10 Conclusion
The narrativisation of social transformation
Modernisation
Most early studies of democratic transition in post-communist Europe stressed that a system change was involved, incorporating three key institutional changes (the so-called ‘triple transition’) — from authoritarian or totalitarian to democratic governance; from a planned to a free-market economy; and from quasi-colonial status to full nation- and state-hood. Partially dissenting from the institutional school of thought, other authors emphasised the ‘path-dependent’ nature of the process and the inevitable conditioning of strategic choices by the inherited social, economic and cultural resources of a given society. These critics advocated the term transformation in place of transition, to capture the sense of change as a process of recombinations of existing sub-systems or fractions of capital.
Few western theorists have used the concept of modernisation in connection with post-communist developments (Machonin 1997: 108). If so, then only a conceptually narrow version has been invoked, such as when discussing Lipset's notion of a relationship between socio-economic development and democratisation (Nagle and Mahr 1999: 55; Przeworski et al. 1955: 62–3) or the impact of the scientific-technological revolution on the social and power structures of communist states Nagle and Mahr 1999: 212). Such reductionist understandings — perhaps taking their lead from earlier ‘convergence theories’ which saw capitalist and state socialist societies as members of a common family of modernities — have led to misinterpretations of what a strategy of modernisation would mean in a post-communist context. Przeworski et al. contrast ‘postwar attempts at modernisation’ which ‘asserted the importance of national cultures, … called for political institutions consistent with national traditions, and envisaged growth led by national industries’ with later Latin American and Eastern European strategies which they call ‘modernisation by internationalisation’ based on ‘imitation’ in the political, cultural and economic realms: ‘today’, they conclude, ‘modernisation means liberal democracy, consumption-oriented culture, and capitalism’ (1995: 4). Yet notwithstanding the condition of international dependency in which post-communist development is occurring, the immediate result of the collapse of communist power has been increasingly sharp social stratification accompanied by an unplanned and often disorienting diversification in lifestyles, life strategies, economic interests and bases for collective identification within these societies. It would be perverse to try to reduce this spontaneous social differentiation to a process of convergence with, let alone submergence by, western stereotypes. If it is to be understood as westernisation in any sense, then a more pertinent image would be the spread of the individualising processes which the condition of late modernity had let loose twenty or thirty years previously in Western Europe and North America. As such it was viewed by one early Slovak commentator as a welcome source of dynamism within previously ‘monolithic’ social structures (Turčan 1992: 47).
Essentially modernisation theory is an account of socio-cultural transformation (Kabele 1998: 331) and taken as such it presents a number of advantages for understanding post-communist developments in terms of how it handles the subtle relationship between institutionalisation and evolutionary cultural change. A more obvious advantage, however, is a conceptual linkage to the vast body of social scientific theory reflecting on the complex civilisational changes undergone by advanced societies from the time of the Enlightenment. Modernisation does not presuppose any developmental logic in terms of transition from one economic or political system to another, but at a higher level of abstraction it is a teleological concept which attempts to explain the observable and often alarming process whereby the potentiality and reflexivity of human activity have expanded continually for several centuries. What, in particular, has expanded at an accelerating pace since the industrial revolution is the capacity of societies — generally through coordinated action by the state — to transform themselves, ‘even to the point of self-destruction’ (Melucci 1989: 176), and the corresponding capacity of individuals and societal sub-groups to handle (increasingly rapid and disruptive) change. Modernisation produces a simultaneous heightening of both control and emancipation (Giddens 1985: 11), intervention and individuation (Melucci 1989: 59, 112–17), and integration and differentiation (Melucci 1996: 254).1 For the individual or collective actor caught up in it, modernisation fundamentally alters the relevant structure of opportunities and constraints upon action. Modernisation theory thus has the advantage of being able to conceptualise change as an instance of actor-driven intervention in social reality (either as ‘enlightened’ social engineering or in the more diffused form of political demands which provoke successive de- and re-institutionalisation) but