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(PRWEB) March 14, 2005

Open for Business: The Persistent Entrepreneurial Class in Poland by Elizabeth Osborn and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski has recently been published (January 2005) by IFiS Publishers in Warsaw, Poland, associated with the Polish Academy of Sciences (ISBN 83-7388-063-1; paperback, 280 pp.) and is available worldwide through Amazon.com. Professor Henryk Domanski, director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, writes: “This is the first comprehensive sociological study on the emergence and formation of an entrepreneurial class in Poland through the course of the initial and advanced phases of the post-communist transformation. [The authors] concentrate on entrepreneurial class recruitment patterns during the transition from a command economy to a market economy … using both qualitative and quantitative methods. … [The authors] … have written a book of fundamental importance. It is insightful work that examines the roots of the rising middle class, and traces the ambitions, insecurities and anxieties of its members.”

The book studies the entrepreneurial class in post-communist Poland from a broad historical perspective, documenting its development and persistent endurance during the radical social change from a controlled, centrally planned economy to a market economy. The authors situate this class in the context of general issues involved in the transformation. Their comprehensive analysis of data—obtained from national surveys and panel studies on social structure and mobility as well as personal interviews with entrepreneurs, managers, and heads of business organizations—demonstrates how the entrepreneurial class in Poland took advantage of economic liberalization at the close of the communist era, thus contributing to the emergence of a solid basis for a capitalist system.

The post-communist transition, undergoing in East-Central Europe since 1989, created a novel opportunity to examine the emergence of a capitalist system through an extensive analysis of survey data and accompanying narrative interviews. Osborn and Slomczynski’s book offers insight into the formative processes of capitalism by focusing on a social class acting as the first-line promoter of a political and socioeconomic system that has been long established elsewhere. Thus, this book will be of interest to social scientists and business professionals alike, not only in Poland and other post-communist states but also in the United States and other economically well-developed countries. The book is grounded in sociology but—since it studies processes that are essential in other fundamental formative changes—it should interest academic and non-academic economists and political scientists in addition to sociologists. The book will appeal to business people in Poland and other capitalist countries, both old and new, because of its insight into the formative mechanisms of business world phenomena they had previously learned to take for granted.

Elizabeth Osborn is an associate professor of sociology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Among her other works are contributions to a two-volume series on the post-communist transition in Poland: Social Patterns of Being Political and Social Structure: Changes and Linkages (IFiS Publishers, 2000 and 2002, available through Amazon.com), edited by her co-author. Kazimierz M. Slomczynski, a professor of sociology and political science at The Ohio State University, is also affiliated with the Polish Academy of Sciences. Like Osborn, he specializes in the social transformation of post-communist societies as well as in cross-national studies on social structure and inequality, work and personality, and political sociology. He is author or co-author of numerous books in these areas as well as articles in leading American and European journals specializing in sociology and political science.

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