Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

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