which can nevertheless be seen (and subjectively interpreted or ‘narrativised’) as the logical outcome of a preceding reconfiguration of social and cultural capital within a given society. It appeals ultimately to profound cultural-civilisational changes, in which institutionalising processes play a mostly supporting role, formalising the new (temporary) status quo. Thus ‘political modernisation’, according to Melucci (1966: 242), entails increasing the elasticity of the filtering of demands, incorporating previously excluded social groups, stepping up the mobilisation of resources and increasing the flow of information. These are constant challenges for complex societies and organisations which would cease to be capable of managing competing interests without an ability to innovate in order to contain social pressures within the broad confines of the existing regime. In other words the modernity of a political system is given by its capacity to process and implement normative decisions which reduce the uncertainty of social action, a function which both increases the effectiveness of social control and creates an opening for non-dominant interests to intervene in the reproduction of social norms and regulations (ibid.: 229–42). Modern political systems need to be able to translate even anti-systemic challenges (including ‘anti-modern’ social movements) into decision-making processes which enhance the functional integration of an organisation or society: this has been one of the most difficult challenges for post-communist political systems, as they extricate themselves from a very different logic of political decision-making.
Modernisation is a normative discourse. Social and cultural modernisation holds out the prospect of a more open society capable of meeting the needs of diverse interests and providing individuals and groups with the possibility of self-realisation and self-regulation in many spheres of life. In a specifically post-communist context the emphasis in modernisation theory on individualisation and subjectivisation is particularly relevant when totalitarian or authoritarian regimes had suppressed these processes and cultivated communitarian and paternalistic structures of feeling (Turčan 1992: 51–2). Similarly universalisation (the establishment of transparent procedures and society's adjustment to them) was at least partially displaced, and an atomised society instead thrown back on premodern principles of interaction and socialisation in which trust and reciprocity were found primarily in localised affective groups (Kabele 1998: 17; Možný 1999a). Thus one important aspect of post-communist transformation can usefully be interpreted as a replay of subjectivisation and universalisation as pivotal components of modernisation. Such a powerful normative theory is a useful analytical tool: the potential of societies for achieving a set of goals on which, at a certain level of abstraction, everyone can broadly agree, can be interrogated in relation to the stocks of social and cultural capital inherited and reproduced at the level of everyday life. To put this another way we can identify individual and collective actors' potential for modernisation based on their capacity to fulfil a series of roles associated with a normative definition of modernity, specifically a modern democratic citizenship.
Finally modernisation involves a myriad of small-scale processes of evolutionary change in social and cultural sub-systems — in technology, the organisation of the work process, in settlement patterns and the conditions of human interaction, in lifestyle and habits of consumption, in belief systems, systems of symbolic representation and modes of communicative action. These processes are not contained by the boundaries of political and ideological systems but, particularly since the later twentieth century, have been driven by such processes as the globalisation of trade and communication and the intensification of cultural exchange. If post-communist societies are undergoing a process of transformation, then we can hardly avoid discussing the influence of global civilisational shifts towards post-industrial, post-materialist or post-modern social and cultural configurations. Thus for example, the voicing of ethnic nationalist and other minority demands for political representation or participation in many East Central European states is not to be understood as a reaction to the ideological vacuum created by the collapse of communism, but in the context of the ‘new politics’, emphasising local community and postmaterialist values, which empower such demands within the ‘new European public order’ (Ágh 1998: 79–80). This is not to presume that the outcomes will be the same as in established capitalist democracies. Use of the modernisation approach to ‘give the scientific seal of approval … [to] the total institutional transfer from the west to the east’ is rightly rejected by the editors of a Polish volume on social change in Central and Eastern Europe (Baethge 1997: 11); but only an impoverished version of modernisation theory could be thus misused.
