Coping with Social Change: Life Strategies of Workers in Poland's New Capitalism

The concerns of the people, whose experiences are explored in this book, rarely make it through to the academic discourse and political praxis in Central and Eastern Europe. In the public discourse and in many sociological accounts, manual workers tend to be represented as disoriented victims of post-socialist transformation. But how can such an approach explain the diversity of the actual ways of coping with social change adopted by workers in the new capitalist reality? To address this question the author turns to workers themselves, to their life strategies and personal experiences. He reconstructs the processes of adapting to and resisting structural changes in working-class milieus in one of the industrial regions of Poland (Silesia). Through this in-depth analysis of 166 personal interviews with blue-collar workers, Mrozowicki reaches general conclusions. The workers rarely resemble the passive puppets of historical forces. Their ability to reflect upon their lives, upon their deeply-ingrained moral ethos, and upon their social circumstances emerge as the foundation of their efforts to overcome socially imposed limitations. Exploring the life strategies of the socially disadvantaged, this book is of interest not only to those interested in post-socialism and working class theory, but also to anybody inclined to think critically about workers' empowerment in late capitalist societies. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Table of Contents:
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER 1 IN SEARCH FOR THE AGENCY OF WORKERS CHAPTER 2 WORKERS AND CAPITALIST TRANSFORMATION: THE CASE OF POLAND Rethinking post-socialist capitalism: the frames of sociological understanding From heroes to rebels:the working class in People's Poland and Silesia Segmentation of the working-class milieux in state socialism: structural legacies The socialist makings of the working-class discourse: a cultural legacy of socialism Post-socialist capitalism and the transformation of workers' milieux Re-segmentation of the working-class milieux: persistence and change Workers and a grand narrative of transformation: the end of the working class? Challenge of understanding: sociologists, workers and a "grand transition" CHAPTER 3 LIFE STRATEGIES OF WORKERS: THEORETICAL SENSITIVITY Theories of agency and a critical realist approach The agency of the weak: rethinking working-class studies Marxism and structuralist working-class studies Embourgeoisement and its critics: the early culturalist tradition Class cultures and reflexive modernisation: new working-class studies Agency, structure and reflexivity: sociological approaches to life strategies Life strategies in late modernity: individuality's discourse and reflexivity The forms of capital, habitus and structured life strategies in Bourdieu's theory Life strategies, reflexivity and action contexts in Archer's theory Ethos, resources and reflexivity: the potential for conceptual integration CHAPTER 4 BACK TO THE PEOPLE: BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH ON POLISH WORKERS Research process Data sources: biographical interviews and secondary data Choice of informants: theoretical sampling and field work practice Data analysis: GTM coding and biographical analysis Research contexts, research sites and research participants Research sites and basic socio-structural characteristics of informants Evaluation of the research: methodological limitations CHAPTER 5 NEGOTIATIONG THE MEANING OF THE POST-SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION Devaluation of labour and the revaluation of skills Nostalgic paternalism and pragmatisation of consumption Contested communitarianism and privatisation of social bonds The opening of the public sphere and conditional freedom Embedding in history: ideological frames of remembering Neutralisation of history: the "private frames of remembering" Understanding the ambivalence: segmentation, strategies and reflexivity CHAPTER 6 FORMS OF CAPITAL, ETHOS, AND LIFE STRATEGIES OF WORKERS Body-related resources: work as an ethos and necessity Socio-psychological resources: resourcefulness and helplessness Educational resources and craft skills: redefining cultural capital Social resources at work: embeddedness in work milieu and privatism Trade union resources and trade union ethos Resources, reflexivity and career patterns: the typology Anchor careers Bricolage careers Dead-end careers Patchwork careers Social resources beyond work: embeddedness in family Embeddedness in locality and social resources beyond work and family Economic capital, pragmatism and life styles in the sphere of consumption Structured and reflexive dimensions of life projects: towards synthesis CHAPTER 7 COPING WITH SOCIAL CHANGE: THE TYPES AND DYNAMICS OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE STRATEGIES Workers' strategies after system change: typology building Embedding: the logic of communitarian persistence Integrating: the logic of collective co-determination Getting by: the logic of a privatised survival Constructing: the logic of a privatised bricolage Towards theoretical integration: ethos, reflexivity and hybridisation Social structures, agential powers and the evolution of workers' milieux CHAPTER 8 THE AGENCY OF THE WEAK: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Rethinking the agency of the weak: theoretical implications Labour studies in Eastern Europe: towards new sociological imagination? Towards the politics of empowerment LITERATURE APPENDICES Appendix 1. Narrative interviews with workers. Instruction for interviewers Phase I: Spontaneous narration Phase II : Supplementary narrative questions Phase II : "Theoretical" questions Appendix 2. The acquired sample: the structural description of workers' positions Appendix 3. Matrix of cases. Core cases and context cases SUMMARY Coping with Social Change. Life Strategies of Workers in Poland's New Capitalism STRESZCZENIE Sposoby radzenia sobie ze zmianą społeczną. Strategie życiowe robotników w nowym polskim kapitalizmie

About the Author :
Adam Mrozowicki is lecturer at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wroclaw.

Review :
"This is a very strong contribution to both the sociology of post-communist countries, and to the sociology of the working class. The theoretical framework is very rich and original."-Guglielmo Meardi, University of Warwick