Researching Capitalism In Poland: Economic Interests As A Cultural Construction

• Authors: Witold Morawski

Abstracts

EN

Purpose: The three goals of the article are: first, to show some arguments surrounding the notion of capitalism in theoretical perspective, and also somewhat bashful connotations since it was intro-duced in Poland after the fall of communism; second, to present some historical facts about the rise of capitalism in Poland in comparative perspective, mostly European; third, to look for cultural categories necessary for analysing the peculiarities of Polish socio-economic development as the part of so-called „the second Europe”. Methodology: I go back to the history of European patterns of capitalist formation: Anglo-Saxon, French, German, Russian in order to show the Polish trajectory as strikingly different. Before enter-ing the Polish case, I present Mary Douglas and Aaron Widavsky’s proposal – how to analyze four cultures: individualist, egalitarian, hierarchical and fatalistic (authoritarian). Implications: The main finding is that economic interests are always socio-cultural constructions, hence all definitions of the real life decisions (on public vs private, risk, externalities etc.) that the people make, must frame them within working life of given culture as the combination of universa-lism and particularism (of above-mentioned four cultures).

Keywords

EN

capitalism vs market-private economy; economic growth vs economic development; insti-tutional patterns of capitalism; “Second Europe”; cultural theory of economic interests; four cultures; individualism; egalitarism; hierarchy; fatalism

• Publisher: Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego
• Journal: Central European Management Journal
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 27(1)
• Pages: 84-107

Dates

published

2019

Contributors

author

Witold Morawski

Identifiers

Biblioteka Nauki

1810491