On the contrary an understanding of the dynamics of modernisation offers a note of caution against over-optimistic predictions about the future of post-communist Europe which abounded in the first few years after 1989 especially in the western literature on transition. Since modernisation is an holistic process, it is not reducible to institutional reform — the error which more than one western policy-adviser, academic and their Central European clients made in the early 1990s. Even in the late 1990s, as it became obvious that initial expectations had generally been over-optimistic, revisionist accounts have typically only qualified earlier interpretations, conceding that everything will take longer, and outcomes be more differentiated, due to the emergence of conflicts around particular institutional transitions and to growing social costs which make reform more politically ‘difficult’. A more perceptive approach needs, first to distinguish between institutional and socio-cultural changes, processes which operate on completely different timescales and, second to consider more closely the legacy of the state socialist system and in particular to identify elements of society and culture which developed under its influence that had a de-modernising or anti-modernising impact. Because modernisation is not a one-way street, a theory of modernisation implies also a theory of demodernisation (Možný 1999a: 85). At that point it can shed light on the causes of the sudden collapse of communist regimes as well as on the reasons why post-communist transformation has been more problematic than many anticipated. It can help explain how well-designed institutional reforms are frequently frustrated by the persistence of residual anti-modernising practices and collective identities; and why modernisation strategies which at the macro-level have often entailed little more than institutional transfer from functioning capitalist democracies have not produced a matching westernisation of cultural practice at the micro-level.
Local communities as sites for the construction of narratives
As certain authors have argued from as early as 1993, the burden of the democratic transformation in post-communist states is shifting from institutional reform towards the longer-term processes taking place at the micro-level and connected with the social and cultural adaptive responses of a variety of social actors (Rychard 1993; Machonin 1997: 126–7; Matejů 2000: 44). It is ironic to note how this turn to micro-sociology in the Czech and Slovak contexts actually involves a return to the applied sociological approaches developed prior to 1989 described in Chapter 1 as ‘activist’. This is less surprising than it seems: among other things they constituted an entry into reflexive modernity by taking on board the ‘thoroughly sociologised’ nature of contemporary societies, and therefore reconceptualising sociological research as the exploration of ‘particular cases of the possible’ (Bourdieu 1998: 2, 13), or as ‘that particular kind of social action where chances or opportunities for self-reflexivity are higher’ (Melucci 1996: 390). In both the pre- and post-1989 periods capacity for action is fundamentally limited by differential access to discursive resources, and sociological knowledge itself is an increasingly valuable resource. The specific conditions of rapid social transformation only heighten the ‘reflexivity of modernity’.
Whereas ‘in unproblematic periods social worlds seem to reproduce and modify themselves almost exclusively by the power of institutionalisation … in crises and revolutionary eras narrativisation comes to the fore as a means of managing these exceptional periods’ (Kabele 1998: 159). People need more than ever to see themselves as part of an historical narrative, a myth or story, a process of becoming. The institutions and procedures which normally order their worlds no longer seem so reliable and permanent, and thus young people in particular must manage the transition to adulthood through improvisation rather than imitation of role-models or adherence to established norms (Heitlingerová and Trnková 1999: 56). This applies even after the ‘empty shells’ of new institutions have been installed relatively quickly at the macro-level, because they are still not socially grounded, maladapted to the more spontaneous institutionalising processes occurring through trial and error in everyday practice (Kabele 1994: 30). In such situations successful narrativisation becomes the most essential prerequisite for actors' participation in events — without narratives to provide meaning to their actions, events will seem to by-pass their social worlds and their interests, and they will be more likely to retreat to the position of disinterested observer, unable to manage or even envisage transition as a shift from the old order through a period of disorder to a new order.2 The very concept of modernisation carries significant narrative power, although it may seem too abstracted from reality during ‘normal’ periods of history. But in the institutional flux of the post-communist ‘order’ the generalised myth of progress through humanisation, the recurring theme of the post-enlightenment era, made a strong return, at least during the initial period of euphoria. More specifically the myths of a return to Europe, of the liberating energy of market forces, of the magic power of democratic procedures (especially elections) or of the release of the pent-up energies of civil society or individual agency were narratives which succeeded for a time in partially unifying the contradictory identities invoked by the breakdown of established social structures and macro-social institutions. They secured support for the initiation of macro-level institutional reforms even when many localised institutional systems continued to function — often out of sheer necessity — more or less along the old lines.
