Oberschall stood out as a politician. She was an MP in the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Freedom Party after the Second World War, and as such became persecuted as early as the end of 1946. Her husband was an MP of the Smallholders’ Party, they both escaped to Austria and ended up in New York. She participated in the Columbia University oral history project on the Communist takeover and the subsequent events of Hungarian history.

You have been working in a diversity of research areas, you also conducted research on Africa. Your best known book „Social Conflict and Social Movements” was published in 1973. How did your career as a researcher start?
Upon graduating from Columbia, I was immediately offered a job at UCLA. I was concerned about the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the cold war, the two superpowers competing in Asia and Africa. There was a prestigious African Studies Centre at UCLA that I had a chance to join and work with. I spent about three years in Africa, in Uganda, in Zambia, and in Congo (Zaire) on development and social change topics. The situation deteriorated in much of Africa, t corrupt dictatorships replaced the early democracies. I was unable to teach and do research and protected my students under such dictatorships. I decided to pursue other interests.

This was the period when new left and civil rights movements as well as feminist, environmental and black power movements started in the US. And Together with Charles Tilly and Mayer Zald social scientists we studied these phenomena with our students using "resource mobilization theory" ; I later wrote Social Conflict and Social Movements on these movements. Social movements took place elsewhere and young researchers in Germany, France, the Netherlands got interested in our theory because Marxism and ideological analysis failed to explain them. Our approach was empirical, and made sense to European researchers in Germany, France, Switzerland, even in Japan. When these young researchers became well established in their intellectual milieu and generated their own research program, I decided to do something else, something new.

Anti-Communist movements had just started in East Europe which came to fruition in 1989-90, except in one country, Yugoslavia. Instead of transitioning to a liberal democracy, the situation evolved into the Balkans war. The question for me was why the transition was successful in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and even East Germany, but failed in Yugoslavia? How did ethnic conflict and social division influence the building of democracy? I launched a research project to investigate this particular case, but realized that it was relevant for other conflict zones as well, like Northern Ireland, Palestine.

My Balkan publications came to the attention of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and they asked me to summarize what social science knew about the impact of xenophobic national propaganda, hate speech and fear mongering on public opinion and on the fighting forces, and about how all this rendered post-war co-operation difficult. I was an expert witness for the ICTY and provided a lreport on these topics in a war crimes trial
My publications on ethnic manipulation are based on these analyses. My book Conflict and Peacemaking in Divided Societies was published in 2007.

In the meantime the Chinese Communists had more or less come to terms with the US and the way for scientific research was opened. I was among the first U.S. social scientists in 1985-86 to teach and conduct research in China owing to a Fulbright grant. When I returned I was wondering whether I should become a China expert. This, however, would have required years of Chinese language studies and there were enough experts, and there were developments in Europe and the United States that I should pay attention to.

Since then social division has spread and has reached the United States, too. How do you see these matters in 2017?
First of all, when I studied polarization in Yugoslavia, in the Balkans and in Ireland, I did not think that it could occur in the US. In the last 5-6 years, however, what I studied in these divided societies has grown in the US. The process started as early as in 2000, at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Masses of economic migrants were arriving from Mexico and Central America and one particular section of society was not concerned about jobs, but about culture. They were white nationalists. The people who voted for President Trump came from this section and the trend has become even more powerful since then.

I am currently working and writing on perception of threat to traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and the identity politics and polarization it has spawned. Many ordinary white people are scared of being in a minority, cultural minority. A lot of politicians have playing on these fears and gotten elected. Even in places like Wyoming where there was no Hispanic or Central American population, fear was greater than in Texas with lots of Hispanics. Nevertheless, after the 2016 elections many woke up and have come to understand the societal dangers and oppose polarization.

