Abstract
As Poland and other postcommunist societies have made the dramatic transformation from communism to capitalism, how have workers responded? This study, based on in-depth interviews with Polish workers, argues for an “agency of the weak” perspective to understand the Polish working-class reaction to often cataclysmic change.
That Polish workers would appear weak with questionable agency might appear surprising to some. Workers after all were a large and relatively privileged class under communism. Given the history and impact of the Solidarity movement, if any group of workers were ever historical agents, it was Poland’s workers. Well into the postcommunist period, the Polish press often complained that workers were acting as a brake on needed economic reforms.
And yet most scholarship has found the collective response of Poland’s workers to the postcommunist transformations was fairly muted—despite unemployment rates in the double digits for many years, while trade union density dropped from 65 percent in 1980 to 16 percent in 2008—with some studies suggesting that Polish and other postcommunist workers were surprisingly quiescent.
The present volume seeks to examine and challenge that conclusion through “a search for the agency of workers.” It does so by an in-depth examination of the life histories of workers in Silesia, an industrial region in south-western Poland, and a region that was prominent in the struggles of the Solidarity movement in 1980–81.
Beyond the introduction, the book contains a chapter on workers and transformation in Poland, including an in-depth discussion of previous accounts of postcommunist labor. This is followed by a chapter-length theoretical discussion of workers’ life strategies, focusing in particular on the notions of “agency, structure and reflexivity,” especially through the work of Bourdieu and Archer. A methodological chapter discusses how the 166 in-depth interviews were sampled and conducted. This involved “theoretical sampling” where respondents were chosen based on various categories presumed significant: age, gender, type of workplace, and work performed. Still, the interviewees were mostly male workers in industrial settings, and not surprisingly since trade unions helped in the search for respondents, they were more likely to be trade unionist than the general population.
Given the extent of this theoretical and methodological discussion, and perhaps ironically for a book focused on workers’ agency, one reads through close to 100 pages of text before encountering any of the subjects themselves. The interviews however, both the extended excerpts and the author’s discussion of them, are quite interesting, and cannot be adequately summarized in a short review.
The analysis that follows is subtle: rather than reaching general conclusions, the study focuses on differences within the working-class experiences, between the skilled and unskilled, younger and older generations, between collective and individual orientations. In explaining workers’ response to change, it also presents a convincing synthesis between past analyses of postcommunist workers focused on the ideological and institutional legacies of the communist period with more current studies that have emphasized the structural impact of Poland’s insertion into the global capitalist system. The author underscores the importance of a collective ethos—stemming from communism, Catholicism, and Polish nationalism—and the extent to which it has been transformed by a privatized individualist ethos through market discourse or disruptions to working-class communities and careers.
The different circumstances within Poland’s working class help explain different responses. Two key variables—access to important resources and the extent of a collective versus privatized ethos—explain the extent of one’s agency (and reflexivity) and the direction it takes. This leads to four main outcomes: “integrating,” where resources combined with a community-centered ethos lead to greater agency and “communitarian solidarism”; “embedding,” where fewer resources and a community orientation leads to a “structured dependency” and “communitarian fatalism”; “constructing,” where resources and a private-centered ethos allow for relative success in market conditions (or “privatized bricolage”); and “getting by,” where few resources and a private orientation leads to “privatized fatalism.”
Most subjects do not fit neatly into these four categories, but fall into some form of hybrid, and the author argues that the concept of hybridization “constitutes one of the most important outcomes of the research” (p. 188). This hybridity demonstrates that, while Poland’s workers after Solidarity have not been the agents of historical change found in the Marxist perspective, neither have they been “helpless puppets of social change” (p. 232). The study notes that after years of deindustrialization and union decline, there have recently been emergent, if limited, forms of collective action and union organizing.
Still, while the author is quite clear about the limits of his methodology, one wonders if locating respondents via trade unions leads to more agent-centered and collectivist life histories than one would find otherwise. Even so, the study finds more examples of “structured dependency” (107 cases out of 166) than “structuring agency,” and more privatized than collective orientations.
One is left with the overwhelming sense of people, who while clinging to their dignity, constantly struggle with their subordinate status in a society that has undergone profound change. Agents they may be, but they do so less by shaping events than by reacting and adapting to forces beyond their control. As a recent book by Guglielmo Meardi (Social Failures of EU Enlargement) confirms, most Polish workers channel their agency through individual exit rather than collective voice.