Eventually ‘the architecture of everyday life’ must also undergo reconstruction in accordance with the demands of a modern democratic civil society (assuming this becomes a societal goal). Such changes, however, cannot be enforced from above: they must be ‘lived’ by the actors affected, the largely demobilised majority which has not participated in the post-communist transformation since its initial days and weeks; by the informal groups and communities which must become, in the long run, the primary site for the internalisation and propagation of democratic and humanist values (Fibich 1996: 271). The myths of Europe, the market and elections no longer move people at the grassroots, whose attempts to cope with change have predictably involved the restoration of a cyclical narrative of everyday life founded on the continuity of traditional social relations and cultural practices (Kabele 1998: 185, 337) — often simply because coping strategies honed during the communist era, based for instance around mobilising resources within the domestic economy, continue to be effective, albeit often laborious, ways of dealing with the failure of formal markets (Miková 1992). Indeed democratisation actually enhanced opportunities for small-scale subsistence cultivation and other elements of an informal economy in the countryside, practices which had persisted despite pressures towards ‘class convergence’ and ‘urban-rural equalisation’, due not only to the strength of tradition but also to the poor quality of fresh produce available on the market and the poverty of consumer services in most villages (Krůcek et al. 1984), factors which are still present today. Transformation as a cultural process cannot be reduced to unlearning what was once taken for granted: the discourses and life strategies which articulated the symbiosis of formal and informal economies under state socialism remain relevant to post-communist social actors (Možný 1999b). In the sphere of housing, for example, a free and transparent market would disable established means of reproducing social capital based on the dispositional rights (formally or informally) bestowed on families —isolated individuals are in a much more vulnerable situation. The hybridised housing policies pursued by each post-communist Czech and Slovak government are a pragmatic recognition of this fact, and the unwillingness of any major political force to grasp the nettle of housing market deregulation is given only partly by fear of the price shock this would trigger. Rather it reflects the way that the entire system of housing distribution, (quasi-)ownership and transfer is so closely tied up with established patterns of socialisation, social support and social value systems, in which the extended family plays a crucial role, that it is likely to resist all but the most resolute macro-economic reform initiatives. On the contrary, housing is a sphere where a practical discourse — the grassroots reproduction of social networks and their associated strategies, resources, interests and value systems — is today more determining of than determined by the meta-narratives of macro-economic and macro-social transformation (Šmídová 1999).
In many spheres institutional reforms have amounted to ‘mimeses enabling old practices to survive’ (Kabele 1998: 339). This is very obvious, for example, in systems of enterprise regulation or in the banking sector. Motivation to change a well-entrenched organisational culture cannot be engendered by institutional design alone, especially in periods of radical social change when narrativisation is the primary means by which social actors manage their own identities. Kabele uses the example of eastern Germany to make the point:
The entire transformation of eastern Germany was founded on the adoption of western blueprints, on ‘an institutional xerox’ … [This] created little space for people to adapt. They are not [involved in] deciding about the transformation, and therefore are not naturally integrating it into their own biographies and histories.
