Theorising Transition

Theorizing Transition provides a comprehensive examination of the economic, political, social and cultural transformations in post-Communist countries and an important critique of transition theory and policy. The authors create the basis of a theoretical understanding of transition in terms of a political economy of capitalist development. The diversity of forms and complexities of transition are examined through a wide range of examples from post-Soviet countries and comparative studies from countries such as Vietnam and China. Theorizing Transition challenges many of the comfortable assumptions unleashed by the euphoria of democratisation and the triumphalism of market capitalism in the early 1990s and shows transition to be much more complex than mainstream theory suggests.

Examining transformations using a variety of perspectives Theorizing Transition provides both a rich empirical map of the dimensions of post-Communism and raises important theoretical issues about how we interpret these changes.

In a time of great agricultural and rural change, the notion of 'multifunctionality' has remained under-theorized and poorly linked to the debates in the social sciences. This book analyses the extent to which the proposed transition towards post-productivist agriculture holds up to scientific scrutiny, and proposes a new transition theory.

This book provides an important compilation and synthesis of current work in transition to school research. The book focuses strongly on the theoretical underpinnings of research in transition to school. It outlines key theoretical positions and connects those to the implications for policy and practice, thereby challenging readers to re-conceptualize their understandings, expectations and perceptions of transition to school. The exploration of this range of theoretical perspectives and the application of these to a wide range of research and research contexts makes this book an important and innovative contribution to the scholarship of transition to school research. A substantial part of the book is devoted to detailed examples of transition to school practice. These chapters provide innovative examples of evidence-based practice and contribute in turn, to practice-based evidence. The book is also devoted to considering policy issues and implications related to the transition to school. It records a genuine, collaborative effort to bring together a range of perspectives into a Transition to School Position Statement that will inform ongoing research, practice and policy. The collaborative, research, policy and practice based development of this position statement represents a world-first.

Saw Myat Sandy’s study deals with theoretical and empirical analysis of the political transitions in former Yugoslavia and Burma, the present day Myanmar. It covers the transition period of both states from the late 1980s until present. The author examines the democratic transition in both states, where the process has been ‘unsuccessfully accomplished’, i.e. after a very promising beginning sooner or later undermined by the challenges of the transition, which threatened to reverse, what was gained by democratisation. In this dissertation, Saw Myat Sandy argues that the democratic transition in both states became an extended process of transition’ because of its multi-ethnic societies. The democratisation in former Yugoslavia led to disintegration, and in Myanmar it is proving to be an intractable one and has become almost un-resolvable to anyone’s satisfaction. Myanmar today suffers from on-going political instabilities that cause political and social fragmentations but does not demonstrate that it will fall into conventional Balkan scenarios. This dissertation analyses if Myanmar’s political transition will follow the former Yugoslavian fate by using the transition theoretical framework and highlighting the empirical facts on the problems of ethnicity and other political factors that relate to these democratisation processes. The theoretical approaches are based on the ‘democratic transition and consolidation theories’ argued by Juan J. Linz, Alfred Stepan and Samuel Huntington. As opposed to many quantitative studies, relevant dimensions will gradually appear in this qualitative case study. The theoretical perspectives that apply are equally significant and supplement each other and relate to its national experience. The study contributes to the conventional theoretical debate and aims to offer the understanding for the need to expand the link between ethnicity and political transitions in transition theories. It proposes a heuristic method to integrate the dynamic of ethnicity in political transition theories.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Since the late 1980s the experiences of work and employment in the former communist world have been profoundly transformed. Work, Employment and Transition brings together a series of essays by leading international scholars which highlights the varied and complex forms that work and employment restructuring are taking in the post-soviet world, and makes important theoretical contributions to our understanding of these transformations.

In this new edition, the progress made in the last decade to solve the environmental problems described in the first edition is assessed. The attempts to bring environmental legislation into line with West European norms is also described. Environmental Problems of East-Central Europe looks at air and water pollution, modern farming, water supplies, waste management and landscape protection. These topics are placed within economic, social and political profiles, as spending on a clean environment must be reconciled with welfare spending and the safeguarding of jobs, European Union assistance, civil society and the work of environmental NGOs are also discussed. All of these matters are considered within the context of the wider geographical area and then by each individual country, including the previously communist states lying to the west of the Soviet Union (now with the former federal states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia broken up into seven different entities) and a review of the former Soviet Union with particular reference to the Baltic States. Environmental Problems in East-Central Europe provides a wealth of up-to-date reference material, with a vast amount of supporting literature on environmental conditions and the functioning of civil society and a map of each country. The environment is being taken seriously by them all, such is the influence of the Rio sustainability agenda in general and the EU environmental 'acquis' in particular. The book reveals that Eastern Europe is not a blighted area, but in some respects has a higher biodiversity than Western Europe. Although there is enormous waste and inefficiency in energy use, people actually consume relatively little and the East therefore has some lessons for the West in terms of managing on the bases of 'fair share' of the earth's resources.