Restructuring Networks in Post-Socialism

Abstract

Abstract This book is about change in Central and Eastern Europe, and social and economic change more generally. In contrast to the dominant ‘transition framework’ that examines organizational forms in Eastern Europe according to the degree to which they conform to, or depart from, the blueprints of already existing capitalisms, this book examines the innovative character, born of necessity, in which actors in the post-socialist setting are restructuring organizations and institutions by redefining and recombining resources. Instead of conceiving these recombinations as accidental aberrations, it explores their evolutionary potentials. The starting premise of this book is that the actual unit of entrepreneurship is not the isolated individual personality but the social networks that link firms and the actors within them. Drawing insight from evolutionary economics and from the new methods of network analysis, sociologists, economists, and political scientists present their findings from Hungary, Poland, Eastern Germany, Russia, and the Czech Republic.