Capitalism from Outside? Zentai, Violetta; Kovács, János Mátyás
2012, 20120620, 2012., 2012-06-10
eBook
Does capitalism emerging in Eastern Europe need as solid ethnic or spiritual foundations as some other “Great Transformations” in the past? Apparently, one can become an actor of the new capitalist ...game without belonging to the German, Jewish, or, to take a timely example, Chinese minority. Nor does one have to go to a Protestant church every Sunday, repeat Confucian truisms when falling asleep, or study Adam Smith’s teachings on the virtues of the market in a business course. He/she may just follow certain quasi-capitalist routines acquired during communism and import capitalist culture (more exactly, various capitalist cultures) in the form of down-to-earth cultural practices embedded in freshly borrowed economic and political institutions. Does capitalism come from outside? Why do then so many analysts talk about hybridization? This volume offers empirical insights into the current cultural history of the Eastern European economies in three fields: entrepreneurship, state governance and economic science. The chapters are based on large case studies prepared in the framework of an eight-country research project (funded by the European Commission, and directed jointly by the Center for Public Policy at the Central European University and the Institute for Human Sciences) on East-West cultural encounters in the ex-communist economies.
Recent changes in the organization of long-term care have had controversial effects on gender inequality in Europe. In response to the challenges of ageing populations, almost all countries have ...adopted reform measures to secure the increasing resource needs for care, to ensure care services by different providers, to regulate the quality of services, and overall to recalibrate the work-life balance for men and women. These reforms are embedded in different family ideals of intergenerational ties and dependencies, divisions of responsibilities between state, market, family, and community actors, and backed by wider societal support to families to care for their elderly and disabled members. This article disentangles the different components of the notion of ‘(de)familialization’ which has become a crucial concept of care scholarship. We use a fuzzy-set ideal type analysis to investigate care policies and work-family reconciliation policies shaping long-term care regimes. We are making steps to reveal aggregate gender equality impacts of intermingling policy dynamics and also to relate the analysis to migrant care work effects. The results are explained in a four-pronged ideal type scheme to which European countries belong. While only Nordic and some West European continental countries are close to the double earner, supported carer ideal type, positive outliers prove that transformative gender relations in care can be construed not only in the richest and most generous welfare countries in Europe.
The Romani women’s equality agenda is embedded in practices of political intersectionality – that is, category-based political mobilization against subordination and exclusion produced through ...multiple and intersecting societal hierarchies. A while ago, I started drafting this chapter to study the opening and closure of opportunities to articulate the Romani women’s equality agenda in Central and Eastern Europe; but by the time I had finished a first draft, important transformations were already in the making. Consequently, in the present chapter, I will take these transformations into consideration as well. I will investigate instances of intersectional politics that have taken shape along two
Abstract
The paper explores the attitudes of Hungarian civil society in the context of the war against Ukraine, the active agents of solidarity, and the general social atmosphere associated with ...welcoming displaced people. Based on a population survey from the summer of 2022, the paper draws an ambivalent picture. First, it highlights the exceptional momentum and mobilising power of civil solidarity both in terms of practical involvement and expressed attitudes. At the same time, the results also reveal the limits and vulnerabilities of civil solidarity—namely, its exposure to populist political discourses which cherish or condemn moral economies of assistance according to vested interests, as well as its embeddedness in a neoliberal reliance on citizens’ individual resources (disposable time and material means), and the salient inequalities in sharing the burdens of humanitarian support. All this reflects that the consensus and relative evenness of solidarity attitudes at the time of our survey were unevenly translated into practical help, burdening those already heavily charged with care responsibilities. With this finding, we underline the importance of exploring solidarity as a complex relationship of attitudes and practices; also, we highlight the need to include the perspectives of care in inquiries of the population’s attitude towards immigrant groups and categories. Our results are drawn from the application of multi-dimensional logistic regression models based on data from a statistical survey involving 1000 respondents representative of Hungary’s adult population.
This article is dedicated to Julia Szalai who researches the underlying reasons, consequences and mechanisms of the social exclusion of the Roma in Central and East European societies. Her work and ...her writings serve as a compass for those who examine problems of social exclusion, including the authors of this article. The present paper discusses position of the Roma on the Hungarian job-market, focusing on highly-qualified young Roma within the context of the business sphere. Our knowledge is informed by the first results of an initiative which creates bridges between disadvantaged social groups and the business sector through pro-active measures. The initiative mobilizes multinational companies, business trainers, NGOs promoting social inclusion, and academics. Both the initiative and our study intend to pursue a subtle understanding of the tangible and hidden obstacles that highly educated young Roma encounter when seeking employment, and of the dilemmas that multinational companies face in relating to these prospective employees.
This article is dedicated to Julia Szalai who researches the underlying reasons, consequences and mechanisms of the social exclusion of the Roma in Central and East European societies. Her work and ...her writings serve as a compass for those who examine problems of social exclusion, including the authors of this article. The present paper discusses position of the Roma on the Hungarian job-market, focusing on highly-qualified young Roma within the context of the business sphere. Our knowledge is informed by the first results of an initiative which creates bridges between disadvantaged social groups and the business sector through pro-active measures. The initiative mobilizes multinational companies, business trainers, NGOs promoting social inclusion, and academics. Both the initiative and our study intend to pursue a subtle understanding of the tangible and hidden obstacles that highly educated young Roma encounter when seeking employment, and of the dilemmas that multinational companies face in relating to these prospective employees.
Banking has become a salient component of the transforming economies in Central and Eastern Europe due to the fact that only few of these economies had started to establish commercial banks during ...the old socialist system, their territories perceived as fertile grounds for profit and opportunities in the rush for new markets. Due to their actual economic and symbolic power, banks tell us about the nature of privatization and its trends, mobilize social imagination about wealth and monetary power, and set the norms of actions in corporate governance and the banking sector. This comparative study will investigate the main patterns
Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of
increasing anti-migrant and anti-Roma sentiment, this book analyses
how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe. From
...backgrounds ranging from political theory, postcolonial, cultural
and gender studies to art history, feminist critique and
anthropology, the contributors reflect on the extent to which a
politics of identity regarding historically disadvantaged,
racialized minorities such as the Roma can still be legitimately
articulated.
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