CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Simionca, Anca |
|---|---|
| Title | Critical Engagements with and within Capitalism: Romania s Middle Managers after Socialism |
| Summary | This dissertation is a study of the way individuals live within and engage capitalism in the particular historical context in which capitalism is being forcefully presented as the right systemic alternative to the morally, socially and economically wrong socialism of the past. Capitalism is not only built with the ruins of socialism, but also by keeping its ghost alive. On a theoretical level, I argue that ordinary actors are endowed with critical capacities and their actions are informed by their sense of justice; critical theories of capitalism cannot afford overlooking this aspect. Through unpacking the two facets of ideology – as integration and as distortion – I place the tension of maintaining a sense of legitimate personhood at the center of my analysis. I rely primarily on working life histories of middle managers in Cluj, Romania and a solid contextualization of these narratives in the economic trajectory of the city, its ethnicity cum class history, together with an account of the series of reforms in the national system of higher education. I try to substantiate the claim that because it is their very possibility to maintain a sense of legitimate personhood that is primarily at stake for the individuals, the hegemonic anti-communist discourse and the reality it enables to hold together short-circuits the possibilities for the critical work of individuals to turn into a strong alternative to this reality. The ways in which socialism figures into the justificatory mechanisms of capitalism makes its reality hold together to an even greater extent than in other contexts. As academic production of knowledge can only either contribute to confirming this reality or to putting it into a state of uncertainty, I argue that it is crucial to think of the quality of research primarily in relation to its having met the challenge of the political implications it inherently has. I used the ambiguous status of methodology (with a special focus on Sequence Analysis) within the sociological production of knowledge to restate both the fragile position it has in relation to the other institutions that confirm reality and the necessity to work towards living up to the responsibility of feeding into critique. |
| Supervisor | Vedres, Balázs; Kowalski, Alexandra |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/simionca_anca.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University