Social control in local government units

Local self-government is an important element of the political system of democratic countries. It satisfies numerous collective needs and also participates in the exercising of public authority. This makes it necessary to exercise control over the activities of local government units. The article deals with the issues of control carried out by members of local and regional communities, and focuses on the consequences of its legal institutionalization. An example of a new form of control was used, which is the debate on the report on the state of a local government unit. Both the institutional-legal analysis and the comparative method have been applied to verify the following thesis: legal institutionalization of social control makes it easier for citizens to undertake it, creates better conditions for controlling the actions of local and regional authorities, with the advantages of institutionalization of control outweighing its certain shortcomings.

In the article, I search for the connection between emotions culture and education by examining the affective reproduction of culture. Building on the tradition of Émile Durkheim, in the works by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Steven Gordon the concept of emotional culture is (re)constructed. Emotional culture is understood as the specific complex of emotion vocabularies, feeling rules, and beliefs about emotions. Emotions and their meaning provide a socio-psychological mechanism that controls/develops individuals and groups. In the text, it is argued that the concept of emotional culture adds a distinctive conceptual tool for studying different educational contexts and environments. To examine this argument, the article is divided into three parts. First, an overview of the concepts and theories that underlie the term of emotional culture is given. In the second part, the concept is analyzed in the light of modern cultural studies. The article closes by pointing out pedagogical implications, especially those connected with emotional education.