Publisher's Synopsis
The Reader is a compilation of articles that have appeared in the journal Innovation in the Social Sciences Research in the past five years. It represents an attempt to comprehensively document and analyze the process of transformation in Europe during the last five years. The end of the Cold War and the breakdown of Communism mark the beginning of a new era for Europe as well as for the world at large. The latter is not only characterized by the addition of new dimensions to pre-existing structural configurations, more importantly, it is branded by the erosion of the mental schemata within which ? for good or bad ? lay people, but also social scientists, learned to perceive and interpret social reality. In that, at the end of the twentieth century we are confronted with a crisis of human consciousness and, by extent, a crisis of the social sciences. The originality of this volume lies in the bringing together of viewpoints and analyses from different countries and different points in time in the period under investigation. Within a framework of rapidly changing social environment, the significance of maintaining in active memory the multifarious aspect of social change at all successive points in time cannot be stressed enough.
