Summary
Ildiko Erdei: Waiting for Ikea
Ildiko Erdei, a professor at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, placed her study in a context conditioned by important and major political, economic and social changes in Serbia.
The first part of the book provides the necessary overview and theoretical framework for understanding production and consumption under socialism and after its collapse, while the second part through "localized" studies of examples shed light on a whole series of important questions related to "transitional" processes in Serbian society.
The author asks questions about the nature and basic characteristics of the socio-economic systems of that era, such as: "Is socialism a production society and capitalism a consumption society? Can it be consumed if it is not produced and that much and relatively well, as well as can it be consumed if it is produced little and very poorly? How long did it take for the mass consumption of capitalism to overthrow the socialism of vouchers, queues, poverty and would it have brought it down at all if the image of a full refrigerator had not penetrated and eventually broken through the iron curtain with the electronic revolution?
The book is one of the few studies on socialism and post-socialism, economics and consumption in the social sciences, which makes it a unique pioneering undertaking..
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