Book Review: G. Meardi, Social Failures of EU Enlargement. A Case of Workers Voting with their Feet, Routledge: New York–London: 2012: 228

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Sometimes you may judge the book by its cover. Those familiar with the works of Guglielmo Meardi know very well that his name as the author usually signals a controversial, if not a provocative content. Italian-born Meardi, who currently is the Head of prestigious Industrial Relations Research Unit at the Warwick Business School, has been covering developments in the field of work and employment relations in Europe for more than two decades, paying special attention to transformations of that field in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). He pioneered field research in the Polish a# liates of multinational corporations. In $%%$ Meardi stepped forward with a thesis that fuzziness, disorganization and hybridity of Polish industrial relations make our country look like an ‘American Trojan horse (Meardi 2002), posing a threat to the foundations of European Social Model. Ten years later the Author does not hesitate to formulate even more acute diagnosis, writing openly about EU’s lack of capability to maintain the social dimension of European integration after the 2004-2007 enlargement. In his book Meardi claims that the accession of post-communist countries to the EU produced a convenient excuse for undermining the idea of the intrinsic nature of work as a value, which should not be assessed only from a market perspective, as either profitable or not. What happened in the New Member States (NMS) from the CEE after the accession, serves as the evidence.

Keywords

EN

transformation; the Central and Eastern Europe; economics; economic sociology

• Publisher: Szkoła Główna Handlowa w Warszawie
• Journal: Warsaw Forum of Economic Sociology
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 10
• Pages: 133-138

Contributors

reviewer

Adamczyk Sławomir

• Office of the National Commission in Warsaw