The Quest for Certainties

The lecture series in the autum and winter of 1994/95 at the Centre Marc Bloch brought to Berlin social researchers from Eastern and Western Europe who were questioning precisely these opposites. They had all done longterm qualitative research in factories and among entrepreneurs and managers in Eastern and Western Europe. Their research challenges the view en vogue since 1989 of market economy as a coherent attainable aim that followes clearly defined predictable laws. They criticize existing theories that failed to study the changes in Eastern Europe as a political process with an economic dimension that had its own sui generis dynamics. The papers show that labour relations in the market economies of East and West undergo similar developments. The papers on labour relations in the West analyse in a historical perspective the profound changes by which these relations were affected in the last thirty years. These are shown to have been inextricably linked to politics. The papers giving a detailed account of relations on the shopfloor in Eastern Europe point to the continuities in mechanisms of social interaction in the face of a radical change in the economic framework and to the growth of existential uncertainties.