Autobiographies of Transformation

Lives in Central and Eastern Europe

Mike Keen, Janusz Mucha, Mike Keen, Janusz Mucha

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136800665
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Social Science Biographies

Autobiographies of Transformation is a completely unique history of sociology in Central and Eastern Europe in the post-Communist era.

Through the autobiographies of ten key sociological witnesses from the region, the sociological imagination is turned upon itself, resulting in a compelling and revealing account of the struggles, triumphs, and continuing challenges faced. The sociologists examined fall into three cohorts: early, mid and late career.

As participants, each of the sociologists included has witnessed the intersection of history and biography in Central and Eastern Europe. As sociologists, they have tried, and continue to try, to connect the two so that they and their fellow citizens may better understand their circumstances and the futures that may follow.

This revealing book, ideal for students and researchers of sociology, and Central and Eastern Europe studies, provides powerful and compelling autobiographical accounts, relating them to the current interest in this area's transformation.

1 Witnessing sociological lives in Central and Eastern Europe

Mike F. Keen and Janusz L. Mucha

In November of 1989, the image of workers with jackhammers perched atop the Berlin Wall, as if dancing to the beat of the rock music blaring amidst the cele-brative crowds below, powerfully and poignantly broadcast to the world the independence of Central and Eastern Europe and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union.¹ Foreshadowed by the rise of Solidarity and the revolt of the Gdansk shipyard workers in Poland almost a decade earlier, with the great transformation that followed, the climate for sociology in the region changed dramatically. Planned economies were quickly replaced by newly emerging markets, and through them increased articulation with world markets and world sociology, as well as the forces of globalization.²

The region was opened both politically and economically to foreign goods, services and investments, as well as to foreign ideas and institutions. In most of the newly emerging or once-again independent nations, new political parties were legalized, procedural democracy was introduced, and free national and local elections were held. Ethnic and other minorities and marginalized groups, i.e., gays and lesbians, became much more visible and active. Small enterprises mushroomed, commerce bloomed, and many new occupations, for example that of “entrepreneur,” were born. At the same time, many sectors of the socialist economy collapsed, especially the large state-owned industrial enterprises.

The very structure of society changed as unemployment and poverty grew quickly, and decreases in many social services followed. At the same time new elites and concentrations of wealth also emerged, leading to whole new types of social stratification and marginalization. Western culture gained a foothold: books and magazines were translated, and music and television streamed into the region, as did email and the Internet. In other words, with the transformation, upon the ruins and in spite of the remnants of the old system, a new and free civil society and state apparatus emerged as the precondition of a free sociology, as well as its primary subject matter.

Though remarkable, particularly as presented through the vivid images of the mass media, the transformation, admittedly unanticipated by sociologists or historians on either side of the Wall, did not occur overnight. As is the case with all such transformations, it was the result of a whole series of less visible and often unrecognized changes, ferment and foment. Arguably, and in hindsight, this particular transformation was the culmination of a series of complex events and forces leading up to the glasnost and perestroika that is associated most clearly with Mikhail Gorbachev, but that also had been reflected in a growing, albeit often underground, critique of and resistance to, as well as loosening of, the ideological and political control of the Communist authorities. Nonetheless, its impact on the sociology in the region, both prior to and during the last decade of the twentieth century, was considerable.

For the last decade, we have been conducting research on the great transformation that has occurred in Central and Eastern Europe, and the impact it has had on its sociology. Our first two books examine, first, the impact that the imposition of Communist rule, later the deStalinization, and then the systemic transformation that followed, had on the configuration and national traditions of the discipline within the nations of the region.³ Their focus is largely a structural one (albeit micro, mezzo, and macro), i.e., how was the discipline through its various institutions (universities and academies), curriculum and teaching, research, professional associations, journals and publishing houses influenced by the transition.

However, as C. Wright Mills noted, the sociological imagination should combine the analysis of history and social structure with that of agency and biography.⁴ In the spirit of Mills, we would like to complete our work by turning the sociological imagination upon itself with this collection of autobiographies of sociologists who actually lived through the history we have documented in our earlier work. This third completes what has become our trilogy on the recent history of sociology in Central and Eastern Europe.

