<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">One of the main tasks of universities of Central and Eastern Europe is that of forming loyal and reliable citizens ready to fill in the ranks of public service. Educational credentials make for social elevation into the ranks of this peculiarly state-dependent middle class. Law students make the relative majority of those engaged in higher learning in the region all through the first half of the 20th century. Where and when there is an acute need for a new middle class under a new state sovereignty, it is law studies that are notoriously perceived as meant to producing the bulk of it. The University of Cluj in the inter-war period is a case in point. The paper shall put forward a selection of data (from an ample statistical survey of elite formation via upper-level education in Central Europe) on this segment of the student population in the 1930s, setting it against a dramatically changed background (the general one and the local one, as traced in secondary sources): how do Romanians cope with the task of producing this new middle class on old grounds, and what are the unwanted side-effects of such state-related social emancipation mechanisms? And how non-Romanians behave in the new situation?</abstract>

A New Middle Class on Old Academic Grounds: Law Students of the Cluj University in the 1930s

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper focuses on the recent neo-liberal transformation in the Romanian education system and analyzes the genealogy of a new form of academic governance that has been implemented in higher education institutions in the past decade. It examines the role quality indicators and supplementary funding have played in the gradual embedding and naturalization of neo-liberal disciplinary reforms in universities and the specific quality enhancement policies that aimed at increasing the productivity of academic workers by stimulating the competition among them. The main argument of the paper is that in order to understand the extensive academic management based on scientometrics and recurrent evaluation of academics we need to look at the structural mechanisms that have shaped higher education institutions in accordance with market rules and at the generalization of competitiveness throughout the system in the context of budget cuts and decreasing resources allocated to education.</abstract>

Competitiveness and Research-Oriented Teaching in Romanian Universities: The Neo-Liberal Transformation of the Higher Education System

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper describes the procedures that minimized labour costs in a typical offshore factory of a large corporation from the global market: the Nokia factory in Cluj, Romania. Two interrelated factors contributed to this. Firstly, the arrival of neoliberal economic rationality created favourable conditions for transnational capital’s free passage through the country. Secondly, under the imperative of flexibilization, the 2011 Labour Code modifications diminished employee rights and increased employers’ privileges, allowing companies such as Nokia to freely assemble the region’s labour force – engaging it in a complex production process – and disassemble it without any major consequences. Flexibilization permitted the use of outsourced labour power in the form of external employees, partly from rural areas, with short-term contracts and minimum wages.</abstract>

The Making of Cheap Labour Power: Nokia’s Case in Cluj

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In the present article I discuss the migration of work from the West towards the East, making direct references to this kind of work relocation between the Netherlands and Romania. More specifically, this article focuses on the Dutch language based activities relocated or outsourced to Romania, a situation which puts customers in contact with “brains without bodies” or “invisible work-migrants”. In order to highlight the trend of migrating jobs I take a look at the evolution of job advertisements for Dutch speakers in Romania. Then, I investigate the impact that the international relocation of back-office and front-office business activities has both on the employees who take over the activity and on the customer’s satisfaction. Factors such as linguistic similarity, cultural practices, and attitudes towards customers’ complaints shape the outcomes of such relocations. Given that the otherness between employees and customers can be faster noticed in the direct, “voice-to-voice” interaction, the situation of call-centres deserves special attention for the analysis. Call-centres clearly feature the characteristics of non-places, where the employee must assume a similar identity to that of the customer.</abstract>

The Flying Dutch Job. Jobs that Migrate from the Netherlands to Romania

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The current frailties of the Romanian health care system are often explained by resorting to the previous regime’s institutional framework, rarely accepting that they are also the product of post-1990 reforms and the neoliberal means of system reconfiguration. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the ways in which two “products” of these reforms actively contribute to the augmentation of private medical services and to the diminishing access to quality care in the public system: the bureaucratization of primary medicine and the “dual medical practice”. More specifically, I use the concept of “informal exchanges” in order to explore the variety of transactions that occur between patients and the health care staff and to document the means through which its main social actors understand, reproduce, legitimize or blame the very existence of these practices. Then, I analyze how referrals to private medical units increasingly replace informal payments, simultaneously laying even harder obstacles in the access to health care for those in need.</abstract>

From Informal Exchanges to Dual Practices. The Shadows of the Romanian Health Care Reform

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The article aims to illustrate the mutual dependencies and transfers between different segments of the cultural field and areas of civic or political activities, together with the function these changes fulfil in redrawing individual trajectories and then the balance of forces. The leading idea is that, in relation with the literary field, the intellectual field is most sensitive to political changes and functions as a regulatory and legitimizing space for writers’ everyday practices, via its power to produce the criteria for public recognition and thus for symbolic inclusion and exclusion. This casts a different look on the claims for creative autonomy within the cultural field and its multiple dependencies on media, politics, the civic and the academic field, and the understanding of the inner logic of these domains through the lens of their complex interrelationship.</abstract>

Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: The Transformation of the Cultural Field in Post-Communist Romania

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 68 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 67 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 67 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 66 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 66 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 65 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 65 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 64 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 64 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 63 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

Volume 63 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 62 (2017): Issue 2 (December 2017)

Volume 62 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 61 (2016): Issue 2 (December 2016)

Volume 61 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 6 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015)

Volume 6 (2015): Issue 1 (June 2015)

Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia

The journal welcomes multidisciplinary and comparative approaches in the fields of sociology, social work, social policies, anthropology, urban and rural studies. Articles that address social issues from Central and Eastern Europe from a global perspective, develop historical comparisons or critical reflections, are particularly appreciated. The core of each thematic issue is composed of research articles with empirical grounding. Methodological discussion papers and book reviews compose distinct sections. A special section entitled Romanian Sociology Today publishes recent research papers relevant for the state-of-art of sociology in Romania.   Why subscribe and read  Studia UBB Sociologia was one of the first Sociology journals in Romania, fully published in English since 2008. The majority of articles are authored by Eastern European scholars who embrace a theoretically informed, empirically grounded, comparative and critical perspective on social changes in the region.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 