Blackwell Reference Online

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Societies or economies in transition have been the focus of sociological research since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, which symbolized the demise of the state socialist system. The term transition economies therefore applies mainly to post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and also in East Asia, despite its wider use in the economic or sociological literature. The term transition is used to describe the process through which a society or economy introduces the institutional facets associated with advanced capitalist economies, such as the legal system, ownership structures, institutions of financial and labor markets, the party system, and the institutions of the independent and democratic state. While the term transition is often restricted to a small time span of an economic change, or relates only to an economic view of post-socialist societies, or describes the fixed result of the changes as the western type of a market economy or capitalism ( Offe 1996 ), the term transformation has been more widely used in the sociological literature, especially in Europe, since the mid-1990s. The latter term covers a wider social process of fundamental political, economic, technological, and cultural change in structures and values, including all areas and levels of the society: organizations, the individual, and collective actors ( Nee & Matthew 1996 ... log in or subscribe to read full text