(Ibid.: 245)
‘Myths’ are thus necessary not only to secure loyalty to the principal transformation goals — to linearise the historical drama — but also to render them assimilable within individual autobiographies and the discursive rituals of everyday life. Small-scale myths are needed to enable people to transcend the instinctive conservatism of most (localised) lifeworlds (Možný 1999b: 34) and yet feel as though they are acting consistently and within the limits of acceptable risk. Individuals and basic social groups always seek to assimilate the unknown using tried and tested procedures, and are reluctant to participate in institutional change, with its high transaction costs. Processes of de- and re-institutionalisation will therefore be more acceptable to local actors if they are assimilable in the terms of a familiar discourse — if it is possible to incorporate ‘a ‘modern’ solution into one’s own repertoire of coping mechanisms (Kabele 1998:205–7).3
In such cases narrativisation can facilitate surprisingly smooth adaptation to institutional change: according to the findings of the study ‘The Lives of Young Prague Women’ a discourse of individualism, which formed a central component of their general outlook, apparently enabled members of a 1989 cohort of nursing college graduates to rationalise and endorse the dissolution of communist-era institutions which previously structured the life paths of women, such as secure employment or ‘career-friendly’ childcare facilities. An intuitive individualism, involving a clear rejection of all collective dependencies above the nuclear family, seems to be the mode of narrativisation which facilitates this generation's adaptation to institutional transfer (Heitlingová and Trnková 1999). What is noteworthy, however, is that it involves a recombination rather than a rejection of past practices and outlooks. Generalised across other social groups, this example suggests that the success or otherwise of post-communist transformation will increasingly be negotiated between ‘actually existing’ social and cultural discourse and practice and the modernising narratives put forward by competing political and social movements and elites. Hitherto these have remained largely separate discursive universes, and any accommodation between them has been more intuitive than reflexive. This in turn has been an important factor in the weakness of collective action and identification during the social transformation. As I sought to demonstrate in Chapter 3, the success of community mobilisation initiatives beginning with local Civic Fora and Publics Against Violence has been strongly correlated with their ability to facilitate such a dialogue between ‘popular’ and ‘intellectual’, local and global discursive universes.
One process which, in this context, merits a lot more investigation than it has received is the reconstruction of social organisations which belonged to the communist-era National Front following the regime collapse (Huba's chapter in this volume on the Slovak Union of Nature and Landscape Conservationists represents one of the rare attempts to write such an organisational monograph). Many of them, including trade unions, sports associations, youth organisations and a multitude of societies involved in self-educative or leisure-time activities, did not disappear but underwent more or less radical internal structural reforms, initiated from below and generally characterisable in terms of decentralisation, entrusting substantial powers and legal subjectivity to territorial or sectoral affiliates of what had typically been highly centralised organisations. Studies thus indicate a strong continuity in the types of voluntary activity and associative behaviour Czechs and Slovaks are involved in (Woleková et al. 2000: 17–18), but a certain discontinuity in its institutionalisation (Turčan 1992: 49), representing a shift from a principle of regulation (surveillance) to one of self-regulation. Can the relatively successful restructuring of the NGO sector be read as an instance of successful narrativisation enabling institutional reconstruction? Were actors better able to embrace the principle of self-organisation, and thereby re-institutionalise a significant part of their social worlds, because the practices and discourses involved were familiar and valued? Does the tradition of an affective community or communicative network embolden actors to envisage and construct a new institutional arrangement, better able to express their collective identity or pursue their shared interests and goals?
