The Politics of Mobilizing Local Resources for Growth: ‘Urban Areas’ in Romania

In this paper I argue that sociology was a key discipline in producing relevant knowledge for managing and reimagining the socialist economic development in Romania. It played a central role in placing economic development at the subnational level, since much of the everyday economics unfolded at the level of the regions, which formed around the emerging cities. I analyse the birth of the ‘urban area’, an academic concept and a policy tool, as it was developed by Miron Constantinescu and his associate Henry H. Stahl. This was the main device that shifted economic growth to the subnational level and allowed the planners to regulate the economy as a set of inter-connected production chains. Sociology was disbanded as an academic discipline in 1948; nonetheless, through the figure of Miron Constantinescu, a key member of the Political Bureau between 1945-1957, it remained a central producer of knowledge through complex institutional arrangements, put in place in the 1950s. These institutions employed sociological figures from the inter-war sociological establishment. Their methodological skills and theoretical endeavours were put to work in applied research. I argue that some strategic developmentalist policies in socialist Romania were strongly shaped by the reworking in Marxist terms of certain key ideas of the Gustian school of a ‘sociology of the nation’

Framing Criticism and Knowledge Production in Semi-peripheries: Post-socialism Unpacked

More than two and a half decades after the demise of actually existing socialism, much of the contemporary literature produced about CEE is still organized around a dichotomy between socialism and post-socialism, transforming the region in an epistemic enclave. This paper clarifies the agencies of CEE scholars in producing these epistemic landscapes and adds to the analyses that describe the devices developed in peripheries that contribute to the asymmetries between the core and their academic hinterlands. I address the positioning games played by the CEE scholars, the modalities in which their various critical agendas became embedded in global fluxes of ideas, and their important role in co-producing the self-Orientalizing narrative on "socialism" and "post-socialism". Following the debate between Thelen (2011, 2012) and Dunn & Verdery (2011) over postsocialism as a strategic case, my contention is that the various degrees of epistemic enclavisation of the region spring from the various types of global partnerships, which forge critical alliances predicated on attributing history to West and taking out the East from the "normal" flow of history, coevalness being denied. I further develop this point by making appeal to an example, the understanding of socialist urbanization in the 1980s and 1990s. I illustrate why the over-emphasis on differences between socialism and capitalism, and socialism and post-socialism, and the underestimation of similarities, such as accumulation by dispossession and class decomposition, is a wrong analytical option. I plead for a more Gramsian understanding of counter-hegemonic alliances making

Depoliticizing the Firm: Revisiting Employability as a Strategy and a Narrative for High-Skilled and Skilled Workers in an Eastern European City

Our main aim is to unpack the notion of employability as a narrative and as a strategy by contextualising it in an Eastern European setting and by scrutinizing how it is defined and experienced by two different categories of employees: high-skilled and skilled workers. We look at the case of Cluj, a mid-size Romanian town fast developing into an IT hub and a centre of reindustrialization. Drawing on qualitative interviews with employees in the IT and HR sectors, and in medium-sized factories, we argue that personal development and gaining expertise are a successful employability strategy for the highskilled, but make the skilled workers more vulnerable and at risk of becoming redundant. We argue that the employability discourse draws new lines of divisions between employees. By shifting the lens away from the organization and towards the individual worker’s responsibility, the employability discourse depoliticizes the relationship between the employee and the employer

Where Brain, Body and World Collide

The production cross section of electrons from semileptonic decays of beauty hadrons was measured at mid-rapidity (|y| < 0.8) in the transverse momentum range 1 < pt < 8 Gev/c with the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC in pp collisions at a center of mass energy sqrt{s} = 7 TeV using an integrated luminosity of 2.2 nb^{-1}. Electrons from beauty hadron decays were selected based on the displacement of the decay vertex from the collision vertex. A perturbative QCD calculation agrees with the measurement within uncertainties. The data were extrapolated to the full phase space to determine the total cross section for the production of beauty quark-antiquark pairs

Post-socialist Europe and its “Constitutive Outside”: ethnographic resemblances for a comparative research agenda

The “post-Socialist Europe” label has been criticized for not being able to fully capture post-1989–91 social and cultural processes in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. While some ask what was Socialist Europe?, I interrogate non-post-Socialist Europe today. This chapter examines, from a historical-ethnographic comparative perspective, present-day fragmented resemblances and disjunctures between Eastern and Western Europe, contextualizing them within their (Socialist) antecedents. By focusing on the local governance of marginalized Romani families in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Florence (Italy), I show that in both temporal regimes (pre- and post-1989) the two cities display ethnographic resemblances. However, rather than creating disparities and hierarchies, I point to the importance of ethnographic comparisons between the margins of the “West” and the “East” in order to de-dichotomize and refine our knowledge