Blackwell Reference Online

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Although one could argue that all economies are in transition, permanently, from one state to another, this entry will focus on former socialist societies, which have undergone a post-communist transition both in a political and a socioeconomic sense. Accordingly, economies that experienced a transition to democracy but not to a market economy (e.g., countries in South America) are not considered. Thus, this entry provides information on developments in social stratification in societies as a consequence of political and economic changes since the collapse of socialism at the end of the 1980s. The sociological context is a change in mechanism, which creates social inequalities and generates stratification in socialist planned economies and in capitalist market economies. Former socialist societies represent good test cases for studying these different mechanisms because the same nations with their historical and sociological characteristics can be observed before and after the transformation, in a situation dominated earlier by socialist redistribution and later by the capitalist market . With respect to these two mechanisms, the basic assumption is that inequalities under socialism are generated by the redistribution and reduced by the market, while inequalities in market economies are produced by the market and decreased by state intervention ( Manchin & Szelényi 1987 ... log in or subscribe to read full text