These are difficult questions: the reconstruction of some such social organisations followed pragmatic or purely personal interests surrounding the distribution of often substantial property funds or the creation of new offices; many experienced a prolonged period of organisational chaos, a lack of professional responsibility among functionaries and a lack of initiative from their grassroots.4 But experiences gained by individuals involved in such hands-on processes of micro-level transformation could be invaluable. For there is a strong case to be made that processes of ‘representative bargaining’ within social formations or collective actors (normalising relations between organisation and membership/constituency) are substantially autonomous from and, in the context of social transformation, logically prior to the bargaining processes whereby those formations and actors become involved (in cooperation or competition with other actors) in macro-level institutionalisation. As Przeworski et al. point out, ‘many of the practices of trade unions, business and professional associations, social movements, and public-interest groups emerge from informal interactions within civil society … only loosely and indirectly affected by the provisions of the civil and criminal codes [and other legislation]’ (1995: 55).5 Here we need to know more about what capacities predispose actors, social formations or societies to ‘discover’ and successfully deploy myths in order to manage radical change. Mythologisation may be a natural human capability in part acquired during childhood, in part honed through experience, such that the effective mythologisation of one transformation leaves an actor or society better disposed to overcome the next crisis (Kabele 1998: 317); however this sheds little light on the observation that despite a common initial approach to the construction of a legal and institutional framework, the main macro-level transformation myths (particularly that of the free market) were significantly less potent in Slovakia than in the Czech Republic, and competing anti-myths6 about a ‘stolen revolution’ were on the contrary more persuasive there (Kabele 1994: 31–2). Was the depth of the transformatory crisis greater in Slovakia, to the extent that it rendered the process of mythologising a new order too difficult? Or were there certain resources in Czech political and civic culture which were weaker in Slovakia? How crucial was the role of political actors in constructing and popularising different myths in either country? How important were differences in social and economic structure?7 One way of answering these kinds of question begins with investigations into the ways in which distinct communities and organisations have dealt with change, given that they are the principal sites where the reception of discourses is tested and contested.
The contention here is that acknowledging the centrality of narrativising processes to post-communist transformation within local communities and institutions opens up an important new line of inquiry about the mechanics of the process. Transitologists have held that the shift from ‘transition’ to ‘consolidation’ is defined by ‘the moment when things become boring … we are moving from an epistemology founded on underdetermination to an epistemology founded on overdetermination [in which] various factors favour the reproduction of a newly-consolidating system’ (Schmitter and Dvoráková 2000: 132). This distinction is a useful one. However, although Schmitter refuses to delimit the length of the transition phase as a general rule, he insists that it could last just ‘fifteen or twenty minutes’, if by then ‘the actors who are making the founding choice know that there is already no chance of return to the previous regime’ (ibid.). Unfortunately for this optimistic reading, narratives, especially popular narratives, take longer to close than institutions or the rules of the game for political elites. Social actors — who are not necessarily directly interested in the social transformation, or did not start out defining themselves as interested parties — need to find in the new historical era not just regularity and predictability (which is related to the progress of political bargaining, institutional innovation and social structuration) but a deeper sense of meaning and motivation for action, which is only possible through constructivist communicative action. It is therefore inevitable that a new order governing social interaction at the level of everyday life takes longer to embed than the mere establishment of a consensus of no return. For these reasons the under-determination of social relations in most spheres of life is an ongoing feature of post-communist societies even though there are apparently no threats to the democracy of the regimes themselves. The most serious weakness of the transition approach is its underestimation of the extent to which, down to the lowest level, transformation (if it is to be successful) is a creative, participative and self-reflexive process. This is so for two sets of reasons. First, when a society enters a new historical epoch there is a need to establish and legitimise ‘founding’ myths redefining its collective origin and destiny, whose acceptance cannot take place via the ‘non-decision-making’ processes which ordinarily govern the socialisation of populations to collective norms and institutions. Indeed resistance to new regulatory modes is often most deep-seated within local bureaucratic apparatuses impervious to instructions issuing from a new political consensus ‘at the top’, and innovation at this level must therefore be struggled for among actors at the grassroots. Second, the new mode of regulation which post-communist countries are attempting to join has been characterised as one demanding greater participation on the part of individual and collective actors with high information-handling capacities. In an open society the success of economic enterprises, towns and regions depends increasingly on their ability to innovate and their ability to mobilise the creative energies of their own members. The unique conditions of social transformation — the breakdown of social order — could paradoxically prove advantageous in one sense, if an initially forced narrativisation is adopted by specific collective actors as a way of life.
