Challenges of Sustained Development: The Role of Socio-Cultural Factors in East-Central Europe

Within the context of the accession of the post-communist Eastern European nations to the European Union, the authors (all professors of sociology at the U. of Ljubljana, Slovenia) "provide a heuristic model of the socio-cultural factors of developmental performance." The model exists at three levels of analysis: historically-derived civilizational competence; internal developmental factors of cognitive mobilization, social capital, entrepreneurial spirit, quality of governance, and social cohesion and external factors of openness to international environments; and the way factual developmental performance contributes to the reproduction of the factors that enable it. The authors explain the operations of each of these factors in individual chapters that also include empirical justification. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR