TOL STORE BY COUNTRY "Poland"

Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor

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 Rzeszow, 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.

Restructuring Regional and Local Economies: Towards a Comparative Study of Scotland and Upper Silesia

Throughout both Western Europe and the former Soviet bloc, there has been a transition away from traditional heavy industry in certain peripheral areas. This has necessitated a complete restructuring of local economies of such regions. This volume brings together researchers and practitioners from Scotland and Poland to compare their experiences of regional development and restructuring in areas of former heavy industry. As Poland approaches EU entry, the comparisons have greater salience; the Polish are eager to learn from Western experience while the West will become more involved in Central European development. The book is divided into four main sections: the first examining economic transformation and restructuring; the second focusing on social partnerships and their role in regional economic development; the third looking at enterprise initiatives and development; and the final section questioning the role of FDI. It concludes by bringing together the findings from both countries, critically analysing the different policies, incentives and multi-level structures involved in regional economic development. In doing so, it aims to provide a fresh perspective on the relevant policy matters and stresses the importance of building appropriate institutional capacity to promote development.

In 1945, Russian forces advancing from the east attacked the German city of Danzig, and the German residents fled. As the Russians took control of the city, Poles driven from their native regions moved into the stately, now abandoned, homes. Hanemann, a German and a former professor of anatomy, refused to flee after the mysterious death of his lover. As Danzig became the Polish city of Gdansk and slowly relinquished its German identity, the old and new inhabitants were forced to interact. The narrator's family was driven out of Warsaw and settled into Hanemann's building. They take in a troubled young woman without a country, who struggles with her elusive and violent past. As the characters intermingle, they strive to define a city that no longer has a history of its own; their own stories define its nature, and reality becomes a blend of old and new. Chwin skillfully describes a city in as much chaos as its inhabitants, striving anew to forge a new sense of identity.

The best known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

After the collapse of communism there was a widespread fear that nationalism would pose a serious threat to the development of liberal democracy in the countries of Central Europe. This book examines the role of nationalism in postcommunist development, focusing in particular on Poland the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It argues that a certain type of nationalism that is liberal nationalism has positively influenced the process of postcommunist transition towards the emerging liberal democratic order.

Caviar and Ashes : A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968

"In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska." Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.

Marci Shore begins with this generation’s coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

Meddling in Middle Europe: Britain And the Lands Between, 1919-1925

Addresses the much-ignored history of British policy towards Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland following the creation of nation states in Central Europe at the end of the First World War. Lojko convincingly argues that the absence of trust in the new political settlement and the discrediting of the tradional channels of diplomacy resulted in British influence in the region.

From Solidarity to Martial Law: The Polish Crisis of 1980-1981: a Documentary History

95 documents on the events that represent a pivotal moment in modern Polish and world history: 16 months between August 1980 when the Solidarity trade union was founded and December 1981 when Polish authorities declared martial law and crushed the nationwide opposition movement that had grown up around the union. Transcripts of Soviet and Polish Politburo meetings give a detailed picture of the goals, motivations and deliberations of the leaders of these countries. Records of Warsaw Pact gatherings, notes of bilateral sessions of the communist camp provide additional pieces to the puzzle of what Moscow and its allies had in mind. Materials are included from Solidarity, too.

The EU's Transformative Power: Europeanization through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe

Between 1989 and 2004, the EU's conditionality for membership transformed Central and East Europe. The EU had enormous potential power over the whole range of domestic politics in the candidate countries. However, the EU was able to use that power at a few key points in the process leading to their accession. The EU's long-term influence worked primarily through soft power and through voluntary rather than coercive means. During the membership preparations, the EU built many different routes of influence into the candidate countries' domestic policy-making through 'Europeanization'. The Central and East Europeans voluntarily took on the Union's norms and methods, guided by the European Commission, in a massive transfer of policies and institutions. However, the EU missed important opportunities to effect change as well. The EU's Transformative Power explores in detail how the EU used its influence to control the movement of people across Europe, through both coercive use of conditionality and voluntary methods of Europeanization.

The New Atlanticist: Poland's Foreign and Security Policy Priorities

This book is an authoritative account of Poland's emerging foreign and security policies and will contribute to an understanding of the foreign policy preferences of an enlarged EU.
* Evaluation of Poland as by far the largest and most vocal of all the countries joining the EU
* Exploration of Poland's strong support for US policy over Iraq, its military potential, its proven capacity to use armed force and its de facto role as a regional leader
* Argues that Poland will have a defining influence not only on the nature of transatlantic relations, but also on the EU's emerging international identity

Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policies and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies

Despite dramatic increases in poverty, unemployment, and social inequalities, the Central and Eastern European transitions from communism to market democracy in the 1990s have been remarkably peaceful. This book proposes a new explanation for this unexpected political quiescence. It shows how reforming governments in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been able to prevent massive waves of strikes and protests by the strategic use of welfare state programs such as pensions and unemployment benefits. Divide and Pacify explains how social policies were used to prevent massive job losses with softening labor market policies, or to split up highly aggrieved groups of workers in precarious jobs by sending some of them onto unemployment benefits and many others onto early retirement and disability pensions. From a narrow economic viewpoint, these policies often appeared to be immensely costly or irresponsibly populist. Yet a more inclusive social-scientific perspective can shed new light on these seemingly irrational policies by pointing to deeper political motives and wider sociological consequences.

Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

The first work to cover post-Communist developments in historical studies in six Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria) from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. It is a building block for scholars of the history of European and global historical studies, and a useful pedagogical tool for classes on the history of historical studies. Each individual chapter is in itself a guide to further research through a wealth of detailed notes and references.

A comparative-historical study of welfare states in the former communist region of East Central Europe. Inglot analyzes almost one hundred years of expansion of social insurance programs across different political regimes. He places these programs in a larger political and socioeconomic context, which includes the most recent developments since the advent of democracy. Based on this research, he argues that despite apparent similarities the welfare states of East Central Europe, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic and Slovakia since 1993), Poland, and Hungary have pursued distinct historical paths of development and change. He examines the highly unusual evolution of these welfare states in detail, tracing alternating periods of growth and retrenchment/reform, which he links to political and economic crises under communist rule. Inglot uses this comparative analysis of welfare systems to examine the continued influence of history over the politics and policies of the social safety nets in Eastern Europe.

• First ever comparative-historical analysis of East Central European welfare states published in English • Based on original data, archival materials, government documents, and interviews with experts directly involved in policy-making • Provides detailed analysis of the ideas, politics, and economics behind the development and reform of the five basic social programs

Poland under Communism: A Cold War History

This is the first English-language history of Poland from the Second World War until the fall of Communism. Using a wide range of Polish archives and unpublished sources in Moscow and Washington, Tony Kemp-Welch integrates the Cold War history of diplomacy and inter-state relations with the study of domestic opposition and social movements. His key themes encompass political, social and economic history; the Communist movement and its relations with the Soviet Union; and the broader East-West context with particular attention to US policies. The book concludes with a first-hand account of how Solidarity formed the world's first post-Communist government in 1989 as the Polish people demonstrated what can be achieved by civic courage against apparently insuperable geo-strategic obstacles. This compelling new account will be essential reading for anyone interested in Polish history, the Communist movement and the course of the Cold War.