This book addresses class formation and changes in personhood in contemporary Eastern Europe in the context of the spread of a market economy. The authors investigate processes of social closure, marginalization and elite formation, paying particular attention to their cultural expressions and to the legitimizing discourses of nationalist and neoliberal agendas. While individual and collective identities are inextricably linked with the consolidation of global capitalism, external blueprints are everywhere mediated through historically grounded experiences and local social relations. Comprising studies from Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, the volume explores practices, stories, and performances in everyday life worlds. The ethnographies show both individual and collective identities to be emergent projects, constrained by economic processes and state policies but ultimately created by people themselves as they pursue their interests and search for meaning.

Two decades have now passed since the revolutions of 1989 swept through Eastern Europe and precipitated the collapse of state socialism across the region, engendering a period of massive social, economic and political transformation. This book explores the ways in which young people growing up in post-socialist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union negotiate a range of identities and transitions in their personal lives against a backdrop of thoroughgoing transformation in their societies. Drawing upon original empirical research in a range of countries, the book's contributors explore the various freedoms and insecurities that have accompanied neo-liberal transformation in post-socialist countries - in spheres as diverse as consumption, migration, political participation, volunteering, employment and family formation - and examine the ways in which they have begun to re-shape different aspects of young people's lives. In addition, while 'social change' is a central theme of the issue, all of the chapters in the collection indicate that the new opportunities and risks faced by young people continue both to underpin and to be shaped by familiar social and spatial divisions, not only within and between the countries addressed, but also between 'East' and 'West'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Youth Studies.

This book focuses on survival strategies developed at local levels in response to changing cultural, political and economic structures in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted as the contributors engage with questions of gender, ethnicity, migration, nationalism, employment and labour patterns and changing family structures.

This interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Providing full historical context and drawing on a wide range of literature, this book explores the continuous economic and social transformation of the post-socialist world. While the future is yet to be determined, understanding the present phase of transformation is critical. The book’s core exploration evolves along three pivots of competitive economic structure, institutional change, and social welfare. The main elements include analysis of the emergence of the socialist economic model; its adaptations through the twentieth century; discussion of the 1990s market transition reforms; post-2008 crisis development; and the social and economic diversity in the region today. With an appreciation for country specifics, the book also considers the urgent problems of social policy, poverty, income inequality, and labor migration. Transition Economies will aid students, researchers and policy makers working on the problems of comparative economics, economic development, economic history, economic systems transition, international political economy, as well as specialists in post-Soviet and Central and Eastern European regional studies.

A collection of 16 essays written over the period 1984 to 1996, and so preserving perspectives at different stages of what we now know was the decline and breakup of the socialist economies of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. They consider failures and their causes of political economy reform, determinants of the collapse of the system, and the feasibility of the process of systemic change. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Is there a distinctly East European capitalism? This volume analyzes democratization and economic change in the postsocialist societies of East Central Europe. It demonstrates that the collapse of communism was not the same across the region and that the differences in how the pieces fell shaped the building blocks used for reconstructing political systems and restructuring economies in the region. Among the key concepts are the importance of social networks in the economies and of deliberative institutions in the polity that include the interests of subordinate groups in policymaking.