Postkommunismus: Versuch einer soziologischen Analyse

Three dimensions of the emerging postcommunist order are analysed: the institutional infrastructure of markets (especially »political capitalism«), the sphere of politics (especially the structural weakness of the postcommunist state), and the developmental dilemmas as a consequence of accelerated integration in the EU. Many roots of this problems are to find in the economic and political changes of the last communist decade

Dynamik des Arbeiterbewußtseins

Drei Schwellen gilt es zu erwähnen, wenn wir über die Entwicklung der Arbeiterklasse in Polen sprechen.1. Es ist vor allem eine Barriere begrenzter semantischer Kompetenzen, die in der Vergangenheit zu einem Konkretismus der Interessenartikulation führte. Im ersten Teil dieses Aufsatzes möchte ich zu zeigen versuchen, wie jene begrenzten semantischen Kompetenzen der Arbeiterklasse deren Protest weniger wirkungvoll machten. Dies ist ein gutes Beispiel für eine Situation, in der die Struktur der Rede - mit anderen Worten die Form und nicht der Inhalt - eine ideologische Rolle spielte, indem sie objektiv das politische System verstärkte und stabilisierte. Es muß jedoch unterstrichen werden, daß genau diese begrenzten Kompetenzen bisweilen vorteilhaft sein konnten, indem sie bei Verhandlungen die Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten reduzierten und als Folge davon die Arbeiterklasse für Manipulation weniger zugänglich und in bestimmter Hinsicht radikaler machte. In diesem Zusammenhang möchte ich über Radikalismus als Problem von Vorstellungskraft und Einstellung und über die Ereignisse im August 1980 als Typus einer Kulturrevolution sprechen

Embracing the Market: Entry into Self-Employment in Transitional China, 1978-1996

This paper introduces labor market transition as an intervening process by which the macro institutional transition to a market economy alters social stratification outcome. Rather than directly addressing income distribution, it examines the pattern of workers’ entry into self-employment in reform-era China (1978-1996), focusing on rural-urban differences and the temporal trend. Analyses of data from a national representative survey in China show that education, party membership and cadre status all deter urban workers’ entry into self-employment, while education promotes rural workers’ entry into self-employment. As marketization proceeds, the rate of entry into self-employment increases in both rural and urban China, but urban workers are increasingly more likely to take advantages of the new market opportunities. In urban China, college graduates and cadres are still less likely to be involved in self-employment, but they are becoming more likely to do so in the later phase of reform. The diversity of transition scenarios is attributed to rural-urban differences in labor market structures.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39897/3/wp512.pd

The Two Parallel Contexts of Power: The Lisbon Treaty and the Global Crisis (new challenges for governability)

This paper discusses the Lisbon Treaty as a new formula for power, one that both incorporates and relies upon complexity, networks, and multivalent logic. This discussion importantly draws upon the thinking of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant. It thereafter examines the suitability of the Lisbon Treaty in meeting the challenge of the global financial crisis, and its impact on civil society across Europe

University of California Press eScholarship editions in process

Understanding the dramatic political, social, and economic changes that have taken place in Poland in the mid-1980s is one key to predicting the future of the communist bloc. Jadwiga Staniszkis, an influential, internationally known expert on contemporary trends in Eastern Europe, provides an insider's analysis that deserves the attention of all scholars interested in the region.Staniszkis presents the breakthrough of 1989 as a consequence not only of systemic contradictions within socialism but also of a series of chance events. These events include unique historical circumstances such as the emergence of the "globalist" faction in Mosow, with its new, world-system perception of crisis, and the discovery of the round-table technique as a productive ritual of communication, imitated all over Eastern Europe. After describing the development, collapse, and reorganization of a "new center" in Poland in 1989-1990, she discusses the first attempt at privatizing the economy. Her analysis of the dilemmas accompanying breakthrough and transition is an invaluable guide to the challenges that face both capitalism and democracy in Eastern Europe

Global Challenges, Culture and Development

This paper examines the comparative suitability of Chinese and Western European philosophies of power vis-`a-vis globalization. TheAuthor argues that the patent feebleness of themodernEuropean state represents the demise of the post-Enlightenment model of power, one based on uniform, hierarchically organized standards of formal rationality-and she contrasts this with China’s pursuit of steerability as based upon a stratified system of logics that deliberately hearkens to divergent standards of rationality. The Author proposes that to govern in the era of globalization means not to sniff out irrationalities as within the Enlightenment formula, but to build institutional and mental bridges between a system’s differing rationalities and topographies at both the micro and macro levels. She also offers an analysis of Russia’s ongoing radical pursuit of the Enlightenment paradigm, and notes that the weakly “theoretized,” flexible practice of the English world’s utilitarianism and pragmatism can be treated as a suitable option for a globalized world-an option deprived, however, of the intellectual seductiveness of the Asian philosophy of power. In the later case, the epistemology rather than axiology is a decisive dimensio

L'état de guerre en Pologne et sa dynamique. (Contribution à la théorie du « socialisme réel »)

Martial law pursues its course in Poland. (Contribution to the theory of «real socialism »). Tn the author's view, Poland belongs in the category of the so-called Asiatic mode of production, and has entered upon the « baroque » phase of its development. The article is written around this basic idea, which of course determines the pattern of analyses presented on the relationships between the powers-that-be and society, the Party, the government and the army. The same is true in the context of the economy, with its succession of crises and the powerlessness of the authorities, embroiled in their own inner contradictions and those of the system. This was the impossible situation which, after an interim period described as the « Solidarity interlude », the declaration of martial law and the brutal change of régime was intended to resolve. The author expresses doubts about the effectiveness of the solution, which has done nothing to remedy the basic conflicts within Poland.Selon l'auteur, la Pologne appartient à la sphère du mode asiatique de production et serait entrée dans une phase baroque de développement. L'article est centré autour de cette idée-force, qui détermine évidemment l'ensemble des analyses présentées ici quant aux relations entre le pouvoir et la société, entre le parti, le gouvernement et l'armée. Il en va de même en ce qui concerne le domaine de l'économie, avec son cortège de crises et l'incapacité des autorités, embourbées dans leurs propres contradictions et celles du système. D'où une situation devenue sans issue que la proclamation de l'état de guerre et le changement brutal de régime, après une période transitoire dite « période de Solidarité», étaient censés débloquer. Mais l'auteur doute du bien fondé de cette solution extrême, les conflits fondamentaux n'étant pas résolus en Pologne pour autant.Staniszkis Jadwiga. L'état de guerre en Pologne et sa dynamique. (Contribution à la théorie du « socialisme réel »). In: Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest, vol. 14, 1983, n°2. pp. 79-96