ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a paper that I presented at the annual convention of the American Sociological Association in Pittsburgh, August 24, 1992, as the 1992 Cooley-Mead Address and subsequently published as Kohn 1993. I include this account of the history of my Polish and Ukrainian research because I think it enriches the reader’s understanding of the research to know something of its development and of the intimate relationship between the conceptualization of the research and the lives of the people who did the research—not only my life, but also the lives of my collaborators in the research on which this book is based. I deliberately present the essay virtually unchanged from its original publication (aside from a few changes of tense, some after-the-fact clarifications, and the deletion of a couple of footnotes about the prior research that add nothing to what the reader of this book already knows from Chapter 1), because I do not want to change the sense of how my collaborators and I viewed the research on radical social change at its inception, and in context of our past experiences. As you will shortly see, the timing of my writing the essay, and even the very fact of my ever having written such an essay, was fortuitous, but also (I now think) very fortunate: This is how the research appeared as we experienced the 54beginning of the process of radical social change, before we had a single finding to guide us, but not before we had ample opportunity to observe and to think about what Poland and Ukraine were experiencing through the lens of what we ourselves were experiencing in trying to study the process. I leave for the following chapter a more formal statement of the hypotheses and research design we formulated, and for all the rest of the book (save a short, personal appendix) the results of the research and its theoretical implications.
I am indebted to Marta Elliott, Roberto Gutierrez, Krystyna Janicka, Valeriy Khmelko, Elliot Liebow, Bogdan Mach, Vladimir Paniotto, Carrie Schoenbach, Carmi Schooler, Kazimierz Słomczynski, Katherine Verdery, and Wojciech Zaborowski for their suggestions for correcting and improving earlier versions of the text.
