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New pronatalist regimes rely on market incentives to increase childbearing and encourage full employment. Few countries have instituted a more extreme version of new pronatalism than Hungary. The current study analyzes how professional women navigate uncertainty and risk under Hungary’s pronatalist regime. Our analysis of twenty-one in-depth interviews with middle-class professional women reveals inherent tensions and contradictions. Respondents perceived two competing imperatives: seek financial security in a highly unstable labor market and privately absorb care burdens associated with larger families. Respondents weighed the potential rewards of accessing various pronatalist benefits against the costs of reproduction in a policy context characterized by risk and uncertainty. Respondents were highly selective regarding which benefits they accessed and which they avoided. Our analysis contributes to research and theory on the substantive impact of formal welfare and work policies, including the ways actors interpret and engage policies in order to limit risk and uncertainty.

As most other EU countries, Hungary implemented severe lockdown measures during the pandemic, including the closure of the schools and childcare facilities. This meant that for several months a vas...

The ten countries with the fastest shrinking population are all located in Eastern Europe, with low fertility as one of the leading causes. In this article, we analyze the privatization of companies as a potential but so far neglected factor behind the postsocialist fertility decline. We argue that privatization is linked to lower fertility by catalyzing uncertainty, shifting the cost of care work onto families, and reducing the resources available to support social reproduction. We test this hypothesis using a novel database comprising information on the demographic and enterprise trajectories of 52 Hungarian towns between 1989-2006 and a cross-country dataset of 28 countries in Eastern Europe. We fit fixed and random-effects models adjusting for potential confounding factors and control for time-variant factors and common trends. We find that company privatization is significantly associated with the postsocialist fertility decline. The observed level of privatization among Hungarian towns corresponds to 0.37 fewer childbirths per woman on average, i.e., approximately 54.3% of the overall fertility decline. Cross-country fixed effects models covering 28 former socialist-bloc countries for the 1989-2012 period confirm the town-level findings. The observed level of privatization among postsocialist countries might explain approximately 49.75% of the overall fertility decline.

Business feminism is a brand of feminism that privileges women's advancement in the corporate hierarchy and centres corporations as the ultimate purveyors of gender equity. While scholars have critiqued this formulation, little empirical research has analysed the processes that guide the dissemination and translation of business feminism in organizational settings within global corporate networks. This article advances scholarship on the global processes that drive the export of business feminism logics. We analyse the process of dissemination of business feminism from the headquarters of multinational corporations to corporate hubs located in Hungary. This process relies on women executives who are charged with translating policies and practices originating in the headquarters of western corporations. In‐depth interviews with women executives charged with implementing corporate policies reveal the ways in which business feminism is interpreted, modified and/or resisted by actors within organizational settings.

How does job context influence employers’ views of mothers as workers? Drawing on 51 in-depth interviews with employers in the finance and business service sectors of Hungary, the authors find that finance employers rely on a variety of strategies aimed at excluding mothers from entry-level professional jobs, while business services employers invest significant resources aimed at recruiting and accommodating mothers. To explain this variation, the authors suggest that employers’ views of mothers are dependent on their perception of skill requirements and knowledge/skill dynamism.

This final chapter synthesizes and discusses the results of the previous chapters, identifies future challenges, and makes suggestions for future research. It shows which employees use different types of organizational investments and what the consequences are for a range of outcomes. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of studying the organizational level in addition to the employee and country level. The chapter concludes by identifying future challenges for a sustainable workforce, such as the future of work, analyzing the family and community in addition to the organization, the socioeconomic divide in workplaces, and inequality between countries.