Although the studies in this volume have not explicitly adopted a narrativist approach, a common theme is an attempt to describe patterns of behaviour within a certain social sub-system with reference both to the intrinsic discursive logic of the relevant communities and practices and to a discourse of modernisation either constructed in a normative fashion by the author (as in the case of Slosiarik's study which invokes concepts such as self-regulation and civic responsibility as basic and desirable principles of ‘modern’ territorial community development) or imputed to external political or economic actors and institutions (as in the case of the studies of work collectives which appeal to the logic of necessary innovations in the work process connected with the transition to a new mode of economic integration and driven by the action of foreign owners or the competitive pressures of an international division of labour). This approach enabled them to comment on the intrinsic functionality or meaningfulness of existing practices and evaluate the modernising potential of social and cultural capital, the take-up of ‘modern’ values, the capacity of actors to step into ‘modern’ social roles, or the compatibility of micro- and macro-level norms and practices. Contradictions between these discourses are often more apparent than real, a matter of misunderstanding or mistranslation rather than incompatibility. By facilitating a dialogue between ‘discursive universes’ sociological studies of local communities, such as those presented in this volume, can themselves contribute towards the establishment of a modern democratic civil society.
Notes
1. This ambivalence is very clear in the modernisation of the work process, which has been characterised by increasing degrees of intervention in the autonomy of the worker and even the psychological conditions of the work environment, at the same time as by the transformation of organisations into networks of social relations equipped with an initiative and an independence which are not completely reducible to domination by class power or manipulation by social engineering. The survey findings presented in this volume by čambáliková and by Kroupa and Mansfeldová, which uncover some intricate contradictions in workers' attitudes (encapsulated in the title of čambáliková's chapter, ‘Dual identity and/or “bread and butter”’), describe the rapid modernisation of work processes in electronics factories as a process interpretable in these terms.
2. To understand the role of myths in social transformation Kabele returns to the cultural anthropology of Levi-Strauss and others. Myths, it is suggested, replace institutions when the latter no longer adequately render life predictable and ‘ordered’. Life is thus temporarily construed not as ‘order’ but as ‘drama’ (Kabele 1994: 22). Myths enable social actors to overcome the hardships and the sense of disorientation associated with the ‘disorder’ of transformation by interpreting it as a series of ‘tests’ on the road to the restoration of (a different) order (ibid.: 25); they energise actors to adopt an active approach to reality and facilitate actor-formation and collective identification, because they construct and internalise relations of conflict, cooperation and empathy (ibid.: 28).
3. Naturally art is one of the sites of this kind of constructive myth-making. An overview of contemporary Czech and Slovak cultural production is obviously not possible here, but a brief illustrative example may elucidate how the process can work. Petr Zelenka's 1997 feature film Knoflíkáfi deals with the disconnections between several individual biographies and broader historical changes in the setting of 1990s Prague. A tribute to human ‘uniqueness’, it portrays, in several loosely overlapping fragments of narratives, the clumsy attempts of various social actors (all misfits in one sense or another) to return a sense of meaning and direction to their own lives. The film's main leitmotif is perhaps supplied by the chorus of the Už jsme doma song ‘Jó nebo nebo’, featured in the soundtrack: ‘I like those who are beginning to differentiate, those who inquire, those who are not satisfied with a single answer’ (a kind of anthem for a new age which Miroslav Wanek actually composed shortly after November 1989). The narrativisations that are being attempted by the characters amount, in Bourdieu's terminology, to the deployment of symbolic capital so as ‘to occupy a point or to be an individual within a social space, [i.e.] to differ, to be different’. As a life strategy, however, this is only effective ‘if it is perceived by someone who is capable of making the distinction’ (Bourdieu 1998: 9). In other words it is only effective in an integrated social space — hence the struggle to make narratives interconnect which is inscribed into the very formal structure of the film. A secondary leitmotif is also invoked: swearing -the failsafe mechanism of coping with crises adopted by an actor unable to overcome an obstacle, who can only relieve his or her frustration by cursing the vagaries of fate. Although short on happy endings, Knoflíkáfi can be read as a generally optimistic account of the resourcefulness of people in not succumbing to fatalism but finding their own idiosyncratic ways to differ; at the same time it represents a warning about the lack of progress in reconstructing a legible social space where differentiation is possible, and of the tragic consequences of misunderstanding.
