Does capitalism emerging in Eastern Europe need as solid ethnic or spiritual foundations as some other "Great Transformations" in the past? Apparently, one can become an actor of the new capitalist game without belonging to the German, Jewish, or, to take a timely example, Chinese minority. Nor does one have to go to a Protestant church every Sunday, repeat Confucian truisms when falling asleep, or study Adam Smith's teachings on the virtues of the market in a business course. He/she may just follow certain quasi-capitalist routines acquired during communism and import capitalist culture (more exactly, various capitalist cultures) in the form of down-to-earth cultural practices embedded in freshly borrowed economic and political institutions. Does capitalism come from outside? Why do then so many analysts talk about hybridization?
This volume offers empirical insights into the current cultural history of the Eastern European economies in three fields: entrepreneurship, state governance and economic science. The chapters are based on large case studies prepared in the framework of an eight-country research project (funded by the European Commission, and directed jointly by the Center for Public Policy at the Central European University and the Institute for Human Sciences) on East-West cultural encounters in the ex-communist economies.
- Cover
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Table of Contents
- List of Tables
- About DIOSCURI
- Prologue: Going beyond Homo Sovieticus
- Part 1. Entrepreneurship: Smooth Hybridization?
- Repatriate Entrepreneurship in Serbia. Business Culture within Hauzmajstor
- A Small Miracle without Foreign Investors.Villány Wine and Westernized Local Knowledge
- From Local to International and Back. Privatizing Brewing Companies in Eastern Europe.
- Reason, Charisma, and the Legacy of the Past. Czechs and Italians in Živnostenská Bank
- Managers as “Cultural Drivers”: Raiffeisen Bank in Croatia
- The Rise of a Banking Empire in Central and Eastern Europe. Raiffeisen International
- Part 2. State Governance: Unilateral Adjustment?
- Transmitting Western Norms. The SAPARD Program in Eastern Europe
- Cloning or Hybridization? SAPARD in Romania
- Caring Mother and Demanding Father. Cultural Encounters in a Rural Development Program in Bulgaria
- Becoming European: Hard Lessons from Serbia. The Topola Rural Development Program
- Part 3. Economic Knowledge: Does Anything Go?
- Have Polish Economists Noticed New Institutionalism?
- The Sinuous Path of New Institutional Economics in Bulgaria
- Soft Institutionalism: The Reception of New Institutional Economics in Croatia
- Institutionalism, the Economic Institutions of Capitalism, and the Romanian Economics Epistemic Community
- Beyond Basic Instinct? On the Reception of New Institutional Economics in Eastern Europe
- Epilogue: Defining the Indefinable: East–West Cultural Encounters
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Back cover