In view of such an oeuvre and such a career, what importance does the honorary doctoral title of the Corvinus University have for you?
I am very pleased and touched by having been awarded, as I first came here in 1991 and now am retired. Nowadays I work out of sheer intellectual and personal curiosity. At Corvinus I did a joint project with Zoltán Szántó and with Zsuzsa Hantó at Godollo on the privatization of cooperative farms. Believe me or not, I had been to more villages and small towns in Hungary than those who attended my lecture on Wednesday. We toured the whole country, conducted interviews, made films. I am also an occasional lecturer in the CoDe program.

As a sociologist, what would intrigue you in today’s Hungary?
The country is ageing demographically, some of the talented young people leave the country. I am interested in how this situation is handled, and how Hungary works out its European Union relations for mutual benefit.

Although family-owned medium and large enterprises are important actors of the Hungarian economy and society, relatively little is known about them. We interviewed Attila Wieszt, research fellow of our university’s Center for Family Business (CFB) about their current research and further plans.

György Drótos, Head of CFB talked about the circumstances of setting up the Center as well as about its objectives in previous interviews. What is the scientific mission of CFB?
The most important expectation of the founder is that we should be of direct benefit to Hungarian family businesses. In addition to our teaching and event organizing activities, we are trying to achieve this goal in research from two directions: through the adaptation of foreign research findings and their publication in Hungary on the one hand, and by getting involved in and launching new research in Hungary on the other. Around 12-15 main themes can be identified in family business research , out of which our Advisory Board has selected three: succession, governance and change-innovation-adaptation. Content-wise these three themes will define the framework of our research activities. Whereas previously, one of the biggest dilemmas of international research was how family enterprises could be distinguished from non-family enterprises, internal heterogeneity of their group has become one of the main concerns in the last decade . At the same time it is not sufficient to explore their difference. It would equally be crucial to understand how and in what internal management processes they differ from each other. In connection with that, we are working on a comprehensive survey on enterprises in these months, with data collection still being underway. The findings will be published in February.

What is the aim of the research? What have been your initial objectives?
We would like to get a comprehensive and representative picture of Hungarian family businesses. Our sample will include enterprises with a yearly turnover in a range of 80 million to 150 billion forints. The survey has a double purpose: to get a picture of the state of affairs in Hungary and to define further avenues of research accordingly. In the first part of the research we wish to map the basic data on the population of family businesses, and in the second part we will examine how their heterogeneity prevails in the overall themes of succession and governance.

What kind of difficulties, obstacles have you faced so far during the research?
One of the key initial problems was the fact that the family character of enterprises is hard to define. Researchers have been attempting to provide a general definition since the 1990s, but have not come up with anything that is broadly accepted. Based on the operational definition at first we had thought that we would consider as family businesses enterprises in which family ownership is at least 50%, the intentions of succession within the family are high and at least two family members work for the enterprise. As we know little about conditions in Hungary, we had to give up this subtlety of definition and limit ourselves to 50% ownership.

How is the research done in concrete terms?
Data recording is carried out by an external partner, TÁRKI. They purchased a database from which they filtered the enterprises that are relevant for our purposes on the basis of the 2016 data. First, they take a random sample from this population and conduct phone interviews with the selected businesses. When they are ready, we will have access to a database that is representative in terms of industry, size and location. We will then take random subsamples from this population to collect data on their internal functioning. When the research is completed, one of our main ambitions is to look after and regularly update the database, the other being to continue the research – partially based on the previous findings – with in-depth interviews, with special regard to the connection between change management and governance. In this topic we are joining forces with our partner FBN-H, the co-operation forum of Hungarian family enterprises, which is the Hungarian member organization of the International Family Business Network.
It is true for Hungary, but generally also globally that relatively few management researcher are engaged in this field as a core subject. Besides, there’s a great abundance of research topics as family enterprises are one of the most widely spread business forms. Hence we are trying to address as many partners as possible in order to set up a co-operation. We are in touch with the most significant institution of the field on a global scale, the German Wittener Institut für Familienunternehmennel (WIFU). The survey referred to above was devised together with one of their leading researchers.

