Factory Unions Facing Asset- Strippers in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine: An Overview of Strategies

"The paper supplements the literature on post-communist organized labor with a systematic comparison of union strategies towards employers at the plant level, in the metal sector throughout the 2000s (in Romania and Ukraine). It shows how unions can bring employers to the negotiation table, and highlights strategic elements that allow unions to act in support of their members even when facing the biggest difficulties, brought by collapsing economic sectors and dwindling employer interest in production. The paper’s novel contribution lies in uncovering how trade unions cast their strategies in terms of constituting disruption to force their opponents to accept at least parts of their demands." [author's abstract

Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States, Mentalities, Modernisation

Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist-religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19th-century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived ‘core’ European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’, bypassed by “modernising” processes. This contribution focuses on (post-)Cold War discourses in social science and shows how these discourses re-produce 19th-century layers of orientalising map-making and keep East-West differences alive by tracing deficient, fragile or repressive state institutions back to alleged Eastern European ‘mentalities’

All the Roads to Market: The Soviet Union, China and the World Bank’s Narrative of Capitalism

This essay explores the consequences of postcommunist economic reform for narratives about capitalism, using the example of World Bank discourse. It shows how the World Bank’s capitalism narrative has changed to reflect post-Soviet reform complications and the growing Sino–(post-)Soviet contrast. While the capitalism narrative struggles to show that there is one (global) capitalism or market economy model, reform anomalies and the Sino–(post-)Soviet contrast turn the model into a complex political–economic hybrid. Simultaneously, the interplay between the capitalism narrative and reform anomalies highlights the World Bank’s relevance for neoliberal ideational production

The return of economic nationalism to East Central Europe: Right-wing intellectual milieus and anti-liberal resentment

This article emphasises the non-economic goals of economic nationalism and in particular its often overlooked political goals. Drawing parallels between economic nationalisms in Central Europe and East Asia, it focuses on Poland and Hungary and asks why did these countries turn to economic nationalism. The article traces this turn to ideational foundations developed by right-wing intellectuals over the last two decades, arguing that right-wing intellectuals believed that liberalism has failed what they conceived of its most important (political) purpose, the need of a radical break with the communist past. Based on a study of the writings and careers of leading Polish and Hungarian right-wing intellectuals, the article draws attention to the nature of the perceived threat to the nation. It contributes to the sociology of nationalism an analysis of how such a threat emerges and translates into a guiding idea of illiberal economic policies

An Anatomy of 'Collective Anti-Collectivism': Labor Sociology in Ukraine and Romania

This article shows that workers (their life-worlds and instances of collective action) have been conspicuously absent from the work of local sociologists by researching three sociological journals of professional associations and Academies of Sciences in Ukraine and Romania. Such an absence is particularly puzzling given the dramatic deterioration in the material situation of the working class in both countries during post-communism, some experience during Soviet times with the sociology of work in Ukraine, and the widespread worker protests in Romania throughout both decades since the fall of communism. The article reviews several possible explanations for the absence of a labor sociology, and settles on a perspective situating sociology in its wider national context and noting that the current generation of sociologists might have more in common with the countries’ ruling elites than with workers and other subaltern groups, and therefore might be reluctant to study workers and their life-worlds

The Two Faces of the ‘Global Right’: Revolutionary Conservatives and National-Conservatives

Studies of the Global Right usually trace its intellectual underpinnings to the revolutionary conservative New Right and its ideas claiming to defend an ‘ethno-pluralist’ European identity from the multiculturalist threat of a ‘Great Replacement’ through immigration. A second lineage, which we refer to as ‘national-conservative’, is less explored and is more concerned with threats to moral order and the loss of moral bearing due to liberalism’s relativism. These two intellectual lineages, and corresponding political alignments, engender different political projects of the Global Right, which is not that coherent as it seems. Taking a long-term historical-ideational perspective that underlines the power of ideologies as templates, we argue that a closer look at the different intellectual traditions of the Global Right can help explain the contrasting political preferences for socio-economic action, institution-building and transnational cooperation

From the Qualities of Products to the Qualities of Relations: Value Conventions in the Solidarity Economy in Sicily

This article explores the “quality battlefield” in the food economy – the dispute over value conventions between mainstream business actors and alternative food networks. It shows how actors in one particular alternative network – the solidarity economy – shift such notions from product qualities to the qualities of relations in production. Opposing the standardized criteria characterizing private certification schemes and organic certification, they struggle to establish the value of their products by creating and circulating verifiable stories proving their involvement in the solidarity economy. These stories further emphasize the distance to standard business motivations, for instance by accentuating the cooperative rather than competitive relations with other producers. The article illustrates the features and tensions of value conventions in alternative food networks by contrasting actors in mainstream agriculture with an expanding organization of agricultural producers adhering to solidarity economy and operating in the grocery sector in Sicily, Italy

Mean Mutual Information Based Adaptive Modulation and Coding Mechanism for Cooperative Relaying in Wireless Systems

Abstract. We propose a link adaptation algorithm for cooperative transmissions in an OFDMAbased wireless system. The link adaptation method selects the transmission type (cooperative or noncooperative), the modulation orders and amount and type of redundancy required to ensure a target block error rate at each phase of the cooperative transmission. The above parameter-values are chosen so as to minimize the number of occupied time-frequency radio resources required to transmit the Kbit log data block. The algorithm employs a BLER performance prediction method based on mutual information. The proposed link adaptation algorithm has linear complexity, but still provides a very good performance, as shown by simulation results

4-Benzyl­piperazin-1-ium chloride chloro­form solvate

The ions of the title chloro­form-solvated salt, C11H17N2 +·Cl−·CHCl3, are linked by a strong N—H⋯Cl hydrogen bond; the solvent mol­ecule also inter­acts with the chloride ion through a C—H⋯Cl hydrogen bond. Additionally, neighboring cations form weak hydrogen bonds to the anion, resulting in a supra­molecular ribbon that runs along the a axis

Screening of the Romanian maize (Zea mays L.) germplasm for crtRB1 and lcyE alleles enhancing the provitamin A concentration in endosperm

Maize occupies a significant place in the world agriculture. Yellow kernel maize contains mainly non-provitamin A carotenoids: lutein and zeaxanthin. The accumulation of provitamin A carotenoids is regulated by favourable alleles of lcyE and crtRB1 genes and could be used for the enhancement of these carotenoids in the maize grain through breeding. In this study, molecular screening of the Romanian germplasm was performed, looking for favourable alleles of the crtRB1 and lcyE genes, and the level of carotenoids was determined in a few selected lines. A number of 2746 inbred lines from seven research stations were subjected to a PCR amplification of crtRB1 and lcyE genes in order to identify the favourable alleles. It was selected 27 lines carrying the favourable alleles and nine lines with unfavourable alleles (four groups in total), from which total carotenoids, lutein, zeaxanthin, β-cryptoxanthin, β-carotene and retinol equivalents were determined by HPLC. Out of 2746 inbred lines analysed, 23.53% contained one or both genes with favourable alleles. The favourable allele of the crtRB1 gene was the most widespread (584 lines), followed by the lcyE gene (55 lines), while alleles favourable for both genes were detected in only 7 lines. Inbred lines with the favourable allele of the crtRB1 gene showed the highest levels of β-carotene and β-cryptoxanthin, while those with favourable allele of lcyE gene showed a high level of β-cryptoxanthin; the lines with favourable alleles for both genes had a level of β-carotene 60% higher than the lines with two unfavourable alleles