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Struggles between current tenants and the heirs of former owners over property rights in post-socialist housing restitution in Romania often unfold through kinship measurements. I use the notion of 'boundary kin'—relatives who in different situations may be considered as either near or distant—to capture the role that kinship measurements play in these conflicts. Expanding ties to the past, a large number of persons are seeking restitution. In this 'inheritance bubble', the importance of the material basis of measurements in documenting and certifying kinship increases. In an effort to limit restitution, tenants question the genealogical, geographical, and temporal proximity between potential heirs and original owners, embedding kinship measurements instead in care, past suffering, and material engagements with, and knowledge of, the restitution object.

Ethnographies of groups who draw genealogical charts are relatively common in anthropology. Bringing the ethnographic gaze to bear on genealogical charts drawn up by bureaucratic and legal institutions, however, is a fairly rare methodological strategy in both the anthropology of bureaucracy and kinship studies. Hybridizing these two bodies of anthropological theory and using ethnographic material on post‐socialist housing restitution in Romania, I describe how bureaucratic and legal institutions co‐create genealogical charts and use them as tools to make the composition of kin networks legible and to verify and validate them. Several articles of the Civil Code strictly regulate inheritance, amounting to what might be called, after Malinowski, the state's bastard algebra of kinship. These legal prescriptions inscribe kinship in bureaucratic certificates, documents, and genealogical charts, which help state institutions reach legal certainty about the flow of inheritance rights. Rather than simply dismissing genealogical charts as false science, anthropologists might approach them as a mundane form of statecraft and as bureaucratic inscriptions able to author social worlds and make law active in everyday life.

AbstractHousing nationalization as a solution to urban inequalities has a long history in European social thought. This article describes housing nationalization in a state‐socialist context. Using a political economy perspective and relying on recently released archival material about housing in 1950s Romania, I argue that nationalization may be regarded as a special type of urban process. Nationalization raised the occupancy rate and intensified the usage of existing housing, desegregated centrally located neighborhoods, turned some residential space into office space for state institutions, facilitated the degradation of the existing housing stock and gradually produced a socialist gentry. Aside from similarities with other state‐socialist nationalizations from the same period, Romanian nationalization resembled the housing policies of other statist regimes. The data also suggest that, even in the context of revolutionary change, the state is a sum of multiple, often diverging projects, rather than a coherent actor.RésuméNationaliser le logement pour résoudre les inégalités urbaines n'est pas une solution nouvelle dans la pensée sociale européenne. Cette option est décrite ici dans le contexte du socialisme d'État. Adoptant l'angle de l'économie politique et s'appuyant sur des archives récemment rendues publiques concernant le logement en Roumanie dans les années 1950, cette étude affirme qu'on peut considérer la nationalisation comme un type particulier de processus urbain. Elle a élevé le taux d'occupation et intensifié l'usage de l'habitat disponible, atténué la ségrégation dans les quartiers centraux, transformé une partie de l'espace résidentiel en espace de bureaux pour des institutions étatiques, facilité la dégradation du parc de logements existant, et généré peu à peu une aristocratie socialiste. Hormis des similitudes avec les nationalisations dans d'autres États socialistes à la même époque, la démarche roumaine a ressemblé aux politiques publiques appliquées au logement dans des régimes étatiques différents. Les données suggèrent aussi que, même dans le contexte d'un changement révolutionnaire, l'État est un agrégat de projets multiples, souvent divergents, et non un acteur homogène.

Many scholars have asked themselves if and for how long they should use the concept of "post-socialism." We review some ways in which post-socialism is no longer used productively and suggest that one way to analyze the enduring effects of socialism (a useful role for the concept of post-socialism) is by paying attention to how economic and political elites in Central and Eastern Europe continue to use the ghost of state-socialism as the ultimate boogeyman, disciplinary device, and "ideological antioxidant." We call this blend of post-1989 anti-communism and neoliberal hegemony "zombie socialism," and we argue that it is a key component of contemporary capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe. We illustrate briefly some cases of zombie socialism, using data such as EU 28 statistics on labor, wages, work–life (im)balance, income tax, housing, and housing policies to show the effects of this hegemonic discourse. The presence of zombie socialism for almost three decades in Central and Eastern Europe made some of these countries "more" capitalist than countries with longer capitalist traditions in Europe. We join others who have suggested that there is nothing to transition any longer, as the "transition" is long over.

Many scholars have asked themselves if and for how long they should use the concept of "post-socialism." We review some ways in which post-socialism is no longer used productively and suggest that one way to analyze the enduring effects of socialism (a useful role for the concept of post-socialism) is by paying attention to how economic and political elites in Central and Eastern Europe continue to use the ghost of state-socialism as the ultimate boogeyman, disciplinary device, and "ideological antioxidant." We call this blend of post-1989 anti-communism and neoliberal hegemony "zombie socialism," and we argue that it is a key component of contemporary capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe. We illustrate briefly some cases of zombie socialism, using data such as EU 28 statistics on labor, wages, work–life (im)balance, income tax, housing, and housing policies to show the effects of this hegemonic discourse. The presence of zombie socialism for almost three decades in Central and Eastern Europe made some of these countries "more" capitalist than countries with longer capitalist traditions in Europe. We join others who have suggested that there is nothing to transition any longer, as the "transition" is long over.

The article identifies the extent to which the most valuable Romanian companies practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its beneficiaries. It describes the main areas of action and specific instruments of intervention. The data analysed cover the top 100 Romanian companies, as ranked by Ziarul Financiar. The corporate website of each company was analysed and subsequently codified on multiple variables. The results outline the fact that firms engage in CSR activities to a relatively high extent (49% of the companies). They adopt a vision of corporate social responsibility exclusively centred on the firm and the competitive advantages that derive from CSR activity. The wider community is represented as the primary stakeholder and beneficiary, whilst those stakeholders thought to influence the profit-making goals to a lesser extent are more often than not overlooked. Finally, companies prefer inexpensive intervention instruments and prove weak coordination with others social and political actors.

AbstractScholars have raised concerns about the social costs of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and geographers are particularly interested in the spatial expressions and implications of these costs, including apparently increasing residential segregation. Applying a range of segregation measures to 1992 and 2002 census data, this contribution studies socio‐occupational residential segregation in Bucharest. The conclusion is that Bucharest was relatively socio‐spatially mixed at both times; in fact, a modest, yet fully legible, decreasing overall trend is observable. This is at odds with many popular assumptions of the past 20 years.