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Pitfalls and weaknesses of direct application of Western social theories to the study of post-communist societies: critical assessment of middle class and civil society concepts
This paper is devoted for the exploration of the particular dangers for a direct application of the Western social theories to explain the transformation process in post-communist countries. Sociology of these countries suffers greatly from a lack of deep theoretical analysis of social reality because most of the sociological researches hold pure descriptive character. In the best cases there are attempts to use or rather to strain Western social theories in examining of observed social facts. One of the arguments for such tendency is that our societies after the collapse of socialist regime have the direction towards the shape of Western countries with their developed democracy and economy, etc., therefore their theoretical basis must be as an analytical guide for social scientists. However, these theories were developed for different and relatively stable social environment, thus there is a risk to neglect distinct contexts and especially different cultural patterns in West and East European societies. I would like to illustrate these arguments by the two examples of questionable application of Western social theories, namely theories of middle class and civil society.
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