Using the 2008 cross-sectional wave of the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey and multilevel modeling techniques, this article explores the macro-level determinants of the gender-poverty gap in the ten post-socialist EU member states. In dialogue with the literature on the impact of economic development on gender inequality in Asia and Latin America, we find that fast-paced, foreign capital-led economic growth is associated with a larger gender-poverty gap in Central and Eastern Europe, while generous welfare policies, specifically higher levels of spending on pensions and family policies, are correlated with women’s lower relative destitution. These findings evaluate the impact of neoliberal style “economic development” on gender inequality in a geopolitically specific context and suggest that structural adjustment and global market integration may exacerbate women’s vulnerability even when they are well equipped with human capital and other resources to compete with men in the labor market. Utilizando la oleada transversal de la encuesta de Estadisticas de Ingresos y Condiciones de Vida (EU-SILC) del 2008 y a traves de tecnicas de modelizacion multinivel, este articulo explora los determinantes a nivel macro de la brecha de genero y la pobreza en los diez estados post-socialistas miembros de la UE. Partiendo de la literatura sobre el impacto del desarrollo economico en la desigualdad de genero en Asia y America Latina, encontramos que el rapido crecimiento economico asociado a capital extranjero esta relacionado con una mayor brecha de genero y pobreza en Europa Central y del Este. Sin embargo, se observa que unas politicas de bienestar mas amplias, especificamente aquellas con niveles mas altos de gasto en pensiones y politicas familiares, se correlacionan con una menor pobreza en las mujeres. Estos hallazgos muestran el impacto del "desarrollo economico" neoliberal en la desigualdad de genero en un contexto geopolitico especifico y sugieren que el ajuste estructural y la integracion del mercado mundial pueden incrementar la vulnerabilidad de las mujeres, incluso cuando estas cuentan con capital humano y otros recursos para competir con los hombres en el mercado de trabajo.

Generous parental leave policies are popular in a number of countries around the world and are usually seen as a sign of the ‘family friendliness’ of the state. Relying on in-depth interviews with mothers on parental leave in Hungary, the authors argue that the context in which the policies are implemented should be examined when evaluating their consequences. In semi-peripheral, resource-poor Hungary lengthy parental leave policies turn women into an invisible ‘reserve army of labourers’. While their employment is mostly unaccounted for in aggregate statistics, and political discourse suggests that their ‘job’ is to look after children, nevertheless many women do end up doing some work for wages during the almost five years they spend on parental leave. However, given the rigidity of the labour market and rampant discrimination against mothers with small children, their chances of obtaining formal employment are small. They therefore resort to doing ad hoc, temporary, informal work, which is often underpaid and well below their qualifications. Thus generous family policies do not necessarily indicate the ‘women friendliness’ of the state and may not lead to the relatively favourable trade-off between stable public sector work and lower wages suggested recently by comparative researchers. Instead, in this specific context, which combines legacies of state socialism, a backlash against women’s emancipation before 1990 and a peripheral, vulnerable labour market, familialist policies are associated with a high degree of marginalisation for women with small children in which the state is at best complicit, at worst, an active agent.

In this paper we explore the impact of the economic recession of 2008 on gender inequality in the labor force in Central and Eastern European countries. We argue that job and occupational segregation protected women’s employment more than men's in the CEE region as well, but unlike in more developed capitalist economies, women’s level of labor force participation declined and their rates of poverty increased during the crisis years. We also explore gender differences in opinions on the impact of the recession on people’s job satisfaction. For our analysis we use published data from EUROSTAT and our own calculations from EU SILC and ESS 2010.

Under what conditions do motherhood penalties emerge in countries undergoing transition from state socialism to capitalism? This analysis identifies the ways managers in global financial firms employ gendered assumptions in constructing and implementing labor practices among highly skilled professional workers in Hungary. Relying on 33 in-depth interviews with employers as well as interviews with headhunting firms, labor and employment lawyers, and analysis of antidiscrimination cases brought before Hungary’s Equal Treatment Authority between 2004 and 2008, we identify several strategies global employers use to shed, demote, and marginalize professional mothers. By demonstrating the salience of motherhood as a status characteristic in the postsocialist labor market, our work contributes to existing scholarship on motherhood penalties. Our work also extends this scholarship by showing how the salience of motherhood is strongly conditioned by state-level arrangements that shape the opportunity context in which employers design and carry out employment practices.

