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On postsocialist capitalism

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Abstract

Unlike recent tendencies to specify the variety of postsocialist trajectories, this article attempts to characterize the common features of postsocialist capitalism, as it has developed since the 1990s in Eastern Europe. Using conceptual tools of economic sociology, the postsocialist socio-economic organization is analyzed as embedded economy, the institutionalization of capitalism as a moral project, and the pervasiveness of informality from the networks and culture perspectives. Economic development is viewed as dependent, simultaneously, on the system’s structural, political and cultural features. For postsocialist capitalism, these features include lack of state autonomy due to close coupling of political and economic roles; the embrace of greed and self-interest as legitimate motives for action; and persistence and bolstering of informality as modus operandi. Stipulations about developmental consequences are provided in the conclusion.

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Notes

  1. The emphasis is on rapid simultaneous political and economic transformations toward a capitalist democracy, which means that the scope of countries discussed here does not include countries of Central Asia and South Caucasus, nor China, Vietnam, and Laos.

  2. I thank a reviewer for suggesting this formulation.

  3. Note that I do not mean to imply that lived socialism was uniform in its expression across all of the countries under discussion here.

  4. I thank a reviewer for this formulation.

  5. This implies very conscious decision-making on the part of actors, generally. Two caveats are in order: for one, many simply mimicked the behavior they saw around them, and second, many obviously never got any of these self-advancing opportunities to take advantage of, which contributed to vastly expanding social inequality in postsocialism (Bandelj and Mahutga 2010).

  6. I transpose here the phrase that Borocz (2000) uses when he discusses the moral imperative of formality.

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Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to the Editors and reviewers of Theory and Society for engaging critically with my argument and helping me improve it. I would also like to thank Alejandro Portes for organizing an ASA session on Institutions and Development for which an early version of this article was first prepared, and to thank audiences at conferences in Yokohama and Chicago where later versions were presented. Katelyn Finley provided excellent research assistance. This piece has been long in the making, and inspired by decades of extensive travel to Eastern Europe to visit family. I dedicate it to the memory of my mother.

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Bandelj, N. On postsocialist capitalism. Theor Soc 45, 89–106 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-016-9265-z

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