In the last two decades there has been an important shift towards studies of sociocultural issues in most of the social sciences and also in human geography. This thematic shift has been brought about through a number of circumstances. First there have been accelerated interactions and interdependences in the world system which have increased as economic, social and cultural relationships have come to stretch worldwide. Globalization processes have led to new social inequalities and have also been reflected in science, politics and the lives of citizens. Simultaneously, there has been growing tensions among some sociocultural macro-systems of the current world (civilizations in conceptions of Huntington 1996, or Krejcı 2004) that cannot be understood purely in terms of differentiations in economic development level, but in terms of a deeper and long-term articulation of mass value orientations and attitudes, and thus through socio-cultural embedding of actual economic and political behaviour. It seems that interactions and interdependences in the current world system have led to a scale shift in perception of differences from the level of ‘between nations’ to the one of ‘between civilizations’(Dostál and Hampl 2000). Changing conditions of economic growth and mass value orientations of populations in the rich ‘western’civilization are of specific significance and tend to increase importance of subjective factors (human and social capital), on the one hand, and articulation of post-materialist value orientations, on the other (Inglehart 1997). The stress now put upon globalization processes tends to emphasize external pressures as the source of social and cultural changes taking place in individual countries. Second, there have been pressures of posttotalitarian (or post-communist) transformation. The collapse of the communist bloc at