This paper compares the political processes and gendered outcomes of welfare state formation in Hungary and Poland. We find both differences and similarities in the extent to which family and maternity policies in the two countries encourage women's paid work, support women's care giving work in the home, guard women and their families against poverty, and differentiate among women based on ethnic/racial classifications and class status. We argue that while welfare states in Western Europe may be increasingly characterized by a retreat from maternalist policies, Hungarian and Polish welfare policies support distinct forms of maternalism. While maternalism is privatized in Poland, it is publicly supported and subsidized in Hungary. We attempt to explain the divergence between the two countries by pointing to differences in class-based and gender-based political mobilization around family benefits as well as the timing of welfare reforms. Despite differences in the substance of the policies, however, we find that both regimes limit women's labor market opportunities.

The second volume of the project Kinship and Social Security (KASS) offers "ethnogra phies" of nineteen localities, ranging from small village communities to suburbs and housing developments of large cities, in eight European countries. The authors aim to complement and further develop the anal ysis of concepts about kinship, familial obli gation and care introduced in the other two books of the series. This 500-page edited vol ume is an enlightening read and a creative rethinking of the use of qualitative research methods and comparisons. Yet as the arche typical middle child who must navigate through life between the older sibling and the baby of the family, it seems to have trou ble finding a true identity. Containing much too little detail on kinship practices, most chapters are not quite ethnographies, but neither do they aspire to produce novel theoretical claims on the basis of the inter

This paper discusses changes and new directions in the gendered nature of the welfare state in three post-state socialist societies: Hungary, Poland and Romania. Relying on an analysis of laws and regulations passed after 1989 concerning child care, maternity and parental leave, family support, unemployment and labor market policies, retirement and abortion laws, the authors identify the differences and the similarities among the three countries, pointing out not only their status in 2001, but also their trajectory, the dynamics and timing of their change. The authors argue that there are essential differences between the three countries in terms of women’s relationship to the welfare state. They also specify some of the key historical and social variables which might explain variation across countries.

The gendered assumptions embedded in the construction of the rational individual are well established in Western feminist thought but inapplicable to describe societies operating on different principles, such as East European state socialism. This article identifies the communist subject as the building block of communist political ideology and argues that this formulation was no less male biased than its counterpart, the rational individual under liberal capitalism. In state socialist Hungary this male bias came to be expressed differently: Women were integrated into society through membership in a social group perceived as relatively homogeneous regarding interests and obligations and with gender-specific qualities and privileges. These qualities were considered inferior to men's since women—because of household responsibilities—were not capable of total devotion to the communist party. The author explores this construction of the female communist subject through a content analysis of classified materials from the archives of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.

In this paper we explore the impact of the economic recession of 2008 on gender inequality in the labor force in Central and Eastern European countries. We argue that job and occupational segregation protected women’s employment more than men’s in the CEE region as well, but unlike in more developed capitalist economies, women’s level of labor force participation declined and their rates of poverty increased during the crisis years. We also explore gender differences in opinions on the impact of the recession on people’s job satisfaction. For our analysis we use published data from EUROSTAT and our own calculations from EU SILC and ESS 2010.

Using data on employed men from the 1980 and 1991 South African Censuses, we analyze the determinants of occupational status and income. Whites are found to have much higher occupational status, and especially income, than members of other racial groups. Most of the racial differentials in occupational status can be explained by racial differences in the personal assets that determine occupational attainment (especially education), but only a much smaller fraction of the White/non-White income differential can be so explained. Despite a modest reduction between 1980 and 1991 in the role of race in socioeconomic attainment, the overall picture shows more stability than change.

This article introduces the political leaders and opinion makers who came to power after the "velvet revolutions" in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Who are these people? In the photographs taken during the first few, ecstatic months after the breakdown of the communist regime, we see the faces of middle-aged men, full of youthful anticipation. They seem to be aware that they were entrusted with the dreams of millions improving living standards, achieving political sovereignty, freedom of speech, religion, and civil association, more goods on the shelves, shorter queues, access to MTV, and shedding the negative connotations of the term "Eastern" in describing their geographic location in Europe. In this article, we describe this group in terms of their family backgrounds, political affiliations, credentials, and their past appearances in positions of authority. In painting this picture, we hope to assess the extent of the changes in the upper echelons of power, which, we expect is indicative of the institutional changes that have and will in the future influence the character of the new regimes themselves.