Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Sociologia

Book Review: Limitele supraviețuirii. Sociologia maghiară din Transilvania după 1945, Székedi Levente, Editura Institutului pentru Studierea Problemelor Minorităților Naționale, 2021

2024-06-13T06:14:55+00:00

In his study on the Hungarian Autonomous Region in Romania between 1952-1960, the Italian-Hungarian historian, Stefano Bottoni, documents the impact the development of national-communism and implementation of nationalist Romanian cultural policies had on Hungarian communities in Transylvania (Bottoni 2021). During the late 50’s these policies aimed also at cancelling Hungarian intellectual life and limit education taught in the Hungarian language with the general aim to assimilate the Hungarian population from Transylvania. It also restricted institutional autonomy of the educational system by merging Hungarian with Romanian schools. The apex of this nationalist culturalization process was the trial of Transylvanian-Hungarian intellectuals that were preparing a handbook of Hungarian literature for students in Romania and the merging in 1959 of the Hungarian Bolyai University with the Romanian Victor-Babeș University (Botoni 2021). In spite of this traumatic event for the Hungarian intellectual life in Transylvania we have very few studies that document the way the intellectual Hungarian field reproduced itself during the communist period and the role the new Babes-Bolyai University played in this. Székedi Levente’s book brings an important contribution in understanding the intellectual life in Transylvania during the Communist period and focuses on the reconstruction of how sociology survived as both within and outside academia. By including in this analysis the cultural production of the intellectuals around the periodicals Korunk and Utunk, Székedi manages to reconstruct the activity of one of the most important cultural centre of Transylvania during the communist period.

Guest Editors’ Foreword. Industrial Shifts and Social Rifts: Examining the Layers of Roma Marginalization Across Industrialization Cycles in Romania

2024-06-12T10:13:13+00:00

This special issue delves into the transformative processes of de-industrialization and re-industrialization in the Maramureș region of Romania, with a nuanced examination of its impacts on housing, labour, and migration, particularly among the Roma community. Anchored by the research project Precarious labor and peripheral housing. The socio-economic practices of Romanian Roma in the context of changing industrial relations and uneven territorial development (PRECWORK), this collection of articles provides critical insights into the socio-economic shifts driven by these industrial changes. Through comprehensive analyses rooted in political economy, anthropology, history, and sociology, this issue seeks to reframe our understanding of the complexities surrounding the Roma’s experience in a changing economic and political landscape. This introduction sets the stage for exploring these themes deeply, revealing how historical and contemporary forces shape the lives and labour of marginalized communities.

Precarious Industrial Labour at the Edge of the European Union: The Case of Baia Mare

2024-06-12T10:48:32+00:00

Tens of thousands of labourers work in the factories in and around Baia Mare, a city that is being reindustrialized after an initial industrialization under state socialism. In 2021, most workers were being paid about 280 euro a month, as companies were aiming to achieve the lowest possible production costs while remaining within the European Union. Workers and their families, unable to make do on their low wages alone, constantly scramble for means to supplement their income. Many work overtime systematically; some choose to migrate for work abroad for a few months every year; yet others quit their factory jobs for more lucrative opportunities during the summers, only to return to the factories in the autumn. In this paper, I look at the industrial history of Baia Mare and the work lives of labourers to understand how the workers in the region were impacted by the politics of dispossession. I use two complementary lenses: on the one hand, I understand their position at the junction of global, national, and local forces; on the other hand, I underline the ways in which this specific case speaks to the workings of global capital, not as an exception, but as one of many interconnected stories of human experience.

Labour Force Composition and Labour Shortage in North-Western Romania: A Cross-County Comparison

2024-06-12T10:57:43+00:00

The paper analyses the labour force composition of two adjacent counties in north-west Romania: Maramureș and Sălaj. Regionally, employers stress the lack of available labour force and resort to commuter networks from nearby rural areas and immigrant labour. Why labour shortage? It is argued that Romania’s FDI-reliant export-led growth model factors in. Namely, the growth model’s reliance on low-cost labour that reduces employment incentives to a minimum (often minimum wage) and employment in repetitive labour-intensive activities make the prospect less attractive. If technological upgrading – requiring skilled employees – is absent, regional labour availability tends to be an issue. Alternative subsistence methods are favoured: seasonal transnational migration, household agricultural subsistence and remittances from relatives. Tying livelihood to families and households, these methods pool resources to replace (even if in part) wage labour under global market-dependency conditions.

Reindustrialization and Transnational Labour Regimes in Maramureș County: Between National Deregulation and Export-Dependence

2024-06-12T11:20:08+00:00

The paper examines Maramureș County’s labour regime and describes its transformation from a heavily unionized formation under socialism to today’s deregulated, transnational condition. The region’s former mining cluster and current furniture production hub are posited as sectoral focal points. Union militantism prevented the mining sector’s accelerated decline in the 1990s, but liberalisation and conformity with the European Union’s regulatory frameworks gradually eroded labour rights and shifted the region’s economic profile to export-oriented sectors. Among these, domestic and foreign furniture manufacturers emerged as dominant economic actors in the early 2000s. While the county is well-known for its wood processing, the companies in question tap into IKEA’s global production network and employ low-cost, flexible labour in just-in-time supply schedules. Recent developments include the use of immigrant agency workers as a solution to the county’s skilled and unskilled labour shortage.

