New Researchers on Varieties of Capitalism and Socio-economic Change
in Central and Eastern Europe

Many new scholars interested in the socio-economic change in the post-communist countries work on their research in relative isolation. The expertise and advice available to them are either from a discipline-specific or areas-studies specific points of view and connections between the two are rare. Thus, researchers lack opportunities to exchange opinions, discuss their work and receive useful criticism.

With this Working Group, we would like to offer a platform for those of us whose studies engage in analysis of the emerging forms of capitalism and socio-economic change in Central and Eastern Europe. The Working Group combines research projects of enlarged Europe in the following areas:

• finance and corporate governance
• skills and training
• welfare state and social protection
• industrial relations
• business and industrial change

We gratefully acknowledge sponsoring by Otto-Brenner Foundation for the first and second Workshop held in Oct 5-6 2007, and in March 28-29, 2008 at the LSE. Also we acknowledge greatfully support for the second workshop from the Teaching and Learning Centre at the LSE.

Regular workshops are planned to enable academic exchange of PhDs and Post-Docs that is often difficult to achieve at individual academic institutions. The first workshop was held in October 2007 at the London School of Economics. The second workshop was also held at the LSE in March 2008 (for programme see below). During the workshops young researchers will present their work and will receive comments from other researchers. Some guest speakers from academia may be invited for round table discussions as well.

The Working Group intends to organise a larger conference in Summer 2009 with a call for papers in early 2008.

We welcome new re searchers from various disciplines interested in socio-economic change in Central and Eastern Europe to join this Working Group. We value diversity of opinions and backgrounds. Our aim is to have a discussion forum for PhD and Post-Doc academics bringing together diverse disciplines and points of view.

To join please send an email with your details and short presentation of your research to:

Alexandra Janovskaia, a.janovskaia [at] lse.ac.uk or Vera Trappmann, Vera.Trappmann [at] uni-jena.de

Working Group ‘New Researchers on Varieties of Capitalism and Socio-economic Change in Central and Eastern Europe’ Colloquium 28-29.03.08, LSE in cooperation with FSU Jena

Working Group Coordinator

Alexandra Janovskaia, London School of Economics, Employment relations Group, Management Department
Vera Trappmann, Researcher at the Institute of Sociology at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, http://www.uni-jena.de/VeraTrappmann.html

Members

Eszter Bartha, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
Finishing a Ph. D. in the History Department of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, my main research interest lies in the comparative social history of East-and Central Europe in the 20th century with an emphasis on labor history.
My current project focuses on the transformation of industrial communities from socialism to capitalism, concentrating on the examples of two factory case studies (Carl Zeiss Jena in East Germany and Rába in Győr, Hungary). The two countries were chosen to examine how the partly differing, partly similar paths from socialism to capitalism impacted on the formation of working-class identities. In the 1960s both countries experimented with the reform of the planned economy but while Ulbricht’s reform failed and economic centralization was strengthened under Erich Honecker, the new economic mechanism in Hungary, which was implemented in 1968, gradually opened the country to market socialism. After the change of regimes, the GDR adopted the welfare system of West Germany that mitigated the social costs of industrial re-structuring. Hungary, on the contrary, experienced the dismantling of the socialist welfare system. I use the factory case-studies to make a systematic comparison of the different national trajectories of the collapse of socialist regimes and the rise of the new, capitalist system.
Contact: hphbaa01 [at] phd.ceu.hu

Maria Bytchkova, LSE
Contact: M.Bytchkova [at] lse.ac.uk

Roxana Bratu, LSE
Actors, Practices and Networks of Corruption: The Case of Romania’s Accession to EU Funds: My project explores the mechanisms of accessing EU funds in the Romanian context by focusing on the strategies employed by Romanian entrepreneurs in testing the new economic opportunities. It proposes an ethnographic investigation of the actors, practices and networks of “corruption” in accessing SAPARD funds (Special Pre-Accession Funds for Rural and Agricultural Development). The research follows the encounters between three main types of actors, generically called the entrepreneurs (the ones who access the funding), the brokers (consultancy firms who mediate the access to the funds) and the bureaucrats (officials employed by SAPARD Agency). The project’s premise is that the Romanian entrepreneurs are active and creative actors of European integration in an ongoing process of learning and adaptation. They rely on the old patterns of behaviour seizing new opportunities at the same time and adjusting their responses to structural demands in order to maintain and improve their life trajectory.
Contact: r.bratu(a)lse.ac.uk

