ABSTRACT
The experience of fast economic and political reforms implemented in different countries in the late 1980s has been associated with greater inequality and social stratification. The socialist societies were stratified into social groups in which social capital rather than economic capital determined a person’s status. These status groups have been replaced by social classes in the transition to market economies.
This chapter discusses distinct theories and approaches to explain the income inequality, stratification and class formation in post-communist societies.
The authors conclude that most transition theories assume that capitalism was a single destination and that all former socialist countries would travel on a single path towards this destination; but this assumption is not supported by empirical analyses. Studying the development of post-communist societies over long periods of time presents us with a unique opportunity to obtain fundamental insights into how institutions and markets interact in shaping class formation and enables us to determine the role of local and global actors in formatting patterns of social stratification and inequality.
