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Restructuring Networks in Post-socialism: Legacies, Linkages and Localities, G. GRABHER and D. STARK (Eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford (1997). x + 349 pp. C3750 (hbk). ISBN 019 829020 9.
This book grew out of a conference on networks in postsocialism held in Berlin in 1993 and brings together writers from across western and central Europe, and the US. It develops ideas published widely by each of the individual authors and concludes that the social and economic transformations ongoing in east central Europe and the former Soviet Union are ambiguous and often contradictory, and that to study those transformations using unquestioned concepts and models is problematic.
Following a substantive introduction by the editors, Restructuring Networks is divided into three parts, each dealing with different types of networks and each engaging in different ways with the sub-themes of legacies, linkages and localities. Part 1 focuses on the restructuring of large firms and the recombination of past arrangements, part 2 on the remaking of entrepreneurial networks amongst small firms and part 3 on the development of institutions and policy networks. Whilst each of the individual 14 chapters is coherent and well argued, the book's major strength lies in its collective contribution to the study of post-socialist economic transformations - namely, a strong, theoreticallyinformed set of empirical studies which come together to form a coherent, critical...