ABSTRACT
The demise of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has led to profound changes in the institutional context in which socio-economic action takes place. Indeed, in the past decade or so we have been witnessing one of the most far-reaching contemporary attempts at institutional innovation. Such innovation has been undertaken with a view to establishing democratic capitalist societies and has generally been conceived with explicit reference to the example of Western capitalist societies. Not surprisingly, we can see both institutional convergence and divergence between the former state-socialist countries. For example, while in all of them property has been increasingly privatised, mechanisms of privatization as well as their outcomes in terms of ownership structures have been quite diverse. On the one hand, this is because institutional change has occurred in one and the same global discursive context, which has by and large set the broad boundaries within which change has moved. On the other hand, institutional change has taken place in particular national socio-historical contexts and has been conceived and implemented by particular actors with particular visions and interests concerning the way that capitalism should be built (Blokker and Keune 2001). In this way, the CEE countries are constructing their own ‘varieties of capitalism’.1
