Postcommunist Transformation and the Social Sciences: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

(Paperback)

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This study makes a methodological effort to advance the social science debate on post-communist transformation beyond the limitations of its first decade. Offering theoretical and empirical analyses of fundamental economic, cultural and political problems of systemic change and reform in Central and Eastern Europe, the authors seek to broaden and deepen the research agenda by developing a set of interrelated approaches that are cross-disciplinary, sociologically informed, historically comparative, and global. The work's major substantive themes revolve around problems of post-communist socio-economic transformations. Specifically, it explores post-communist systemic change, the role of religion and collective identity, the significance of trust and economic culture, patterns of state-economy interactions in enterprise restructuring, the context of EU expansion, the strengths and weaknesses of economic theory and neo-liberal doctrine, and the history of ideas in the post-communist transformation debate.

Reviews

Taken as a whole, the volume represents an important contribution to the transition agenda, for the individual contributions offer corrections to that agenda. * Slavic Review *
A meaty, original, comparative study of socioeconomic change in the former Soviet system. The scholarship is uniformly excellent. An exciting work! -- Edward A. Tiryakian, Duke University

Author Bio

Frank Bnker is lecturer at the Department of Economics at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt. Klaus Mller is assistant professor of sociology at Friedrich Schiller Universitt, Jena. Andreas Pickel is associate professor of political science at Trent University, Ontario.