his book has been inspired by the international conference on Adult Learning and Active Democratic Citizenship organized under the scholarly leadership of Ewa Solarczyk-Ambrozik and a team of staff members of the Continuous Education Section of the Department of Education, Adam Mickiewicz University, who worked in cooperation with the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults and, in particular, with John Field and Michal Bron. The event took place in September 1999 in Poznań. All of the presentations were reports on empirical studies carried out by their authors. This was in line with the event's aim of describing and assessing the status of studies on democratic citizenship carried out in diverse national, cultural and institutional contexts. A study of the highly diverse features of active citizenship provides an indication of the changes in this area. Such changes are precisely the topic of this publication.