A Future for Socialism.

Cette controverse autour du projet hydroelectrique danubien hungaro-slovaque est consideree dans cette these a la fois comme un exemple representatif de grandes problematiques (transnationalisme, contestation sociale, mondialisation et enjeux planetaires environnementaux), comme un angle d’approche pour apprehender la recomposition de l’ordre international contemporain et enfin comme un champ d’elucidation et d’application d’outils conceptuels empruntant aux relations internationales, aux politiques publiques, a la sociologie politique et a la geographie. L’attention est portee sur les acteurs et leurs interactions dans une reflexion combinant les interrogations theoriques, methodologiques et l’enquete empirique dans le but de concilier les niveaux macro et microsociologiques de la recherche. Les questions d’expertise et de militantisme, les dimensions scientifiques et environnementales sont plus particulierement examinees a travers l’etude microsociologique des pratiques, des discours et du parcours d’acteurs impliques dans cette etude de cas, dans la lignee de la sociologie de la science et des travaux portant sur les controverses socio-techniques.

Controverse socio-technique autour des barrages danubiens Gabcíkovo-Nagymaros, 1977-2004 (Hongrie/Slovaquie):Etude microsociologique des relations internationales.

A normative desire for interracialism undergirds and structures the sociology of race. However, focusing almost exclusively on racial divisions and conflicts, the sociology of race rarely subjects interracialism to explicit analysis. One consequence of this somewhat peculiar situation is that interracialism is understood negatively, as deracialization-the removal of racism. Even the few studies that appear to redress this negativity through explicit analysis reproduce it. Prototypically, there has long been a scholarly consensus that Hawaii's interracial working-class movement of the late 1930s and 1940s presupposed deracialization: that a "colour-blind" class ideology, advanced by the left-led International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, effaced racial divisions. Refuting this interpretation, this paper demonstrates that a deracializing class ideology was not straightforwardly adopted by Hawaii's racially divided workers. Instead, a leftist ideology of class served as the initial pivot for an affirmative transformation of race, producing an interracial ideology that rearticulated, rather than disarticulated, race and class. The paper concludes with several implications of reconceptualizing interracialism affirmatively.

Interracialism: The ideological transformation of Hawaii's working class

Customers in business-to-business transactions in the Soviet Union were dominated by suppliers who were in such superior positions that the situation facing customers might have been described as “supplier orientation,” with customers absorbing almost all risk as well as tolerating poor quality and irregular delivery. Economic changes in the last decade of the twentieth century introduced an outlook in Russian business which might be viewed as a form of “market orientation,” particularly among new types of firms represented by private ownership and privatized state-owned enterprises. However, political and economic turmoil characterized the Russian economy for most of that decade. This paper examines characteristics of Russian marketing management during this period including marketing orientation, innovation and aspects of organizational culture closely related to marketing management. Based on interviews with one hundred large Moscow firms in the late 1990s, the new kinds of organizational form...

Charting the Evolution of Russian Firms from Soviet 'Producer Orientation' to Contemporary 'Market Orientation'

Michael Burawoy is justly renowned for his ability to pose among the most interesting questions and challenges for sociology. His invitation to postsocialist theory is no exception, but his opposition between Marxist and neoclassical sociology may get in the way of recognizing a critical, historical, and cultural sociology beyond Marx. In this discussion, I like Burawoy’s description of the difference between neoclassical and classical sociology. Neoclassical sociologists Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley (1998) and Stark and Bruszt (1998) are more interested in exploring capitalism’s possibilities through its plurality than in elaborating the classical concern for capitalism’s systemic distinction. The neoclassical sociologists’ interest in capitalist variety also attends insufficiently to the global articulation of national capitalisms. Burawoy especially uses the common concern of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim for the individual’s estrangement from capitalism to cast postsocialist theory’s critical difference with neoclassical sociology. Burawoy’s postsocialist theory shares a cultural disposition with the classics and the authors he reviews that limits sociology’s critical capacities, however. Classical sociology does not just agonize over anomie, alienation, and meaninglessness. Wuthnow (1987, p. 27) also explains how this sociology treats culture as a “reflection” of something more real, which, through the “strategic application of skeptical scholarly knowledge,” can conquer “self-estrangement primarily by extending its knowledge of the world.” While Eyal et al. (1998) and Stark and Bruszt (1998) may not share Burawoy’s normative concerns, they are closer to his cultural disposition, and to that of the classical tradition, than what some significant currents in critical social theory would recommend. Calhoun (1995, p. 11) suggests that critical sociology might be organized around “theory that is self-conscious about its historicity, its place in dialogue and among cultures, its irreducibility to facts, and its engagement in the practical world.” The starting point for any sociology, Pierre Bourdieu (1990, p. 177) argues, should be its own sociology: “All the propo-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/320302

Postcommunist Capitalism, Culture, and History1

In this review of the relationship between marxism and East European transformations since 1989, we consider why Eastern Europe is so important to marxism and how marxists have addressed its transformations. We also point to similar analyses of these transformations generated by nonmarxists, and we review exemplary East European interpretations of marxism to demonstrate that the principal challenge in developing marxism in Eastern Europe lies outside its traditional substantive foci and methodological practices. We propose that in order for marxism to maintain itself as an integrated project without ignoring or dismissing Eastern Europe, it must do more than address questions of class and capitalist formation, problems that can be analyzed in parallel fashion without commitment to the normative aspect of socialism. It must also address directly the region's experience with, and rejection of, “really existing socialism,” rather than dismissing these and thereby allowing socialism to function as an ontologi...

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Naomi Galtz

Papers

From Marxism to Postcommunism: Socialist Desires and East European Rejections