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Capitalism without compromise: Strong business and weak labor in Eastern Europe’s new transnational industries

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Abstract

This paper contributes to the debate on the social impact of globalization. It focuses on the mediating role of the sectoral pattern of transnational production relocation to the postcommunist economies of Eastern Europe. We argue that the collapse of the socialist heavy industries and the eastward relocation of traditional light industries initially forced the social conditions of the East European countries to converge at the bottom and deepened the gap between the West and the East. Later, the east-ward migration of high-skilled labor and capital-intensive industries and jobs led to decreasing social disparity between the West and some of the former socialist countries. However, convergence appears uncertain, costly, and uneven, and coincides with increasing social disparity within the group of East European new members and candidates of the European Union.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Central European University, Budapest

    Dorothee Bohle (assistant professor of political science) & Béla Greskovits (professor of international relations and European studies)

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  1. Dorothee Bohle
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  2. Béla Greskovits
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Additional information

Part of this research was funded by a FESTO grant. We are grateful for very insightful comments and criticisms of our three anonymous reviewers. We also profited enormously from the discussions of earlier versions of our manuscript at the Political Economy Research Colloquium of Cornell University, the Visiting Fellow Seminar of the Center for European Studies of Harvard University, and the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series on “Transnational and Transcultural Europe” at the Institute for European Studies of Cornell University. Our special thanks go to David Brown, Stephen Crowley, Christoph Dörrenbächer, Arthur Goldhammer, Ron Herring, Peter Katzenstein, Neva Makgetla, Andrew Martin, Mitchell Orenstein, David Ost, Dieter Plehwe, Jonas Pontusson, Jörg Rössel, Mary O’Sullivan, Sid Tarrow, and Christa van Wijnbergen.

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Bohle, D., Greskovits, B. Capitalism without compromise: Strong business and weak labor in Eastern Europe’s new transnational industries. St Comp Int Dev 41, 3–25 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686305

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