The Role of Social Capital in Developing Czech Private Business
Опубликовано на портале: 23-12-2005
Work, Employment, and Society.
2000.
Vol. 14.
No. 3.
P. 439-458.
Тематические разделы:
The development of new private business has both economic and social significance
for the post-communist transition. New business firms offer industrial dynamism and
flexibility to former command economies typically dominated by gigantic monopolies,
while, unlike privatised enterprises, not reproducing formerly institutionalised
practices. They further presage the rise of new social groups and values with direct
implications for civic, social and political renewal. The author argues that conventional
economic theories of business foundation, which presume the stable institutional
conditions of Western-style capitalism, are by themselves poor explanations of the
development of private business in transitional conditions. The paper proposes instead
a social-institutional approach, in which small firms are examined as a socially
constructed process undertaken by business founders within ambiguous institutional
circumstances characterised by historical legacies and simultaneous discontinuities.
The empirical findings allow the exploration of the process of business founding
by former nomenklatura. Their stock of inherited social capital gave them a privileged
position in the contest to construct new firms and thereby access to the legitimate
accumulation of economic capital, which completed their personal assimilation to
the emergent form of market-economic capitalism. The paper concludes by assessing
the social implications of these observations.