Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
REFERENCES LITERATUR EDITORIAL<br />
EDITORIAL<br />
1<br />
Alexandra Krause and Vera Trappmann<br />
Seite page 6<br />
Twenty years after the fall of the<br />
Berlin wall, it is due time for a balance<br />
sheet of whether the transition from<br />
a planned economy to a market economy<br />
in Central and Eastern Europe has been<br />
accomplished or is still under way - in both<br />
cases, we would like to know what economic<br />
system has emerged. The workshop held at the<br />
<strong>Friedrich</strong>-<strong>Schiller</strong> University in <strong>Jena</strong> in October<br />
2009 brought together researchers offering<br />
answers to this question. The approach was<br />
two-fold. First, we had empirical contributions<br />
of young scholars, two of which focused on<br />
Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine, respectively,<br />
whereas two additional contributions analysed<br />
offshoring and management strategies in<br />
the automobile industry from a comparative<br />
perspective. Altogether, these papers provide<br />
evidence of the variety of capitalism in the<br />
region. Diversity, in terms of the level of<br />
modernization and market regulation achieved,<br />
is still large. Moreover, the Ukraine is not at<br />
the same level as the Visegrad four, even<br />
considering the level of corruption or informal<br />
economy alone. This finding, however, provokes<br />
the question of how to deal with this variety? Is<br />
it mirrored at other world regions? Do some<br />
countries resemble those in Western Europe?<br />
How do we explain variety among the extransition<br />
countries, in terms of different elite<br />
constellations, as Eyal, Szeleny and King have<br />
suggested, or path dependencies or the varying<br />
influence of foreign direct investments?<br />
Therefore, in a second step, we had conceptual<br />
contributions that attempted to assess whether<br />
the emergent capitalisms and the ongoing<br />
social changes in the region can still be best<br />
analyzed by transformation theory or whether<br />
the region has become affluent of a particular