The turning point in Moldovan society

Presentation

This book analyzes post-socialist systemic change in the Republic of Moldova. It mobilizes the problematic of social capital, in Pierre Bourdieu's sense, to analyze the diversity of strategies and trajectories of "intellectuals", as defined within Soviet-style Moldovan society, in post-socialism. Drawing on the results of two field surveys, this work puts forward the idea that this diversity can reveal the characteristic features of Moldavian post-socialist capitalism. It thus breaks with a teleological and universalist vision of a system to think of it according to its own institutional, historical, political and cultural particularities.

Taking a socio-historical approach and combining different fields of social science, this research provides a comparative reading of the trajectory of these "intellectuals" from 1980 to 2000, a period covering three specific regimes of accumulation: one specific to the end of the traditional type of socialist system, another specific to the reformist socialist system and a third pertaining to the Moldovan post-socialist system. She shows that the tensions generated by the different regimes of resource allocation and distribution can be regulated by the volume of social capital accumulated by individuals. The issue of social capital thus appears central, enabling us to see how institutional dynamics and social action are articulated.

Interview

Author

Dorina Roșca has a PhD in the socio-economics of development. She is a researcher at the Centre d'études des modes d'industrialisation (EHESS) and a member of the editorial board of the journal Economie și Sociologie (National Institute for Economic Research of the Moldavian Academy of Sciences) as well as a founding member and president of the European Institute for Development Studies (IEED).

Her current research focuses on the importance and metamorphoses of private solidarities through Moldovan migration issues and their "feedback" effect on the systemic dynamics of migrants' countries of origin.

337 pages
16 x 24 cm
Publication: 01/02/2019
ISBN: 9782858312986