ABSTRACT

Coping with the minor disturbances of everyday life and with the occasional major crisis is an eternal fact of life all over the world. The reason we begin this analysis with such a truism is that we do not want the reader to believe that what follows is solely related to the process of transition from Communism to free-market liberal democracy. There already exists a considerable literature on how people cope with different crises and disasters, dating back to the work of Jahoda et al. (1933) and Sorokin (1943). While the latter developed and illustrated the social context of coping with mass crisis situations such as war, revolution, pestilence and famine, the former focused on a single ‘modern-individual’ crisis: unemployment. Since then a huge literature has emerged dealing with crisis situations (for example, see Dirks, 1980 on famine; Caldwell et al., 1986; Leana and Feldman, 1992; and Wheelock and Mariussen, 1997, on unemployment and labour market restructuring).