Between Apprehension and Support: Social Dialogue, Democracy, and Industrial Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe

This article explores the attitudes of trade union organizations to restructuring and privatization of their enterprises to strategic foreign investors in Central and Eastern Europe\u27s biggest steel producers: Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia. Contrary to advocates of insulating technocratic decision-makers from social partners, this article argues that higher quality of democracy and concomitant social dialogue carried out at the level of the sector with union organizations that are autonomous of the government in power (as was the case in the Czech Republic and Poland), are associated with greater restructuring and with support for privatization to strategic foreign investors. In these circumstances, the unions actually pressure reluctant governments to accelerate the privatization process. By contrast, politically motivated capture of individual enterprise-level unions and splitting them from sectoral-level organizations, as occurred in countries with lower quality of democracy (Romania and Slovakia), weakens the autonomous sectoral-level organizations, which are generally supportive of restructuring. Conversely, captured unions remain far more resistant to reform than their counterparts belonging to autonomous sectoral organizations. Thus, higher quality of democracy and concomitant vibrant social dialogue safeguard industrial restructuring

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history

‘I don’t really like tedious, monotonous work’: working-class young women, service sector employment and social mobility in contemporary Russia

This article contributes a global perspective to the emerging literature on girlhood in western contexts by examining the changing shape of transitions to adulthood amongst working-class young women in St. Petersburg, Russia. As in many western countries, new forms of service sector employment and an increasingly accessible higher education system appear to offer young women new prospects for social mobility. In contrast to the increasingly impoverished and denigrated traditional pathways into work, the young women in the study derive significant value from these new opportunities, constructing narratives of self-actualisation and approximating notions of respectable femininity. Nevertheless, actual social mobility is elusive, as familiar patterns of classed and gendered stratification limit their prospects. Despite its specificity, the case thus further illustrates the limited nature of the transformations available to young women through the new forms of education and work characteristic of global neoliberal contexts

The Pain and Pride of ‘Angel Mothers’: Disappointments and Desires Around Reproductive Loss in Romania

In this article, I highlight how Romanian women make sense of the losses of pregnancies and babies. Based on 15 months of fieldwork in a Transylvanian town, and on interviews with and observations among ‘angel mothers’ (women who have lost unborn or live-born children) in the Romanian capital Bucharest, I discuss the disappointments and desires that surface when reproduction goes awry. The criticisms of these ‘angel mothers’ throw into sharp relief wider disappointments with biomedical, political, and religious establishments, and continuing social struggles in postcommunist Romania. Although women’s personal predicaments are thus deeply connected to broader structural shortcomings, their coping strategies are highly intimate and nonpolitical. Women focus on creating a spiritual bond between themselves and their lost babies—one that transcends the hardships of earthly life and makes women proud to be the mothers of little angels

Reflective Journals as a Tool for Auto-Ethnographic Learning: A Case Study of Student Experiences With Individualized Sustainability

This paper critically evaluates the use of journals as a pedagogic tool to encourage reflection, critique and self-analysis by students. Based within a postgraduate teaching module that has operated annually since 2008 and was awarded the Royal Town Planning Institute's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009, reflexive journals were employed as a method of assessment which, supplemented by conventional lectures and student focus groups, sought to explore the relations, opportunities and obstacles for sustainable development at the individual level