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AbstractIn this introduction, the author contextualises the research into social stratification in Serbia as a long-term project on the transformation of class structure in that country. The researchers in this project have established how the systemic transformation in Serbia unfolded, doubly conditioned by the more general European processes of postsocialist transformation and the specific conditions in Serbia. The surveys on representative samples of the adult population in the whole of Serbia were conducted in 2003/2004, 2012 and 2018. The author lays out the methodological basis andthe contents of the studies included in the special issue.

The author analyses changes in value orientations in Montenegro between 1989 and 2015, examining on the basis of survey data the changes in the values that regulated the economic and political subsystems. He looks first at the period immediately preceding the breakdown of state socialism, in order to identify the spread of values relevant to the regulation of an economic subsystem which may be labelled 'redistributive statism', and 'authoritarian collectivism' within the political subsystem. He then shows how far Montenegrin society was penetrated by values pertinent to the competitive capitalist order, as well as to economic and political liberalism. He examines the changes in the modes of social reproduction and demonstrates how liberal values in fact replaced the previously dominant redistributive and authoritarian-collectivist ones. Not least, the author establishes that value changes occurred on many levels rather than simply following a linear trajectory from one system to the other.

The author reviews the basic facts necessary to understand the specific process of Montenegro's capitalist transformation in the past thirty years or so, a process particularly influenced by certain characteristics of the political system. The survival in power of one political party throughout the period of systemic changes, as well as the more than twenty-year personal rule of Milo Đukanović which continued despite the introduction of liberal-pluralist principles, are primarily explained by the control of the state apparatus by the ruling elite. Alongside that was a low level of economic development. In addition, ambivalent attitudes of the populace to Montenegro's independence from Serbia and the interethnic relations of Serbs and Montenegrins have played their own role. In the second part, the text displays the leitmotif underlying the contributions to the thematic section on Montenegro in this issue.