CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Simionca, Anca |
|---|---|
| Title | Critical Engagements with and within Capitalism: Romania s Middle Managers after Socialism |
| Summary | This dissertation is concerned with the existence and the possibilities of existence of critical engagement with capitalism in the case of middle managers in Romania nearly two decades after the fall of the socialist regime. The theoretical anchorage of my argument is that of autonomist Marxism, which argues that capital should be analyzed from the perspective of the struggling subjects. I focus on the level of the representation of reality as one of the sites in which this struggle is visible. The study is situated in a 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. I consequently analyze the role of the pervasive and hegemonic anti-communist discourse in preventing the elements of reformist critique (which denounce reality as unjust, but within the overarching framework that holds capitalism itself as a just system) to be coagulated into radical critique (which would put in doubt the very fairness of capitalism and would make claims of alternative modes of co-production). Analytically, I take my informants indignations and satisfaction with their jobs (the way in which their involvement in the circuits of production takes place) and larger environments as indicators of the dimensions on which they put reality to test and as the entry point into the mechanisms through which they formulate critique. I argue that sociologies of domination such as orthodox Marxism contribute to making the coagulation of radical critique more difficult because of the fact that their theoretical position does not allow them to recognize analytically any exterior to capitalism as we speak and live. Therefore, I use my case to make a more general plea for critical sociology to place the political implications of the narratives it produces at the heart of its theorizing. I rely primarily on working life histories of middle managers 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 argue that their careers are unfolding in a career field which has been gradually growing more institutionalized and structured and I describe the main parameters of these changes. Using Sequence Analysis as a method and logic of analyzing temporal data, I engage with the hypothesis of the increased flexibility of contemporary careers and suggest several dimensions that are relevant for accounting for the diversity of trajectories. |
| Supervisor | Vedres, Balazs; Kowalski, Alexandra |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/simionca_anca.pdf |
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