How far do you expect the Hungarian sample to be different from those of the Western countries? Do you expect any similarities with the other post-Socialist countries of the region?
We are expecting two things. On one hand, there is a key independent variable in the research of family businesses, which is how long they have been in family ownership, whether there is continuity. Many other things are also connected to this variable, according to some scholars even the degree of family influence. As a matter of fact in our region due to historical reasons the majority of enterprises are only first or second generation businesses. Thus, the measure that is widely applied in the Western European and in North-American surveys for the purposes of defining family influence can only be used to a lesser degree or it does not provide an accurate picture. Therefore in the survey we also inquire about the prehistory of family enterprise. Our hypothesis is that in certain business groups, business antecedents that are either real or have been present in family narratives across generations can be associated with commitment to the enterprise and in turn indirectly with the business results of the enterprise. I think that this could be true not only for Hungary, but for the entire region. In the spring we will present our findings at a conference in England. There in a section on family businesses in which besides the German researchers, there will also be Bulgarian, Polish and Czech researchers and we are curious whether they will confirm our ideas. On the other hand, also due to the historical-economic background, we expect the average family enterprise to be smaller than in Western Europe or in North America. The notion of the German „Mittelstand” does not only refer to SMEs operating in Germany, but to some extent also to the thriving large enterprises of German ownership that have a secure market position. Most of them are in family ownership and they constitute the backbone of German economy. The group of medium and large family enterprises, however, is much smaller in Hungary than in Germany and also less significant when compared to other types of enterprises, one of the reasons being that they were launched in the 1990s and have not had enough time to develop.

The ruptures, political changes of the 20th century prevented the accumulation of capital: not just financial, but also social and intellectual capital. How are these interrelated?
I presume that they are strongly interrelated and in fact complement each other. It is equally important to have family unity, a sense of ownership, the cohesive force of property as well as the entrepreneurial spirit. Although as mentioned before, we assume that there is some „invisible” continuity since even though these companies were established in the 1990s, in many families there used to be something that they carried on or kept alive. There have been, however, some large gaps like the issue of succession. This element is hardly present in our business culture or if it is, only as a choice between black and white: does the business remain in the family or does it cease to be in family ownership. Actually, a number of intermediate solutions are known that families could make use of: succession of ownership and succession of management should be separated and for both the options of transfer within the family, outside the family or mixed transfer are available. If the family enterprise has taken roots and has brought beautiful sprouts, the available financial, social and intellectual capital will all help the family in its decision: what are the needs and intentions of the manager-owner family members? What form of succession should they opt for?

Does historical experience contribute to grasping the situation?
Yes, absolutely. As a matter of fact, there is a stereotype according to which family ownership tends to be identified with small size. Less attention is devoted to medium and large enterprises. The latter ones, however, are essential: owing to family ties they are attached to the Hungarian economy, they do not move abroad, they pay their taxes here and very often they maintain intense connections with the local communities, municipalities. Also, they can serve as a good example to smaller, developing Hungarian enterprises as far as family involvement or succession is concerned. Here as well we might come up against the generation barrier: most of them are first or second generation businesses. Zwack Unicum Zrt., one of the flagship family-owned enterprises of Hungary, which is currently in its fifth generation, can unfortunately rather be considered as an exception considering the longevity of its existence.
Nevertheless, we strongly believe that we can learn much from our predecessors. A research project has been initiated with colleagues from the Institute of Management and with other colleagues from the Faculty to explore these strings. Before 1947 several large enterprises used to operate in Hungary that were recognized all over the world and had already passed their second or third generation. We think that even today we can learn much from their problems (rivalry between siblings, distribution of competences, identification with the company in the higher generations, maintenance of the entrepreneurial spirit in the successive generations, culture of estate management etc.) and from the way they addressed them.

Who are the current members, researchers of the CFB?
At present, officially there are four colleagues: György Drótos Acting Head, Barbara Meretei and Éva Vajda (both joined as doctoral students) and myself participating in the Center’s work as a research fellow. We would also like to turn to one of the important resources of the university, namely students and alumni who have a family business or are somehow attached to one. At a later stage we would like to have all of our research questions and findings validated by this group.

