Institutional "transition" and "post-communist" changes in Romania: Notes for an anthropology of transparency

• Main Author: Mihailesku Vintila
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Serbian Sociological Association, Belgrade 2004-01-01
• Series: Sociološki Pregled
• Subjects: institutional change; expectations; transparency; trust; assurance
• Online Access: http://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/0085-6320/2004/0085-63200402023M.pdf

"Transition" and post-communist change in European countries may be approached mainly as an oriented institutional change. We may thus get an important insight in a post-communist country’s state of art looking at the way theses mandatory institutional changes have been mastered. The very fact of social life is rooted in mutual expectations (Mauss, 1934). In a broad sense, even institutions were considered to concern all the mutual and stable expectations between actors involved in interaction (Parsons, 1960). In a more analytical sense, one has to distinguish different layers of expectation mastering, from the general categorization of symbolic systems to the legal level of institutional conventions (Douglas, 1986). This institutional legal (not necessary in the modern juridical sense) mastering of people’s expectations provides (more or less) assurance, as different of trust, more likely to be (more or less) developed in interpersonal mastering of expectations via social networks. According to this theoretical scheme one may look at the way and degree institutional change has produced complementary change in people’s expectations, internalized as assurance concerning the institutional functioning. In order for this to succeed institutional change has to be sufficiently "transparent", meaning that the expectations linked to institutional change have to be as much as possible comprehensive, stable and to "make sense" for the population. It turns out that, in the case of Romania, there is a high lack of: - legal transparency (concerning the very legal stake of the institutional change) - moral transparency (concerning the truthfulness of the promoters of this change) - strategic transparency (concerning the lasting strategies of this change) - cognitive transparency (concerning the "sense" of this change) The main outcomes may be considered the following ones: - structural corruption ("cleptocracy") - very low rate of trust ("assurance") - short term social and managerial strategies - "self-colonialism" (Kiossev, 2002). As a global outcome, one may point at a dramatic lowering of assurance concerning institutions in general, thus stressing a variety of strategies rooted in limited networks of selective mutual trust.