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Though the concept of social justice is widely used in the social sciences, we know little about the amount of income inequality that is perceived as just and why perceptions vary across social contexts. In this paper, we argue the ways people define the causes of poverty are related to how they perceive and justify existing income inequality. We examine internal and external attributions of poverty using survey data from the 2006 International Social Justice Project (ISJP). We compare two culturally and structurally distinct regions—East and West Germany. The results support our hypothesis that the amount of income inequality people perceive as just is related to how they explain the causes of poverty, that is, internal and/or external attributions. Poverty attributions are crucial mediators and explain contextual differences in the perceived justice of income inequality between East and West Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under state socialist economic policy, the concept of large-scale factories played an important role. The assumption was that large productivity gains would result from large-scale organisation and so large-scale concepts were also applied to the transport sector. Thirty years before Western management started outsourcing truck transportation from their factories, from 1957 state socialist traffic policy in the German Democratic Republic pulled truck fleets out of nationally owned enterprises, concentrating them into large and dedicated transport service enterprises. As this policy did not increase productivity, it was partly revised in the 1960s. The centralization policy was unsuccessful because state-owned enterprises struggled against the state socialist transport department to keep the fleets they needed to conduct business. Conflicts between the state socialist ideology of centralization and the operational needs of transportation within commerce, construction and industry took on many forms. For example the enterprises transferred only old trucks to the service companies. The paper shows that the theorem of the ‘economies of scale' that was derived in the process industries does not apply in the transportation trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no shortage of literature on the East German revolution of 1989, but class analyses have been few and far between. In this paper, I survey a number of interpretations of the class composition of the 1989 movements-namely, that they comprised 'the people' or the intelligentsia-and find them wanting. I also subject Linda Fuller's thesis on the non-participation of the working class to detailed examination. Against Fuller, I show that workers were involved en masse, and that although the decisive part they played was on the streets, this movement synergised with upheaval in workplaces, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse how young East Germans come to be differentially placed in global network space through their socioeconomically and culturally specific engagements with globalised mediascapes and ethnoscapes. We call for greater awareness of the power differentials which shape globalisation, and draw on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how unequal access to social and cultural capital influences and is reflected in the ‘glocal’ connections through which young people develop and perform their identities. Further, we seek to understand how these differential engagements impact on young people's future trajectories through the development of different competencies. We contend that, precisely how young people are positioned in networks of global—local connectivity matters profoundly, both for the performance of their present identities, and for their future life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]