Abstract
As the title suggests, Making the Transition: Education and Labor Market Entry in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Irena Kogan, Clemens Noelke, and Michael Gebel examines how the move from socialism to capitalism radically altered the transition from school to work for young people in 10 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. This title, however, is insufficiently informative for a book that is much more than a deep exploration of a social transition in a single region of the world at one important time. This is a book about social stratification. In particular, this book expertly models how selection into higher education and the accumulation of human capital influence generational and regional inequality. Moreover, the case studies in this volume, when aggregated, clarify the changing qualities and characteristics of occupational stratification occurring at the country and regional levels during political and economic transition.
The organization of this edited volume is straightforward but worth noting. There are 13 chapters. The first offers an overview of the transition from socialism to communism in CEE countries during the 1990s with special attention paid to explicating how economic restructuring affected country-specific education systems and the employment opportunities of young workers. The second chapter provides the theoretical background for an extensive set of hypotheses investigating how selection into tertiary education and the quality and organization of school systems influence access to employment. The next 10 chapters are case studies of individual CEE countries. Each case study analyzes a detailed country-specific longitudinal data set of young adults. The years of observation range from 1979 to 2007, and more than half of the surveys follow youth for 10 or more years. Although sample size and individual measures vary between data sets, each study uses a consistent dependent variable: time between leaving school and finding significant employment. The consistent forms of quantitative inquiry across chapters, and therefore countries, make macro-comparisons possible and large-scale trends visible, a benefit typically missing from qualitative comparative investigations. The final chapter provides a review of the many ways labor force inequality increased post-socialism.
In Chapter 1, Noelke and Muller argue that during socialism CEE countries experienced low unemployment and income inequality under state-sponsored employment planning systems. As Chapters 3–12 make clear, the transition to a market economy has disproportionately harmed the labor force outcomes of youth from families with low socioeconomic status and increased state-level educational and income inequality. Much of the post-socialism labor market inequality is a consequence of youth from wealthy and well-connected families being advantaged in two primary ways. First, high-SES youth are selected into education programs that improve social capital, develop greater skills, and are linked with high prestige occupations. Second, high-SES youth are advantaged in their relative stability. Indeed, post-socialism the less-well-educated are much more likely to be unemployed after graduation and take longer to transition into significant employment. This pattern of increasing advantage for the well-educated is consistent across CEE countries transitioning to capitalism, but variation in the speed with which countries transition has important consequences for country-level income inequality. Those countries that quickly shifted from socialism to capitalism experienced rapidly increasing unemployment and income inequality. Countries that transitioned more slowly were able to adjust and diversify their educational system by offering more degree options and specializations in an effort to respond to market demands.
Another strength of this book is the visual representation of data. Every chapter includes a set of survival curves that model the timing of entry into first job after leaving school. Individually, each set of curves illustrates the education to labor market transition for a particular country. Together the curves demonstrate a regionally consistent pattern of stratification. In every country the least educated suffer an extended gap between the completion of education and the start of a first job. Given that independent variables, particularly measures of educational attainment, vary across countries, the survival curves provide a meaningful visual and empirical comparison between countries. The survival curves are just one example of the exceptional data summarized within this book.
This book is an exemplar on how to do large-scale comparative work. While some edited volumes are disjointed and uneven, there is consistent quality among the chapters in this volume. The consistency, however, comes at a price, as chapters often lack deep detail on any given country. This a worthy sacrifice. By using a standardized methodology and similar surveys, the chapters read as a singular object rather than a collection of loosely linked essays. In many ways, this edited volume presents a single idea. I would strongly recommend this to book to anyone interested in the political and economic origins of labor stratification as well as those interested in political economy, education, social movements, and the link between education and the occupational life course.