Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- About the Contributors -- Introduction: Postsocialist Trajectories in Comparative Perspective -- PART ONE: REINSTITUTIONALIZING POLITICS -- 1. 1989 and Its Aftermath: Two Waves of Democratic Change in Postcommunist Europe and Eurasia -- 2. China Politics 20 Years Later -- PART TWO: RECASTING STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS -- 3. Postsocialist Cleansing in Eastern Europe: Purity and Danger in Transitional Justice -- 4. Responsive Authoritarianism and Blind-Eye Governance in China -- PART THREE: REFORMING ECONOMIC SYSTEMS

The objective of this volume is to apply the economic sociology perspective to issues of work broadly defined. Economic sociology is a vibrant area of research investigating how social structures, power allocations and cultural understandings shape the production, consumption, distribution and exchange of goods and services. The volume consists of three parts. Contributors of this title include prominent senior scholars and promising junior researchers from some of the most eminent academic institutions like Princeton University, Duke University, Brown University, the University of California-Berkeley, and Ecole Normale Superieur, Paris, France.

"From Communists to Foreign Capitalists explores the intersections of two momentous changes in the late twentieth century: the fall of Communism and the rise of globalization ... The book explores how eleven post-socialist countries address the very idea of FDI as an integral part of their market transition. The inflows of foreign capital after the collapse of Communism resulted not from the withdrawal of states from the economy, as is commonly expected, but rather from the active involvement of post-socialist states in institutionalizing and legitimizing FDI. Using a wide array of data sources, and combining a macro-level account of national variation in the liberalization to foreign capital with a micro-level account of FDI transactions in the decade following the collapse of Communism in 1989, the book reveals how social forces not only constrain economic transformations but also make them possible."--Jacket

Bringing together perspectives from the new economic sociology and new cultural sociology, this paper proposes that because economic phenomena are imbued with meaning they can be studied as cultural objects. In particular, the goal is to analyze the public discussions surrounding the sales of domestic assets to foreign owners in postsocialist Slovenia, in order to find out how individuals understand cross-border transactions and what it is that structures their interpretations. The content analysis of newspaper articles shows that the debate about foreign influences is framed in relation to national interests. But the particular understandings of how foreign investment affects national interests are multiple, even opposing. They are shaped by historical and macrostructural conditions as well as the social identities of actors, who ground legitimacy of their justifications in several different, often contradictory, institutional orders concurrently available in the changing postsocialist landscape. Ultimately, cultural understandings help actors make sense of uncertain consequences of economic globalization, assess possible strategies of action and provide justifications for the positions they adopt in public debates.

In her groundbreaking scholarship on intimacy and economy, Viviana Zelizer coined the concept of relational work, or efforts in matching social relations with economic transactions and media of exchange. This article reviews the conceptual advances and empirical applications of relational work over the past two decades. I first trace the origins of the concept and discuss how it is distinct from the idea of embeddedness. I then identify variants of relational work proposed in economic sociology, including relational accounting, obfuscated exchange, clarifying and blurring practices, and emotions and power in relational work. The second part of the review discusses research on relational work in five areas: earmarking money, walking the terrain of morally problematic exchange, configuring social relations through economic activity, using social relations to negotiate economic interactions, and scaling up to relational work of organizations and institutions. I end by proposing areas of future research to examine the determinants and consequences of relational work for (dis)trust, (in)equality, and relational (mis)matches.

This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in other disciplinary fields. Second, it reinterprets some exemplary economic sociology studies by using the relational work lens to clarify the concept's utility for empirical analysis. Third, it speculates about the place of relational work in the theoretical toolkit of economic sociologists, in particular its relation to embeddedness. The paper concludes by arguing for the utility of the concept to integrate structural, cultural, and power-focused analyses of economic life, to highlight the often-overlooked role of emotions in economic exchange, and to ground an alternative to rational action theory in economic sociology.

How relevant is nationality in global economic behavior? The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the relevance of nationality affiliations and nationality conceptions in cross-border economic transactions, using the case of foreign investment exchanges. In particular, I examine how nationality affiliations may shape the types of commitments that actors will want to realize through foreign investment transactions, and how nationality categorizations influence the evaluation of potential partners in economic transactions. I also stipulate when nationality affiliations and categorizations play a more- or less-salient role. To develop these propositions I use illustrations from cases of foreign investment attempts in which investors from the West try to acquire firms in post-socialist Slovenia. The analysis is grounded in economic sociology and advances a relational understanding of nationality, seen as interpretive codes embedded in actors' cultural repertoires, situationally invoked, and made relevant (or not) in interactions.