Juraj Draxler, CEPS, Brussels
For my PhD I deal with the problems of the political economy of the post-communist welfare state. I try to see how the conjuncture of economic and political factor leads to the adoption of certain social policy solutions and try to describe how the situation might change in the future.
In my work that is not PhD-related, namely, in whatever I produce as a research fellow at CEPS, I deal with EU-wide social policy challenges, such as the prospects for different pension reforms or the impact of globalisation the European social sphere.
Contact: juraj.draxler [at] ceps.eu

Esmeralda Gassie, Graduate Centre of Business, Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, Co. Limerick, Ireland
Kinship network influence on SME development
The focus of this work is to study the type of influence kinship networks have on SME development in Albania. In the family business theory, kinship has been defined mostly as the nuclear family. Many authors have shown that family involvement has a negative impact on business performance, measured as the profitability of the firm. The resulting conclusion is that kinship involvement should be avoided and that other (economic) determinants to business development should be prioritised. This includes developing legislation on the protection of minority shareholders, ensuring a fluid credit allocation and a well functioning bank system, or to summarize facilitate the development of private and individual property. It is the foundation of EU SME development policies. Nevertheless in front of the obstacles to implement effective institutional structures in Albania, emerges the importance of the kinship network as a pertinent analysis factor. As a work tool, the extended family network seems more appropriate in this context. The objective of this work is to take into account the social specificities of Albania and include them in policy making.
Contact: Esmeralda.Gassie [at] ul.ie

Tim Goedemé, Research Group: Centre for Social Policy – Herman Deleeck, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, University of Antwerp
The focus in my PhD research is on the evolution of the income situation of the elderly in the Eastern EU member countries from before communism until today. The purpose is not only to picture their relative income levels, but also to detect and explain changes in the contribution of the market, government, community and family to their final incomes. This in turn will help to get more insight into the evolution of their income (in)security.
Contact: tim.goedeme [at] ua.ac.be

Katarzyna Growiec, Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
In my empirical research on social capital, I have been either using the ISSP datasets or constructing my own survey-based measures of several dimensions of social capital. In particular, I have been examining the ISSP 2002 dataset in order to quantify different kinds of social capital in Poland and to work out its implications for social trust, subjective well-being, and authoritarian tendencies. I have already obtained several interesting results that I have presented at ESA conferences. The logical next step for me would be to conduct comparative analyses between the countries to check which findings are universal and which are specific to the Polish society.
Contact: kgrowiec [at] sns.waw.pl

Igor Guardiancich, Department of Social and Political Science, European University Institute
Institutional Degeneration and the New Pension Orthodoxy
After 1989, CEE countries inherited pension systems characterised by an unfair mix of social insurance and social assistance. Public dissatisfaction and financial crises cleared the path for innovative, paradigmatic multipillar reforms. Implementation, however, did not live up to the high expectations. Ten years later, retirement systems in CEE stand as a model of partial failures and unintended consequences. Most are once again in dire need of a structural overhaul.
Applying a historical institutionalist framework, it will be shown that a number of countries underwent agency-based and structural institutional degeneration. These two phenomena capture those situations where structural transformation takes place, but where, in practice, the old institutional structures ‘contaminate’ the new institutional arrangements, thereby enabling the blending of old and new logics of action. The imparted lesson is that implementation may be every bit as problematic as a successful legislative phase.
Hasty, unilaterally legislated institutional designs are antecedent conditions for the phenomena. The expectations of involved actors fail to adapt, as neither policymakers nor private pension providers play by the rules of the game. Institutional complementarities are not gainfully exploited, since unfortunate policy solutions render the funded pillars costly and inefficient. In order to empirically sustain the argument, the cases of Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia will be presented.
Contact: igor.guardiancich [at] eui.eu

Leo S. Halepli, LSE
How do complementarities in instititutional structures constraint/benefit the structural integration processes of migrants and their children in Europe? Preliminary quantiative analysis of second generation Turks across Europe lays bare some fundamental differences. Holding parental background constant (income and education levels, place of residence, etc.) Turks hold comparable (in a lot of measures equal) status with the native population in societal insitutions in Germany. In the Netherlands, however, parity of life chances are significantly constrained. This is suprising as until the late 1990s Germany is a self-proclaimed “no immigration country,” whereas with its long history of a multi-pillar, multicultural society Netherlands should be a social heaven for immigrants. As such, the comparative research design also opens up the possibility to evaluate the effectiveness of multiculutural policy making on integration outcomes. It is not multiculturally oriented policies but the coherence of institutional structure (and the incentive-compatability of policies) that determine level and depth of integration. Tracing this argument to non-structural fields (i.e. residence choices, entrepreneurship levels, criminal activities, political participation and orientation) shows that the argument travels beyond the institutions of capitalism.
Contact: L.S.Halepli [at] lse.ac.uk

