Innovations and Entrepreneurs in Socialist and Post-Socialist Societies

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4438-4237-2
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 415 Seiten

This volume is composed of interviews with entrepreneurs from Bulgaria, Estonia, Macedonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Russian Karelia, and reveals both unique patterns and striking similarities in entrepreneurial activities during the administrative economy of socialism and the period of post-socialism. The book challenges simultaneously the common way of conceptualizing entrepreneurship, the commonly held belief that there were no entrepreneurs under socialism, and the commonly held idea of post-socialism as an antidote to socialist order. The stories of start-up entrepreneurs of the post-socialist transition also challenge some of the key neo-liberal principles. The book is theoretically inspired by the recent studies of economic historians, critical reading of the classical ideas of Joseph Schumpeter on innovations in non-market economies, and the original model of the communist ‘Sacred and Profane’, developed by Markku Kivinen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nikula, Jouko

Tchalakov, Ivan

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Transformationsprozesse (Politikwiss.)
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitik
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Wirtschaftspolitik, politische Ökonomie

Über Autor(innen)

Jouko Nikula (born 1954) is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Helsinki. He received both his MA (1982) and PhD (1996) in Sociology at the University of Tampere. He has extensively studied the transformation of class structure and the development of the middle classes in post-socialist societies, especially the formation of the class of private entrepreneurs.

Ivan Tchalakov (born 1960) is Associate Professor in the Department of Institutional and Applied Sociology at the University of Plovdiv, and in the Institute of Studying Societies and Knowledge at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He received his MA in Sociology at the University of Sofia (1984) and PhD at the Institute of Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1988). Between 1999 and 2003, he was elected as President of the Bulgarian Sociological Association. His research interests are in the field of science and technology studies, focusing on the transformation of innovation systems in post-socialist countries, and science and technology development in South-Eastern Europe after the Second World War.