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Since institutions of a political economy cannot be taken into consideration individually, institutional change should be looked at not as an individual subject but as a part of a social formation. Such a view requires social systems to be understood in a way that they avoid being associated with the notion of a static equilibrium being seen as an ideal condition. The book takes on a quasi-inductive approach in reconstructing the evolution of five institutional complexes over a quarter century while also looking into the theoretical implications and questions that have been brought about by empirical observations. A series of conclusions are then offered that are based on empirical material regarding institutional change including how to analyse it and the nature and dynamics of contemporary capitalism.

This chapter tackles the problem of volition from an inductive (instead of deductive) and descriptive (instead of normative) approach. In this “bottom-up” approach, a distinction is made between the high-level properties of human voluntary action and its necessary basic components—the building blocks that are necessary for voluntary action to exist. First reviewed are the documented properties of voluntary processes, including high-level cognitions such as the sense of agency (that is, the sense that the self is responsible for the occurrence of a physical or mental act) and less intuitive properties, including distortions in time perception and the ability to influence that which enters attentional awareness. The chapter then examines how the instantiation of voluntary action rests on three primary components: The phenomenal state (the most basic form of conscious awareness), ideomotor processing (a form of action control), and the skeletal muscle output system (the only effector in the body that is controlled voluntarily). We conclude by discussing how the interdependences among these three components provide a unique insight into the mechanisms of voluntary action and the nature of human agency.

This introduction locates the construction of capitalisms within a broader process of internationalization in the region. The central reference point for the economic transformation was building markets, not constructing capitalisms. This introduction raises issues regarding the type of capitalism emerging, and the need for a more discriminating concept than ‘post-socialist’. An inductive, comparative institutional approach is preferred, rather than a hypothetico-deductive approach. The four countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania—were chosen because they differed whilst sharing many common features. The capitalisms were constructed within a framework given by the Washington Consensus in the early stages, but institutionalized and given a different twist by national structures and cultures and the EU. This introduction concludes with an outline of the coverage of the individual chapters.