Browsing by Subject "yhteiskuntatieteet"

The thesis construes the cultural field of transitology from the point of view of its historical development and characteristics. Transitology specifically and transition studies generally mushroomed in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. Transitology is a specific term for a field of transition studies to which particular attributes are controversially connected. These attributes include nomotheticity, ahistoricity, positivism and determinism. Of interest is the fact, that transitology represents a field of academia concerned with guiding policy recommendations in a process that aimed to democratize and market liberalize post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. This instigated a close connection between the social scientific debates and actual policy. The thesis advances in a twofold manner to investigate the effects of the connections and historical factors behind the nature and applicability of transitology. First, it constructs a historical narrative of the developments of social sciences, transition studies, socialist social sciences and post-socialist space. Through different conjunctures each of these levels brought about its own meaning to the manner in which transitology consolidated its existence. Secondly, the thesis observes the form and nature of the relation of transitological research to its own premises and to its subject matter. A historical and radical perspective of social scientific thought is applied to detect the form of the relations. These perspectives are mainly world-systems analysis and the political economy of Stephen Gill. The relations under observation are then set into a wider context of social sciences and cultural competition with the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological thought. Academic labour is perceived analogously to a Marxist perspective of labour as a social process. The thesis concludes transitology to have attained specific character for a variety of reasons. In general these reasons are seen to stem from an interaction of the state of social scientific thought in the late 80s and early 90 and the historical state of the post-socialist space. Observing the effects and developments occurring from this interplay, the thesis claims transitological thought to have consolidated itself as a constituting cleavage of the post-socialist cultural and political space rather than dissolved into a myriad of approaches. In such a situation, in which a dislodgment between the temporal and spatial dimensions of the cultural field of research and academia and the object if its study has occurred, it becomes vehemently important to focus on the relation and type of research conducted and its direct and indirect implications to its subject matter.