Eva Jansova, K.U. Leuven
The PhD study is interested in minimum income schemes in the new EU member states of Central Eastern Europe, namely the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia. The main focus is on the question to what degree minimum income schemes in these countries function to guarantee minimum protection. Therefore, attention is paid to the links between the designs of minimum income schemes in Central Eastern Europe and their power in terms of assuring protection and adequate living standards to all people in need. The comparison of safety nets is conducted using the model of welfare production, which allows the examination of outcomes of chosen income transfers and refers to the different stages of welfare systems (Hill and Bramley, 1986). Using this model we can further study the relations between different stages of minimum income programmes, with particular attention to the links between inputs and outputs or outputs and outcomes. Besides that, research will also outline the development of these schemes and their possible integration among minimum income schemes existing in Europe.
Contact: eva.jansova [at] student.kuleuven.be

Alexandra Janovskaia, LSE, Employment relations Group, Management Department
Industrial upgrading of the Central European subsidiaries of automotive multi-national companies (MNCs) is a phenomenon that is not well understood. This PhD project starts with the assumption that MNCs have a central role in today's political economy. Its focus is on the evolution of production value chains, product strategy, human resource management and labour relations of a large automotive German MNC in Central Europe (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia). Yet, although the MNC and its subsidiaries are at the centre of analysis, strategies of collective actors such as local and national trade unions are also considered. It is the interaction of actors' strategies and their embeddedness in national institutional environments that are argued to have contributed to the industrial upgrading of the Central European subsidiaries. Theoretically, by introducing a stronger role of agency, this research project would like to contribute to overcoming the structural limitations of neo-institutionalism.
Contact: A.Janovskaia [at] lse.ac.uk

d’Artis Kancs, LSE, Department of Geography and Environment
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kancs
Contact: kancs [at] lse.ac.uk

Tatiana Karabchuk, The State University Higher School of Economics
Russian Labour Market: new tendencies, labour law and employment, types of employment, non-standard employment, job instability, gender aspects of non-permanent employment, human capital and remuneration.
Contact: tkarabchuk [at] hse.ru

Lucia Kurekova, Department of International Relations and European Studies, Central European University, Hungary
In my dissertation I analyze labour migration flows in the enlarged EU with a special emphasis on the new accession states. My other research interests are related to political economy of transition in general and varieties of transnational capitalism, car manufacturing, and politics of foreign direct investment in Central and Easter Europe in particular.
Contact: kurekova_lucia(a)phd.ceu.hu

Lena Pellandini-Simanyi, LSE, Sociology Department
Contact: simanyi [at] lse.ac.uk

Raluca Petre, Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw
My PhD thesis focuses on the transformation of the field of journalism in Romania in the context of emerging capitalism. The main theoretical apparatus is that of Pierre Bourdieu, but I use as well historical institutionalism and ideas from the sociology of work and professions. The main hypothesis is that while the discourse on transformation has been amply produced by journalists, the structural transformations inside the field point to a continuity of low autonomy of this sphere of action in
Romania. Thus, that the political limitations that were characterizing the communist understanding of journalism have been replaced by economic ones, in the context of changing property regime. One of my main findings is that this profession lost the momentum of controlling its own means of production in the early nineties, and one of the main reasons was the limited economic knowledge of the actors in the field of journalism.
Contact: rpetre(a)sns.waw.pl

Iain Reid, SSE
The post 1989 countries of Central Europe recognise that film making is an important statement of national identity but have found it difficult to maintain viable film industries: American culture dominates; language limits the international market for locally produced films; former state film practitioners have been slow to adapt to commercial pressures; state authorities find it difficult to identify suitable projects; employment legislation and practices hamper the creation of the necessary pool of freelance skilled labour. The research project, organised through SUKI (the Freelance Workers in Culture and Media of Slovenia), has examined film employment in Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and Slovenia and also looked to the practices of other small European countries, especially Sweden and Denmark, to see what lessons can be drawn from their film industries.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/EROB/staff/academicStaff/reid.htm 
Contact: i.reid [at] lse.ac.uk

Sonja Strohmer, University of Vienna, Department of Industrial Sociology
Western Direct Investments in Central and Eastern Europe: Forward and Backward Effects on the Labour Relations in MNCs’ Headquarters and Subsidiaries
Research Questions: Do foreign direct investments of multinational companies help to democratise the world of employment?
What strategies do multinational corporations pursue regarding the industrial relations practices in their subsidiaries?
Do Western European companies with their subsidiaries in Central and Eastern Europe strengthen the workers’ participation rights in these countries or do the investments - via feedback effects - have a negative impact on industrial democracy in Europe.
Research Design:
The research questions are investigated by a qualitative research design. Subject of the study are two MNC in manufacturing as well as two MNC in the service industry with their headquarters in the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria respectively and their subsidiaries in the Czech Republic. Partly-structured expert interviews are conducted with two to four representatives of the headquarters and their respective subsidiaries.
Project-website (English): http://www.node-research.at/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=54&Itemid=151 
Contact: sonja.strohmer [at] univie.ac.at

