Economy in Changing Society

Economy is embedded in ongoing concrete social networks, and economic processes are increasingly international in character. Three interrelated processes are crucial for setting the frame of analysis for this book: globalisation, development of post-industrial societies, and transformation of European post-socialist countries. Within this framework the main issues are as follows: (1) Economies in transition: reliable patterns, imitation, local adaptation, cultural embeddedness; (2) Multiplicity of markets: commodification of life, new markets in old societies; (3) Economic behavior: households, micro-enterprises, local and global influences; (4) Contemporary polities, i.e. states, the European Union and global corporations. The stress will be placed on actors, relations and institutions as the driving forces of the above described processes. The authors of this collection, based on their empirical material, analyze very interesting socio-economic issues. These are: ethical consumption from the perspective of the moral economy and its connection to political institutions in Europe (and particularly in Hungary); the cultural context of consumption, both in the case of social networks in Bangladesh and of counterfeited goods on the Russian market; the new and old, individual and organizational actors in transition economies, for instance in Poland and Croatia; the new approach to corporations as global actors, stressing their social responsibility; the dynamics of managerial practices in the example of Russia; the influence of EU funds and policies on the Polish SMEs market; the cultural embeddedness of economic behavior, in the case of Poles working in the Scottish market and of entrepreneurs in Damascus; the retirement policy in the fast aging societies of Spain and Poland; and the emergence of the new markets, like that of health services, in Russia and that of the property market in Eastern and Central Europe.