Polish business associations: flattened civil society or super lobbies?

This article tests two hypotheses about post-communist business associations. The first predicts weak business associations which are presented with insurmountable collective action problems by the flattened civil society inherited from totalitarianism. According to this hypothesis, no business associations are inherited from the previous regime, and associations are confronted with difficult-to-organize latent groups of large numbers of new small enterprises. The second hypothesis, as proposed by Mancur Olson, predicts strong business associations benefiting from the collective action advantages of the communist economic structure which was composed of small numbers of large enterprises. The hypotheses are tested with case studies of Poland's five most influential business associations. The conclusion is that the flattened civil society hypothesis is best borne out by the evidence. This suggests that, in other countries, political factors, rather than the standard communist economic structure, are more likely to explain the persistence of industrial super lobbies

Post-socialist Europe and its “Constitutive Outside”: ethnographic resemblances for a comparative research agenda

The “post-Socialist Europe” label has been criticized for not being able to fully capture post-1989–91 social and cultural processes in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. While some ask what was Socialist Europe?, I interrogate non-post-Socialist Europe today. This chapter examines, from a historical-ethnographic comparative perspective, present-day fragmented resemblances and disjunctures between Eastern and Western Europe, contextualizing them within their (Socialist) antecedents. By focusing on the local governance of marginalized Romani families in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Florence (Italy), I show that in both temporal regimes (pre- and post-1989) the two cities display ethnographic resemblances. However, rather than creating disparities and hierarchies, I point to the importance of ethnographic comparisons between the margins of the “West” and the “East” in order to de-dichotomize and refine our knowledge