Katerina Svickova, Central European University, Department of International Relations and European Studies
My research is driven by a question of what drives the industrial and service sector upgrading in the Central and Eastern European countries and to what extent and how government policies can influence it. I am studying especially the skills-related aspects of the upgrading process and of the government policies.
Contact: Iphsvk01(a)phd.ceu.hu

Christopher Swader, GSSS, University of Bremen
I investigate how the capitalist economic culture affects the intimate social values of its citizens in three ‘most-dissimilar’ post-communist societies of China, Russia, and Eastern Germany. Despite their varying cultures, histories, communist pasts, and transition conditions, I ask whether similar tensions between economic and social values have arisen due to the common transformation from a planned to market economy. I use mixed methods. First, I compare face-to-face interviews with young new-rich businessmen, managers, and entrepreneurs on the topic of intimate social values with the parallel interviews conducted with their own fathers in order to determine both likely value changes across the wider population and the specific mechanisms of value change in each society. . I also perform a trend analysis on quantitative data from the World Values Survey’s (WVS) 1990, 1995, and 2000 waves to confirm or deny such value changes across each society and the post-communist world as a whole. Findings suggest marked intergenerational differences in values, with the younger generation in each country exhibiting more self-oriented and less traditional values than their fathers, which results in greater self-direction but also in a loosening of intimacy and declining focus on normative transmission to the next generation.
http://www.gsss.uni-bremen.de/index.php?id=cswader
Contact: cswader [at] gsss.uni-bremen.de

Vera Trappmann, Friedrich-Schiller University Jena
My dissertation analyses the restructuring patterns of steel industry in Central and Eastern Europe. Objectives are to define the influencing factors in the area of conflict between transformation and Europeanisation that lead to restructuring. Second the consequences for employment are of high interest. The study looks into the instruments of adapting personnel and what happens to those workers who are made redundant following restructuring.
Biographical research with ex-steelworkers helps to highlight individual coping strategies following restructuring. As a last element, the local labour markets are investigated in order to understand the societal context in which restructuring and individual coping strategies take place. Under the prism of restructuring steel industry, all four areas of investigation contribute to a better understanding of how many factor have an impact on social change in Central and Eastern Europe.
Contact: Vera.Trappmann [at] uni-jena.de

Narcis Tulbure, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
My research is an anthropological exploration of the concomitant reorganization of money and values in post-socialist Eastern Europe. I try to understand these social processes by looking at the contemporary recreation of capital markets in Romania. More concretely, I study ethnographically the contentions generated by the collapse of several mutual funds in 2000 that affected over 200,000 investors involving the loss of considerable sums of money. Simultaneously, I study the controversial establishment of “Property Fund” by the Government as the solution to compensate the owners of assets nationalized by the communist regime.
My research differs from previous analyses of monetary practices in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Many of those have focused either on monetary aggregates and the policies aimed to control them (in economics or political science), or on the role of money in market exchanges and the social practices involving cash (in anthropology and sociology). While few of the earlier studies have focused on more abstract notions of money or on the social construction of financial schemes and forms of monetary accumulation, my research addresses specifically such processes. They constitute the ideal context for the study of the reorganization of money, values, and social relations during the post-socialist period.
Contact: nst4 [at] pitt.edu; narcistulbure [at] yahoo.com

Olaf van Vliet, Leiden University, Department of Economics
The aim of my PhD research is to give insight into the impact of European integration on national social security systems and to explain differences of this impact between member states. In particular, this research focuses on (un)employment policies and social inclusion policies. An important problem is to analyse whether policy changes at the national level have been caused by EU-level factors rather than global or domestic dynamics. Especially in light of the debate on the open method of coordination, it is difficult to examine whether EU policies lead to convergence of social security systems. Therefore, a main contribution of this research is the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis in a systematic comparison of countries. To examine the impact of European integration on national social policies, countries will be compared in two steps, based on the theoretical framework. First, convergence of social policies in the EU members will be quantitatively analysed. Based on these findings and on theoretical grounds it becomes possible to select a small number of interesting cases to do case studies. To control for the effects of globalisation, the selection of cases may, next to EU member states and non-EU member states, also include new EU member states.
http://www.law.leiden.edu/organisation/taxlawandeconomics/economics/vliet.jsp
Contact: o.p.van.vliet [at] law.leidenuniv.nl

last modified: 2008-05-13