Sociology in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the transformation

Our first book provides an overview of the history of sociology in Eastern and Central Europe from the period of deStalinization starting in most countries in 1956 to the beginning of the end of Communist rule and the dismantling of the Soviet bloc in 1989. This work emerged out of a particular set of historical circumstances which made new dialogues between East and West possible, the perestroika and glasnost of the late 1980s and early 1990s. When we began it, communication between scholars from East and West was not only not taken for granted, it was arduous, intermittent, and often-times prohibited.

The transformation that has occurred in such a short time has been breathtaking and unprecedented. Not surprisingly, the task of capturing this history was not an easy one, for it was itself immersed within the transformations that were occurring, and therefore subject to all the vicissitudes of history in the making. When we began our project, there were only eight countries in socialist Central/Eastern Europe within the Soviet bloc. Yet, before we were finished, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia all had collapsed and fragmented, requiring new chapters to give recognition to the newly emerged nation-states and sociological traditions within them. As the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc began to devolve into a series of newly independent countries, so too did our table of contents.

Following World War II, sociology was generally defined as a bourgeois pseudo-science throughout Central and Eastern Europe. However, the extent to which this occurred in each country varied. For all practical purposes, from 1948 to 1956, sociology as an autonomous discipline with an institutionalized structure of university positions, departments, research institutes, and a set of concomitant professional organizations and associations ceased to exist. During this period it was in conflict with, or was replaced and dominated by, officially sanctioned versions of a Marxist/Leninist historical materialism. Sociology departments were dismembered and degrees canceled, research institutes were closed and professional associations disbanded. In many countries new courses on scientific Communism appeared in sociology's place.

Sociologists in the region adopted several different strategies in response to the crackdown and purges by state and Party officials. Given the ideologically charged climate, they always found themselves challenged with the dilemma of resolving the contradictions between the desire for intellectual independence and academic legitimacy, on the one hand, and political survival on the other, especially when the results of their research contradicted official orthodoxies. One means by which the discipline continued to survive was through the “soci-ologization” of other disciplines as sociologists migrated to other faculties such as history, law, pedagogy, and journalism, or as these disciplines took up traditionally sociological questions and problems in sociology's absence.

With the beginning of the period of deStalinization in 1956, known as “Khrushchev's thaw,” the climate for sociology also began to change and the discipline began to reemerge and rebuild, though unevenly and still firmly under the watchful eye and control of the Party and state. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, sociology slowly regained ground in the institutional structures of the scientific and academic establishments. The political authorities recognized the potential of sociology and encouraged its continued development, but with certain topics (i.e. political structure, inequality, ethnicity and identity) off limits. With the loosening of the Marxist/Leninist monopoly, the discipline that reemerged was increasingly pluralistic, but it was also increasingly empirical and applied.

The final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the replacement of the previously existing totalitarian state structures with their emerging democratic predecessors, and the dethroning of the Communist Party, led to an end to the imposition of an ideological orthodoxy and a single paradigm on the discipline. In its place, intellectual freedom blossomed, and a multi-paradigmatic sociology developed. This included the continuation of research into some subjects prevalent before the transition, youth, family, rural sociology, as well as the emergence of new or previously forbidden topics, such as stratification, political sociology, ethnic relations, gender, religion, and the environment. However, this transformation did not occur through a formal and deep decommunization involving the purge of former Communist personnel, but rather was for the most part the result of a positive reconstruction of the institutional and professional foundations of the discipline, building on a process that had already begun in some nations as early as the late 1950s.

Perhaps the most dramatic development during the 1990s was the emergence of a new commercial and proprietary sector of the discipline, dedicated primarily to public opinion and to political polling and market research. Unlike in the West, where public opinion and market research roles exist but are located outside the bounds of sociological identity, in much of Central and Eastern Europe this became the dominant institutionalized sector of the discipline. In less than a decade, this non-academic professionalization has extended the institutional foundations of sociology beyond the boundaries of the university and academic spheres within which it had previously resided, and led to the emergence of new sociological roles and identities (i.e. the sociological entrepreneur).

International support from government programs, universities, foundations and development agencies, as well as corporate interests and multinational research firms, also exerted a significant influence on the discipline. Funding and investment from these sources contributed to the rebuilding of the institutional and technologi...