Máté Baksa

This year’s winner of the John von Neumann Award is Richard H. Thaler world-renowned professor of behavioral economics who held his inaugural lecture on the past, present and future of the field. Our summary comes with a commentary from Professor Péter Mihályi.

The John von Neumann Award has been conferred since 1995 to internationally recognized professionals who have contributed to the development of exact social sciences in an outstanding way. What is unique about the award is that it is granted by students, the members of the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies, Budapest. Among the former prize winners are Alvin E. Roth, Hal Varian, János Kornai and Daron Acemoglu.

Having obtained his doctorate from Rochester University, Richard H. Thaler is currently professor at the Chicago University. He is member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as of the American Economic Association where he served as president until 2015. His principal research area is behavioral economics and finances, more particularly the psychological motivations behind decision making processes. Out of his six published books the most successful has been the joint publication with R. Sunstein Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness that uses the models of behavioral economics to explain everyday problems. Besides his books, his series of articles called Anomalies that featured on a regular basis between 1987 and 1990 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, have received considerable attention.

In his inaugural lecture he proved through numerous examples that the neoclassical models of economics fail to describe reality accurately enough: the homo economicus does not behave like a genuine homo sapiens. Professor Thaler considers it the greatest strength of behavioural economics that rather than inventing bad psychology with bad models, it borrows some good psychology. In his vision formulated during the lecture, if mainstream economics is finally willing to incorporate the characteristics of human behaviour into its theoretical presumptions, behavioural economics as an independent school will eventually become superfluous and will cease to exist.

Please raise your hands if you are a homo economicus! – Professor Péter Mihályi’s reflections have been inspired by Richard H. Thaler’s lecture.

The lecture held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences provided food for thought for several months for both professors and students. Just as in his articles and books, Thaler’s starting point was that the basic hypothesis of mainstream economics, according to which people as homo economici behave rationally, that is they maximize their utility and efforts and In doing so are capable of forecasting the future in an objective way, is false. Moreover, the lecturer went further to state that it is not adequate to presume that a large number of economic actors over a long period of time behave as if they were all homo economici (the latter assumption originates from Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman).

Thaler and I both believe that this new paradigm called behavioral economics will have incalculably far-reaching consequences. Most of the cases presented at the lecture were related to finances (stock exchange bubbles, price of real estate, pension scheme investments etc) , but it is easy to see that it would be high time to rewrite the standard textbooks of micro- and macroeconomics too.

As a Hungarian economist and lecturer of Corvinus University Budapest I would like to call the attention of students interested in the topic that all that Thaler wrote and said is close to the approach that our university’s internationally known and reputed (own) emeritus professor, János Kornai has developed over the last fifty years. Kornai in fact has gone even further than what we heard during the lecture. One of the main derivations coming from his train of thought is how important it is to clearly distinguish (or-or) routine-like economic decisions from rarely or never reoccurring decisions. As a consequence, for routine-like decisions (eg. daily shopping of a housewife) the assumption of strict rationality is admissible since this is how things work in real life. By contrast, irrational, emotional decisions are typical of decisions relating to major, personal decisions involving great value (eg. career choices, having a child) or huge-volume company or state investments (eg. constructing a nuclear plant, starting a war, backing a new invention).

Máté Baksa

Should one feel guilty if they see themselves as members of the elite? Is belonging to the elite an advantage or a disadvantage in terms of social responsibility? What can the elite do in times of crisis? How can thisaffect the behaviour and circumstances of other members of society? On 19 and 20 May 2017, a two-day English-language conference was held at Corvinus University of Budapest on “Elites in Crisis”. The main organizers were Dr. Lilla Tóth and Dr. György Lengyel (of the Centre for Empirical Social Research of the Institute of Sociology and Social Policy). At the conference, works by university teachers and researchers specialized on elite research were presented. On both days, participants presented their research results and discussed the latest developments in elite research in three panels.

