The Great Shift in Moldovan Society

Presentation

This book analyses post-socialist systemic change in Moldova. It draws on the concept of social capital as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu in order to analyse the diverse strategies and pathways of “intellectuals” – determined in Moldovan Soviet-type society by completed or partial higher education studies and accomplishment of non-manual work – in the post-socialist period. Building on the results of two field surveys, a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview, this work highlights the idea that such diversity can shed light on the characteristic traits of Moldova’s type of post-socialist capitalism. It also breaks with the teleological and universalist vision of a system to conceive it on the basis of its own institutional, historical, political and cultural particularities. Taking a socio-historical approach and combining various areas of social sciences, this research produces a comparative reading between the paths taken by these “intellectuals”, from 1980 to 2000, a period covering three specific accumulation regimes: one specific to the end of the traditional socialist system, another specific to the reformative socialist system, and a third specific to the post-socialist Moldovan system. The work shows that the tensions generated by the different resource allocation and distribution regimes could be regulated by the volume of social capital accumulated by individuals. The notion of social capital thus appears central, demonstrating linkages between institutional dynamics and social actions.

Interview

Author

Dorina Roșca holds a doctorate in development socio-economics. She is a researcher at the Industrialization Study Centre at EHESS, a member of the editorial board of Economie și Sociologie (National Institute for Economic Research of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova) and a founding member and President of the European Institute for Development Studies (EIDS).
Her current research interests include the scale and transformation of private solidarity through the prism of Moldovan migration and its impact on the systemic dynamics of the migrants’ country of origin.

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