ABSTRACT
The linkage between economic actors and institutional change is one of the most fascinating issues in the recent debate, both on transformation to capitalism and the transformation of modern capitalisms. In the early stages of the transition from planned to market economy, the mode of formation of the new business leaders played a crucial role in explaining different speeds and levels of the success of privatisation and of the institutionalisation of the new market order. Lawrence A. King and Ivan Szelényi (2005) view the different elite constellations at the beginning as one of the crossroads in the different paths towards capitalisms in Central and Eastern Europe. In research carried out on the 1990s, Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelényi and Eleanor Townsley (1998) showed that the business elite in Poland and Hungary at the time was mainly recruited from managers holding middle management and deputy positions during the planned economy, while the political nomenclatura rarely transferred their social capital into business ownership and higher management positions. Eyal et al. called this elite change ‘vertical reproduction’ in contrast to a simple reproduction of the old elite or an elite circulation. 1 For the entire ‘post communist power block’, they suggested a stark affinity with anti-collectivistic, individualistic ideologies, as well as with monetarism, and an aversion to state intervention (1998, p. 87). However, this finding was based on a discourse analysis and it was not accompanied by a study of the attitudes of the new business leaders as part of this block. With the growing presence of foreign multinational companies, especially in East Central Europe, interest in the composition and subjective orientations of the new business leaders has declined sharply. In the concept of a ‘dependent’ or ‘foreign-led capitalism’, the domestic management in subsidiaries, as well as smaller supply companies, appear to be members of a ‘comprador service sector’ working in the interests of foreign investors (Drahokoupil 2008). A few other studies have continued classical elite research but with few new insights into how managers reach the highest positions, or into attitudes, especially in an international comparative perspective. 2
