The business of identities: Remaking the Polish bourgeoisie.

Abstract

This dissertation is a cultural analysis of bourgeois class formation in post-communist Poland. By analyzing the strategies and cultural productions of two very different business associations and their members, I describe how distinct fragments of the nascent Polish bourgeoisie participated in the creation and definition of the new field of business associations. I have argued that this emerging field of business associations was an important arena for forging dominant business ideologies, norms and interests in the new socio-economic context. The extent to which organizational actors and individuals were influential in defining the new bourgeois field depended on how they deployed their particular material, historical and cultural resources. By contrasting the organizational actions of the newly created, ascendant and elite BCC to the Chamber's long-established but beleaguered entrepreneurial tradition, I demonstrate that the agentic deployment of resources depended on actors' understanding the new logics of legitimation emergent in post-communism. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of class formation in post communist countries in several ways. First, it differentiates among property-owning fragments of the bourgeoisie where most literature on the new market actors homogenizes this diverse group of private business people. Second, the analysis demonstrates how common sense notions of the market are culturally constructed, and how key actors set out to naturalize market processes and their sometimes unpleasant concomitants. Finally, an important contribution of this study is its new focus of analysis: Rather than concentrating on <italic> whom</italic> these new business people were in the communist social order, it concentrates on <italic>what</italic> they have done to survive or thrive in the post-communist period. My focus on actions suggests that 1989 was a more revolutionary moment than numerous scholars of elite reproduction and circulation would suggest. Elite reproduction does not mean that these actors did not radically alter their goals, strategies and even identities in the post-communist period. Indeed, it was the former nomenklatura, not the socialist entrepreneurs, who were much more eager to espouse and institutionalize liberal market values. Understanding post-communist social change necessitates looking at what actors do in their new social locations, and not just who they were under communist rule.