Preface

This collection of studies grew out of a workshop held in Měchenice near Prague in April 2001, where early versions of the chapters were presented as papers in an informal and relaxed setting which allowed us to devote considerable time to free discussion of a number of related themes. The workshop was hosted by my friend Jirří Holub, lecturer in political science at Charles University in Prague, who has a summer house in Měchenice and is a member of the local sports club where we held the event.The very setting called for our engagement with the issue of local community responses to social transformation: Měchenice is a village faced with the challenge of maintaining or adapting an identity tied up with patterns of work and leisure and action spaces which had evolved and stabilised during the communist era (though some aspects can be traced further back in time). Its position within the living space of a different type of society is uncertain. In a sense it is undergoing a necessary crisis invoked by the lifestyle changes brought on by marketisation and democratisation: what does the future hold for a recreational ‘colony’ near Prague? Can it retain and revive an autonomous civic and cultural life? Can it generate visions and projects which will enable it to prosper in the new conditions? What kind of organisational traditions will enable or hinder its adaptation? How have social relations and public discourses altered? Into what wider networks are local actors becoming integrated (or excluded from)? Měchenice, as it were, crystallised many of the questions which interested us as sociologists concerned with the diffusion of structural changes within a society made up of real human actors.

Following the workshop I invited each of the participants to re-work their contributions to address two general questions seen as central to local community development and organisational transformation at this stage in the emergence of a post-communist social order:

•How have pre-existing sources of social and cultural capital been deployed by actors involved in or affected by social transformation?

•Have adaptive responses by social actors to the pressures of social transformation at the micro-level contributed to or blocked the expansion of civic and political participation in the wider social context?

The studies presented in this volume are the results of our reflections. Each therefore represents a fresh take on contemporary problems, and each is linked to the others by a common conceptual thread even though, in most cases, they present findings from research carried out at various dates during the past decade which has already been reported elsewhere.

The opening chapter (Simon Smith) reviews some influential trends within Czech and Slovak sociology which often differ from dominant treatments of post-communist transformation normatively and methodologically. It focuses especially on critical accounts of the developmental logic and potential of communist and post-communist societies put forward by Czech and Slovak sociologists in the period immediately before and after 1989. These mostly understood the problem in terms of modernisation processes blocked or interrupted by the former regime.The chapter goes on to open a number of thematic and conceptual discourses relevant to micro-level social transformation, concentrating on a critique of the concepts of human potential and civil society.

The second chapter (Martin Myant) deals with the macro-political framework for post-communist transformation, focusing on the Czech Republic. The transformation of local community life is both structurally constrained and narratively conditioned by macro-political programmes, reforms and discourses. This relationship has been unusually reflexive in the Czech case insofar as a recurring theme of public debate and policy formation has been the problematic of civil society. Myant assesses the politicisation of this theme and its implications for the reintegration of public space.

The main part of the book consists of seven empirically based local organisation and community studies, covering three distinct types:

Social movements, beginning with the historic social movements which coordinated the anti-communist mobilisation and the first steps towards central and local democratisation, Civic Forum (Czech Republic) and Public Against Violence (Slovakia). Their emergence and subsequent decline are the reference points for a chapter by Simon Smith which focuses on the roles they played in local community life leading up to the first municipal elections in November 1990, using examples from specific towns and villages in each country. The chapter also attempts to identify the legacy of their organisational traditions and repertoires of collective action in present-day local communities. A second study by Mikuláš Huba examines the Slovak environmental movement, exploring its pluralisation and fragmentation after 1989, when the single, all-encompassing structure which had become an unofficial umbrella organisation for opposition to communist rule — the Slovak Union of Nature and Landscape Conservationists — was gradually transformed into a series of more issue-specific groups. Huba describes how an established social organisation was re-institutionalised by its members and supporters in response to new problems, new resources (such as international linkages) and a new structure of opportunities and constraints given by the initial democratisation and subsequent closure of public space and political decision-making.

Work collectives. Matching case studies by first Monika Čambáliková and then Aleš Kroupa and Zdenka Mansfeldová investigate how four groups of workers in the electronics industry (two each in Slovakia and the Czech Republic) have perceived processes of enterprise restructuring in the midto late 1990s. Surveying attitudes of workers towards management and trade unions and towards the work process itself, they show how the culture of the workplace has responded to such factors as changes in ownership, redundancies, restrictions on the welfare function of enterprises and changing workloads and work practices. Referring to an international comparative framework, the main emphasis in each study is on the ways in which the identity of labour has been discursively articulated and institutionally represented within these firms.

Local communities and democracy. One study from the Czech Republic, by Zdenka Vajdová, and two from Slovakia, by Martin Slosiarik and Imrich Vašečka, deal with the reconstruction of citizenship and civil society within local territorial structures, in particular through local self-government. Vajdová examines the reconstruction of political and civic cultures in a range of rural and urban settings in a study sensitive to differing organisational traditions and social milieux. Slosiarik's chapter contrasts the differing success of two neighbouring villages in tapping internal and external developmental resources, which is interpreted in terms of the distribution and organisation of civic potential within the communities. Vašecka's study is concerned with small rural communities and the capacity of local authorities to mobilise community resources in response to severe threats such as economic decline, depopulation, ethnic tensions, or the planned construction of a dam.

A concluding chapter (Simon Smith) revisits the epistemological problem thrown up by the case studies, namely how best to conceptualise collective actions and community reactions which respond to macro-level policies (narratives) and institutionalising processes; actions which vary from appropriation to resistance and from constructive improvisation to inertia and withdrawal. It is proposed that an understanding of transformation within the wider context of social, cultural and economic modernisation provides a better handle on the complexities and uncertainties of postcommunist lifeworlds than more linear concepts of transition, without abandoning an underlying normative discourse emphasising movement towards self-regulation, subjectivity and participation. It is also suggested that ‘narrativist’ and ‘activist’ sociologies, prepared to engage with the discursive practices of particular communities and organisations, can increase understanding of post-communist transformation where more orthodox approaches fail to appreciate how the clash of reforms with prevailing cultural practices must be carefully mediated. The capacity of individual and collective actors at the grassroots of society to cope with social change by incorporating it into existing worldviews and lifeworlds is dependent upon the existence of channels for a dialogue between the discourses of cultural practice and the modernising discourses of the political actors pursuing social and economic reforms. This represents a challenge for sociologists among others.

Simon Smith
July 2002