This book sets the experiences of former communist countries as they head towards capitalism against the 'varieties of capitalism' paradigm, and provides a framework for comparing transformation processes, demonstrating how differing heritages of communist and pre-communist pasts are leading to different kinds of capitalist economies.

This book intends to be a contribution to the varieties of capitalism paradigm. Our main question is to what extent the present system in Russia, the model of President Putin is a generic model for all post-communist capitalisms.

Business leaders exert extraordinary influence on institution building in market economies but they think and act within institutional settings. This book combines both an elite approach with a varieties-of-capitalism approach. Comparing Poland, Hungary and East and West Germany, we perceive the transformations in East Central Europe and in Germany after 1989 as being intertwined. Based on a joint survey, this book seeks to measure the level of the convergence of ideas among European business leaders, assuming it to be more extensive than the institutional convergence expected under the dominance of neoliberal discourse. Analyzing the institutional framework, organizational features like size, ownership and labour relations, and subjective characteristics like age, social origin, career patterns and attitudes of the recent business elites, we found significant differences between countries and the types of organization. The growing importance of economic degrees and internationalization shows astonishingly little explanatory power on the views of business leaders. The idea of a coordinated market economy is still relatively widespread among Germans, while their Hungarian and Polish counterparts are more likely to display a minimalist view of corporate responsibility to society and adverse attitudes towards employee representation. However, their attitudes frequently tend to be inconsistent, which mirrors the mixed type of capitalism in East Central Europe.

Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.

The period of transition from socialism to capitalism in parts of Europe and Asia over the past 25 years has attracted considerable interest in academia and beyond. From the Editors of Palgrave's iconic series 'Studies in Economic Transition' comes the Palgrave Dictionary of Emerging Markets and Transition Economics. This dictionary addresses the needs of students, lecturers and the interested general public to quickly find definitions and explanations of topics, institutions, personalities and processes in this historical phase of changing societies, which as such is not concluded. Today newly emerging market economies try to learn from the experiences of transition economies. Those who love The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics will enjoy the format of this Dictionary, which uses an encyclopaedia-based approach, where articles not only define the terms but provide an overview of the evolution of the term or theory and also touch on the current debates.

Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

State and Society in Post-Socialist Economies focuses on the reform economies of post-socialist Europe. It looks at how various projects of communism that emerged in have been and are still being dismantled and recomposed by alternative visions, institutions and practices of capitalist market economies and democratic polities.