Postcommunist Transformation and the Social Sciences: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

This book is a methodologically self-conscious and intellectually ambitious effort to advance the social science debate on postcommunist transformation beyond the limitations of its first decade. Offering theoretically innovative and empirically current analyses of fundamental economic, cultural, and political problems of systemic change and reform in central and Eastern Europe, the authors broaden and deepen the research agenda by developing a set of interrelated approaches that are cross-disciplinary, sociologically informed, historically comparative, and global. The book’s major substantive themes revolve around problems of postcommunist socioeconomic transformations. Specifically, the book explores postcommunist 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 neoliberal doctrine, and the history of ideas in the postcommunist transformation debate. Bringing together leading experts in the field to illustrate the fruitfulness of multidisciplinary analysis in understanding socioeconomic transitions, this work will be valuable for economists, sociologists, and political scientists alike.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Postcommunist Transformation: Context and Agenda Chapter 2 Transformation as a Subject of Economic Theory Chapter 3 The Crisis of Transition as a State Crisis Chapter 4 Trust in Transition Chapter 5 Networks, Social Capital and Leadership: Methodological Remarks on Approaches to the Study of Postcommunist Transformation Chapter 6 Comparative Economics and the Study of Russian Transition Chapter 7 Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk: The Cultural and Institutional Effects of Western Models Chapter 8 Global, Transnational, and National Change Mechanisms: Bridging International and Comparative Approaches to Postcommunist Transformation Chapter 9 Economic Transformation, Moral Resources, and the State in Postsocialist Societies: On the Comparative Analysis of Transformation Paths in Central and Eastern Europe Chapter 10 Transformation Process, Modernization Patterns, and Collective Identities: Democratization, Nationalism, and Religion in Postcommunist Germany, Poland, and Russia Chapter 11 The Path-Dependence of Transitology Chapter 12 An Excursion to the Transitology Zoo: Comments on Béla Greskovits Chapter 13 Commentary on Béla Greskovits, "The Path-Dependence of Transitology"

About the Author :
Frank Bönker is lecturer at the Department of Economics at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt. Klaus Müller is assistant professor of sociology at Friedrich Schiller Universität, Jena. Andreas Pickel is associate professor of political science at Trent University, Ontario.

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