|
GLOBAL-LOCAL INTERPLAY IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION Pärnu, Estonia, October 1-4, 1998  Riitta Kosonen
(the case of the Russian border town Vyborg) Abstract
Economic analysis have discovered an array of post-socialist mutations and unique hybrid organisational forms. Post-socialist economic change has proven a far more complex phenomenon than a simple linear macroeconomic transition from state socialism to orthodox capitalism. The complexity of post-socialist change draws on the embeddedness of economy within wider social, political and cultural structures. These historical structures have evolved in history, e. g. the seventy years of state socialism in Russia. Analytical focus on the local level provides a perspective to depict the transformation of post-socialist social relations in their full complexity. The local level provides an avenue to sort out the local empirical processes that are subject to other spatial scales.
This paper adopts the regulation perspective to studying local transition in the Russian town of Vyborg. Regulation approach acknowledges the path dependent complexity of socio-economic stability and change. Regulationist lenses allow us to depict the wide range of social relations and struggles that form national socio-economic systems. However, employing regulationist concepts in the local analysis of post-socialist turmoil calls for further elaboration. This paper draws on socio-economic geography and its collective view of local and regional economic systems maintained by networks and institutions. The paper analyses the institutional structure and social networks that for decades reproduced the local economy of the Soviet Vyborg (Russia). The post-socialist disintegration of these structures, networks and mechanisms is thereafter systematically investigated. The aim is to conceptualise the changing institutional structure and network formation in contemporary Vyborg. The conceptualisation serves as a tool for further regulationist accounts of post-socialist local transformation.
|