4. Thus until a new leadership was installed and new statutes adopted in 1995, the Czech Cycling Union (ČSC), for example, laboured under substantial debt, suffered from a culture of cronyism and diletantism among its staff, and lacked any conception about its organisational priorities, according to the new director of the secretariat, Slavomír Svobodný. Since the shakeup debts have been paid off, more independence has been devolved to specialist sections, and funds are distributed in a more transparent way based on incentives for results and recruitment; however the director complains of a continued lack of initiative from most of ČSC's member clubs (Peloton no. 5, 2000: 59–61).
5. Interestingly, the Czecho-Slovak trade union movement represents a partial exception to this principle. The post-revolutionary environment within which it operated was relatively quickly institutionalised ‘from above’ — arguably before the movement had chance to resolve its identity via internal ‘representative bargaining’. It thus found itself ushered into a position of influence (albeit substantially circumscribed) via the tripartite council and new union legislation before any consistent notion of a labour interest had been worked out through the communicative practices which it, as a collective actor, is supposed to facilitate and structure (see Čambáliková 1992: 71). This ‘back-to-front’ development, in which a tripartite council emerged not as an historic compromise following a period of conflict between unions and capital or the state, but as a ‘preventive’ institution in anticipation of possible future conflict (Mansfeldová 1997: 104), produced for unions a temporary imbalance between influence and legitimacy, which was subsequently slowly restored. ČMKOS and KOZ SR, the two countries' main union confederations, are now possibly stronger as organisations than they might have been if they had been forced to secure influence from the start by demonstrating their strength through mobilising a labour interest, but trade unions as ‘intersubjective communities’ are undoubtedly different due to their unorthodox post-revolutionary regeneration, a fact which is evident from a comparision with Polish experience, where the post-communist state has not embraced corporatist solutions to the same extent (Smith 2000). Which of them produces a more ‘representative’ pattern of interest organisation? Przeworski et al. argue that the preservation of some aspects of a ‘state corporatist’ format following a regime transition may be beneficial if the alternative of ‘a sudden shift to a purely voluntaristic … format could jeopardise the very existence of some organised interests’ (1995: 56). The higher rates of unionisation in the Czech and Slovak Republics compared with other post-communist countries offer some support to this argument, but the relative long-term strength of different organisations is hard to predict.
6. Anti-myths are also narrative devices enabling actors to reconcile themselves with disorder, but on a different basis. Instead of stimulating the vision of a new order, they rationalise the irreversibility of the fall into chaos. They thus legitimise a fatalistic approach to social reality, an orientation on short-term gains and an unwillingness to bear sacrifices, which are irrational if the ‘myth’ of an eventual restoration of order is incredible (Kabele 1998: 317–18).
7. It is obvious that agricultural or certain types of industrial communities have greatest difficulty adapting to macro-economic transformation, because its institutional consequences (above all unemployment) are particularly destructive for them. But is their low adaptive capacity linked also to an inability to narrativise change? Majerová identified as a characteristic attitude among manual agricultural workers ‘a rejection of any kind of changes … and a demand for the preservation of the same work in the same enterprise under the same conditions’ (1999: 245). This intransigence could be related, she suggests, to low levels of educational attainment, a deficit in civic organisational skills, and also to the strong social control mechanisms which prevail in a village setting and which render more visible illegitimacies and inequities in the privatisation process. For these reasons agricultural communities constitute a cultural milieu which is resistant to the heroic mythologisation of privatisation and marketisation and at the same time poorly equipped with the communication skills necessary to express alternative transformation narratives.
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