International Migration From a Semi-Periphery City: The Case of Baia Mare

2024-06-12T11:46:21+00:00

Many post-socialist cities in Romania experience population decline caused by both negative natural growth and large-scale international migration. This study seeks to advance an understanding of post-socialist migratory flows from the city of Baia Mare to Western labour markets in terms of its mode of incorporation into the global economy. Using a historical structural lens, the study traces the critical economic transformations, political moments or institutions that influenced migratory flows from Baia Mare. It argues that from its semi-peripheral position, the city’s role, after the regime change, became that of a supplier of cheap labour to Western Europe and a location for low added value industries. Despite its rapid economic growth due to reindustrialisation and its success in attracting relatively large shares of immigrants, its native urban population continues to decrease. The developing manufacturing industry specialised in intensive, low-paid, manual labour automatically excludes more educated and qualified labourers who continue to resort to international migration in order to survive or to improve the quality of their lives.

Airplane Parts and Covid Masks: Labour Commuters of North-Western Romania Between Central and Eastern European “Re-industrialisation” and the Global Market

2024-06-12T12:05:40+00:00

This article aims to uncover two main features of ‘re-industrialisation’ in Central and Eastern Europe: the reconfiguration of the economic geography in Northwest Romania and the multiple ways in which the Romanian working class is being integrated into the new economy. Post-socialist shifts towards a low-skilled, flexible, and generally insecure economy have underlined the need for cheap, easily disposable labour, and the emergence of the new economic geography has changed the accumulation of capital in the region and the patterns of labour mobility. Despite massive migration, many have continued to work in the region or have combined migration periods with work close to home. This study explores the different mobilities individuals engage in and seeks to understand why some workers choose to stay and live in the region and how the available opportunities for workers aiming to stay in the region influence their prospects. This study traces the patterns of labour commuting and how this is structured by individuals’ strategies and motivations, as well as the social relationships that support this work. The article analyses labour commuting to two major industrial hubs in the region: one which manufactures aerospace components, and one that produces medical textiles. Both companies are foreign-owned and concentrate a significant proportion of the region’s workforce. The micro-dynamics revealed will contribute to understanding the patterns of work in the specific form of re-industrialisation in contemporary Romania.

Debt Dependency and the Cost of Migration: The Case of Roma and Non-Roma Migrants From Baia Mare

2024-06-13T05:31:48+00:00

The Baia Mare region was once one of Romania's main mining centres, with a significant proportion of the local population engaged in industry jobs. However, the extensive economic restructuring that followed the collapse of the old communist regime and the emergence of capitalist development was characterized by brutal privatization measures and great economic instability. While the transition years brought new opportunities for some, for most they meant unstable housing and employment, debt, and a declining social status. Thus, many workers quickly became ‘surplus populations’ (Li 2017) and were forced into patterns of circular migration abroad. Employing a qualitative research methodology, analysing both interviews and secondary data, this paper will focus on the adaptive responses of workers from Baia Mare to the changes in the socio-economic landscape after the collapse of the communist regime and the advance of neoliberal policies in Romania. In particular, the paper looks at Roma and non-Roma migrants from Baia Mare, attempting to compare their strategies and work histories in the context of migration, to see the extent to which class and race differences play a role in creating specific migration patterns in the post-socialist context. The comparison between racialized people living in improvised shelters on the periphery of Baia Mare and those who are working class but not living in a situation of destitution will show us the role that dispossession plays in creating certain conditions that lead to debt dependency and specific migration patterns.

Racialized Housing and Proletarization Policies as Internal Socialist Contradictions: Roma Relocations Between 1975-1989 in Baia Mare, Romania

2024-06-13T05:44:16+00:00

The emergence of the ghetto as an urban social formation is regularly conveyed as a specific neoliberal capitalist product. Based on interviews with inhabitants and policymakers and archival data covering more than two decades, this article brings another dimension to the debates on ghetto formation. It traces the urban spatial politics of managing and containing Roma communities in the Romanian NW city of Baia Mare from the late 1970s until 1989. To this aim, it uncovers the debates and decisions regarding the last stages of socialist urban systematization focused on Hatvan, a Roma neighbourhood, and the subsequent relocation projects. Initially, the socialist administration aimed to assimilate the Roma population into the working class. However, a peculiar segregationist policy followed the failed experiment of expropriation and rehousing into low-quality apartments. In the early 1980s, authorities relocated most Roma in the newly built Vasile Alecsandri district to four new specifically designed apartment buildings nearby. The four blocks on Arieșului Street lacked central heating to prevent the accumulation of arrears – a materialization of the decade-long austerity policies. Other urban Roma were funnelled there as well, thus revealing the racialization policies assembled at the local level. Just before 1990, Arieșului was abandoned, and many people decided to relocate in what became Craica, a ghetto that is still in existence today.

Planning Hatvan: Urban Planning and Repression in One of Baia Mare’s Roma Neighbourhoods (1950-1989)

2024-06-13T05:59:35+00:00

This paper starts from the premise that social space, the state space, is a socially productive territory characterized, among other things, by hierarchical social, economic and political relations. This hierarchical dimension of space comes to the fore when researching the urban marginalization of Roma people in Romania. The mechanisms of exclusion employed by the state against Roma groups are situated in a wide range of other policies, among which uneven territorial development ranks chief. As such, this paper seeks to analyse the junction between these processes. It asks the question: how did the process of urban planning reinforce the urban marginalization of Roma people during socialism in Baia Mare? In order to address this question, I mobilize the results of two years of archival research in the city of Baia Mare, coupled with the discursive analysis of this archival material. I perform a diachronic analysis of how Roma people were targeted by state practices of urban marginalization, such as stigmatization, criminalization and repression. I show how the policies of systematisation of Baia Mare shaped the territory of a particular neighbourhood – Hatvan, attempting to manage and control the Roma population there. Throughout the 1960s, Hatvan was considered a focal point for crime. This led to a large-scale plan to completely transform the area through evictions, demolitions and the displacement of Roma people. The result was a place that was seen as clean, ordered and lawful social space, which became what is currently known as the Vasile Alecsandri neighbourhood. However, this space continues to this day to be one of social marginalisation, economic deprivation and institutionalised racism.