On 18 May, the day before the conference, Max Haller, Professor Emeritus of the University of Graz gave a lecture at Corvinus University. In his lecture “Objective and subjective trends based on findings from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)”, he pointed out that economic inequality has been increasing in several countries. He argued that this increase is not – as claimed by many authors – universal and not attributable only to the rise of neoliberalism. Other factors – political institutions and attitudes, changes in ethnic heterogeneity, socio-economic development – also played a quite important role. At the same time, Max Haller added, there is no one-to-one correlation between objective inequality and its subjective perception. He first presented the recent changes in economic inequality around the world and the way inequality is perceived. Then, in more detail, he examined the relations between objective inequalities and their subjective perception in two categories of countries – the post-Communist countries in Central Eastern Europe and Asia, and the German-speaking Central European countries (Austria, Germany and Switzerland) – with latent class analysis and multivariate analyses. Results show that populations of different countries perceive inequalities in different ways. Beside the individual’s class position, it is the changes in inequality and the differences between countries that matter rather than the level of inequality itself.

A primary objective of the conference of 19 and 20 May was to map the crises (above all, the global economic crisis and its consequences and repercussions) that hit all segments of the elite equally. As one of the speakers, John Higley, professor of the University of Texas summarized, the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 was the starting point of a crisis situation to which the elites failed to respond efficiently, as they stuck to austerity measures which prolonged the crisis. Since then, economic growth has been weak, while unemployment and underemployment have been on the rise. Massive migration to Western countries also worsened the crisis, although it was not brought about by these global financial problems only. Yet another consequence of the crisis was that confidence in political institutions was shaken, which, in turn, increased the distance between the elites and other citizens. Nicolò Conti, professor of the Unitelma Sapienza University of Rome compared the data of ten member states of the European Union, investigating how the national elites perceive the EU and to what extent they trust its institutions. Results show that although the opinion of citizens and the media reflect that Euroscepticism is gaining ground, the elites – in a different manner in each country – do trust and support EU institutions. The major supporters of the integration of the European Union are the Southern states and Germany.

György Lengyel, professor of Corvinus University and Laura Szabó from the Demographic Research Institute of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office shed light on the political elite’s trust in the Union. Their presentation, above all, called attention to a most interesting correlation: that in all member states included in the survey, the elite’s trust in the European Parliament has grown, whereas in Hungary in the period from 2007 to 2014 it weakened, and, what is more – as opposed to the facts reflected by the data of other countries – the rest of the population trusts the European Parliament more than the political elite does.

Borbála Göncz from Corvinus University spoke about the changes that occurred in the relations of the national political elite to the European Union as a supranational organization. During the time of the crisis, the elite’s attitude remained stable. On the whole, the change in opinion occurred as a result of the strengthening presence of newcomers (quite often, extremist or populist parties) in the Parliament.

Luca Kristóf, department member of the Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences conducts research in the field of the elites and the sociology of highly educated intellectuals. Using the example of theatres and theatre directors, she pointed out that the influence of the governing elite on other elite groups has been growing recently, and the political elite is redistributing cultural positions and resources. The discussion of culture as an area under survey added a new aspect to the discourse.

The conference also touched upon, among others, the Norwegian model as a good example and the elites’ contribution to the operation of the welfare state, and the crisis of democracy (seen from the perspective of the decline of participation rates, the rise of populist parties and leaders, and the new social media where information and propaganda merge). The issue of interests and conflicts of interest of the various segments of the elite was also discussed.

The conference offered the best experts an opportunity to meet and, based on their shared knowledge, discuss theprocesses in various countries that are related to or may stem from the behaviour of the elites. The speakers, investigating the issue from an international and a Hungarian point of view, argued that researching the elite and understanding its behaviour are important tasks for social scientists, as the elite is in position to influence or even modify economic and social processes.

Borbála Szczuka