Accession - UAA-1989-134

A. Matejko was born in Warsaw to a family of the Polish intelligentsia: his father was an engineer, his mother - a lawyer. Before the outbreak of World War II, he completed grade three of t gymnasium. Under the German occupation, he worked for a while in a forced labor camp. Shortly after the war he graduated from a technical (water and drainage) high school, and in 1945 enrolled in the program of Co-operative Studies at the University of Warsaw. Matejko received his Master's degree in 1948.

In the early 1950s, Matejko worked in the Institute of Housing Construction. After political changes and the so-called "thaw" which occurred in Poland after 1955, Matejko returned to the University and received a fellowship from the Population Council of New York. This enabled him to continue specialization as a sociologist in the United States at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he received his second M.A. degree in sociology. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation at Warsaw University in 1962. He studied under the supervision of such Polish sociologists and humanists as e.g. St. Ossowski, M. Ossowska, K. Dobrowolski and others.

Upon his return from the United States, Professor Matejko continued teaching at the University of Warsaw. At the same time, a number of his book-length studies appeared in the 1960s, such as, for example, Sociology of the Workplace (1961), Industrial Sociology in the United States (1962), Culture of Collective Work (1962), Man and Modern Technology (1964), Social Conditions of Creative Work (1965), Sociology of Work (196S). Matejko wrote over thirty books and a great number of articles, treatises, papers, reviews, and interviews
published in many languages and in countries on all the continents. He became a pioneer in applying modern American and West European methods of sociological research in Poland.

In 1968-1970, Matejko taught in Zambia, at the University of Lusaka. In 1970 he moved to the University of Alberta, and remained associated with this university for the following 30 years until his retirement and death in 1999.