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PREDOMINANTLY A RURAL NATION, Poland is most often depicted with urban scenes: steelworkers, trade unions, Communist party members, and Solidarity meetings. In contrast to this industrial vision, Reluctant Socialists, Rural Entrepreneurs views historical and recent changes and their agrarian consequences.During her many years in the Polish countryside, Dr. Nagengast has observed,studied, and worked side by side with farmers and other members of the agrarian class. Here she provides a first-hand perspective on the monumental failures of the Polish version of socialism, which were largely due to decisions that led the nation-state down a distinctly capitalist path to agrarian development. On the basis of her extensive research, Nagengast makes chilling forecasts about the impact of the accelerating development of capitalism on the culture, politics, and economy of Poland.This book will be useful to anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars interested in Eastern European and socialist studies.
PREDOMINANTLY A RURAL NATION, Poland is most often depicted with urban scenes: steelworkers, trade unions, Communist party members, and Solidarity meetings. In contrast to this industrial vision, Reluctant Socialists, Rural Entrepreneurs views historical and recent changes and their agrarian consequences.During her many years in the Polish countryside, Dr. Nagengast has observed, studied, and worked side by side with farmers and other members of the agrarian class. Here she provides a first-hand perspective on the monumental failures of the Polish version of socialism, which were largely due to decisions that led the nation-state down a distinctly capitalist path to agrarian development. On the basis of her extensive research, Nagengast makes chilling forecasts about the impact of the accelerating development of capitalism on the culture, politics, and economy of Poland.This book will be useful to anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars interested in Eastern European and socialist studies
Among the East European nations, Hungary has been noted in recent years for permitting, even encouraging, family entrepreneurship in agriculture. In this highly empirical study, Ivan Szelenyi and his collaborators explore this phenomenon, affording a rare view of the reemergence of private sector activity in a socialist society, and offering new insights into the very origins of capitalism. In the years since the government relaxed its policy of forced collectivization, approximately ten percent of rural Hungarian families have taken up entrepreneurial opportunities in agriculture. Why they have chosen this course--and why ninety percent of family have chosen to remain in proletarian or cadre positions--are central questions in Szelenyi's inquiry. The theory advocated here is one of "interrupted embourgeoisement." Those people who, during the years of Stalinism, found occupations in which they could successfully resist the dual pressures of proletarianization and cadrefication are the ones now able to reenter the interrupted embourgeoisement trajectory. As a result, the communist "revolution from above" has been challenged by a somewhat unexpected "revolution from below," in the process producing a socialist mixed economic system that seems to be as different from Soviet--style communism as it is from Western capitalism. "This is a very, very important work, combining rich primary research by Szelenyi and four colleagues with a major 'step toward a theory of articulation of a state socialist mixed economy.' . . . Using surveys from 1972-73 and 1982-84, the authors traced life histories to identify variables that showed why families responded differently to proletarianization, formation of a new working class, or embourgeoisement."--World Development
This book explores major shifts and reorientations in the recent history of American Anthropology, reflecting the author's vision of what anthropology is and what it has the potential to become. The title phrase 'changing fields' can be read in two ways: One meaning refers to how, since the mid-1960s, the larger national and global social, intellectual, and political fields within which American anthropology is situated have profoundly changed. The second meaning refers to how, in response to these changing fields, the author, like many other anthropologists, changed the locations of his fieldwork along with his research problems and theoretical perspectives. The book engages three fundamental intellectual-political challenges that American anthropology is destined to confront (or at its peril, avoid): becoming more self-reflexive, achieving theoretical and methodological holism, and defense of universal human rights.
The concept of ?peasant? has been constructed from residual images of pre-industrial European and colonial rural society. Spurred by Romantic sensibilities and modern nationalist imaginations, the images the word peasant brings to mind are anachronisms that do not reflect the ways in which rural people live today. In this path-breaking book, Michael Kearney shows how the concept has been outdistanced by contemporary history. He situates the peasantry within the current social context of the transnational and post?Cold War nation-state and clears the way for alternative theoretical views.Reconceptualizing the Peasantry looks at rural society in general and considers the problematic distinction between rural and urban. Most definitions of and debates about peasants have focused on their presumed social, economic, cultural, and political characteristics, but Kearney articulates the way in which peasants define themselves in a rapidly changing world. In the process, he develops ethnographic and political forms of representation that correspond to contemporary postpeasant identities. Moving beyond a reconsideration of peasantry, the book situates anthropology in global context, showing how the discipline reconstructs itself and its subjects according to changing circumstances.
The transition from socialism in Eastern Europe is not an isolated event, but part of a larger shift in world capitalism: the transition from Fordism to flexible (or neoliberal) capitalism. Using a blend of ethnography and economic geography, Elizabeth C. Dunn shows how management technologies like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and standardization make up flexible capitalism's unique form of labor discipline. This new form of management constitutes some workers as self-auditing, self-regulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to self-manage.Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' self-concepts; how changes in "personhood" relate to economic and political transitions; and how globalization and foreign capital investment affect Eastern Europe's integration into the world economy. Dunn investigates these topics through a study of workers and changing management techniques at the Alima-Gerber factory in Rzeszów, Poland, formerly a state-owned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan.Alima-Gerber instituted rigid quality control, job evaluation, and training methods, and developed sophisticated distribution techniques. The core principle underlying these goals and strategies, the author finds, is the belief that in order to produce goods for a capitalist market, workers for a capitalist enterprise must also be produced. Working side-by-side with Alima-Gerber employees, Dunn saw firsthand how the new techniques attempted to change not only the organization of production, but also the workers' identities. Her seamless, engaging narrative shows how the employees resisted, redefined, and negotiated work processes for themselves.
This book focuses on survival strategies developed at local levels in response to changing cultural, political and economic structures in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted as the contributors engage with questions of gender, ethnicity, migration, nationalism, employment and labour patterns and changing family structures.
The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical-in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities-about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation-have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.
Poland in the Modern World presents a history of the country from the late nineteenth century to the present, incorporating new perspectives from social and cultural history and positioning it in a broad global context Challenges traditional accounts Poland that tend to focus on national, political history, emphasizing the country's 'exceptionalism'. Presents a lively, multi-dimensional story, balancing coverage of high politics with discussion of social, cultural and economic changes, and their effects on individuals’ daily lives. Explores both the regional diversity within Poland and the country’s place within Europe and the wider world. Provides a new interpretive framework for understanding key historical events in Poland’s modern history, including the experiences of World War II and the postwar communist era.