by Dr. Jogilė Ulinskaitė, researcher from Vilnius University
The secondment to Lund University was a great opportunity to develop and present my research ideas. I particularly appreciated the opportunity to meet interesting colleagues involved in the MOCCA project, researching very important and complex issues. I also had the opportunity to network with the Department of Sociology of Law, the department in which the MOCCA project is based. The friendly and welcoming environment and the spontaneous academic discussions made my stay in Lund very enjoyable.
Most importantly, it was an opportunity to present my research and reflect on its relevance for the post-socialist region as a whole. The post-communist transformation that took place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a complex process involving all spheres of society – political, economic, social and cultural. The economic downturn meant that many people had to think about how to make ends meet. Yet, at the same time, in a period of radical change, some of the most important questions that people had to deal with were what is valuable, what is success and how to achieve it. I argue that as people contemplated future prospects and assumed new roles in a context of uncertainty, they evaluated and justified their choices by drawing on different grammars of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999). In my work, I draw on Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of justification to explain how people actively engage in social discourses to determine the legitimacy and value of their actions and choices in their professional lives.
In my research, I also ask whether different groups use different evaluation repertoires differently. In particular, I look at two different groups that have experienced the transformation from different starting points: small entrepreneurs and former industrial workers. During the Soviet period, workers, especially in the industrial sector, were at the forefront of the political and economic landscape and were supposed to represent a utopian version of the ‘New Man’. Soviet enterprises provided most of the necessary social services to workers, their symbolic status was emphasised, and a whole system of honouring individual workers was created (Ashwin, 1996, 1998). With the transition to a market economy and the contraction of the industrial sector in particular, they lost their importance. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs – the new ‘New Man’ – were now supposed to be the backbone of the new market economy. The transition to capitalism required personal initiative, taking matters into one’s own hands and using ingenuity to achieve success. Nevertheless, the new entrepreneurs were viewed with suspicion by both the public and politicians. Soon after the introduction of capitalism, they came to be seen as a group to be regulated and monitored rather than as a legitimate social group. This can be explained by the fact that, unlike in the Eastern Bloc, entrepreneurship was, for a long time, seen as illegitimate in the Soviet Union, even when liberalising reforms were introduced (Smallbone and Welter, 2009).
Drawing on oral history interviews with entrepreneurs who set up companies and people who stayed in industry in 1990s Lithuania, I show how people justify their positions by invoking different orders of worth. Although similar evaluation repertoires are used in similar situations, which signals the universality of orders of worth, at the same time, certain evaluation repertoires are used more often by some groups than by others. The study also reveals how conflicting orders of worth used during the transformation period resulted in conflicts with societal attitudes and institutional decisions.
I think that similar clashes of evaluation repertoires can be observed not only in the whole post-Communist region but also in a wider context. However, this study reveals how specific evaluation scripts were established at the beginning of the post-communist transformation, which led to the entrenchment of trust/distrust and justice/injustice relations with state actors and other market players. These relationships subsequently lead to a propensity to engage in corrupt practices or, alternatively, to adhere to the rule of law and to build networks of support and legitimate cooperation.