A new line of inquiry into the history of communist regimes and the cold war has emerged. Pioneered by Stephen Kotkin and other American historians, it views Stalinism as the defining era of socialism, building a specific anti-capitalist and illiberal modernity that mustered voluntary participation and international legitimacy. This model of Stalinism as a rival civilization, held together by participatory totalitarianism, challenges older research on communist regimes -both revisionist and totalitarian studies. However, the degree of originality of this perspective is questioned here, citing precursors, parallels and contrasts within European research and political science. 's magnum opus, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, was published in 1995. 2 With time, it has proven to be perhaps the key reference to the themes and methods common to a new generation of American researchers into communist regimes. For lack of an established name, I suggest that the two interconnected lines of research pioneered by Kotkin be dubbed 'competing modernities' and 'participatory totalitarianism'. In a compact summary, the claim of communist regimes to represent a superior modernity was key to their success in making Stalinism participatory.Both these concepts -competing modernities and participatory totalitarianism -highlight the paradigm's intellectual indebtedness to both totalitarian theory

In 1976 Sweden adopted a law on workplace democracy, presented by the Social Democratic government as the ‘reform of the century’. What can the reform tell us about the history of the Swedish Model and how it was revised during the early 1970s under the prime minister, Olof Palme? This article compares four grand narratives of the development of welfare states, viewing dominant narratives of the Swedish Model as influential myths in their own right. The article argues that despite its global reputation as a hallmark of ‘democratic socialism’, the Swedish workplace democracy reform was a broad cross-class compromise, in the wake of a pan-European wave of similarly labelled reforms. Furthermore, the reform served to protect workplaces against Communist activism. The argument builds on the internal meeting protocols of the board and executive committee of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

In studies of cultural globalisation, the influence of communist regimes on Western Europe has remained under-theorised and little explored. Addressing this gap in research, this article puts forward the glocalisation grid of worldpolity theory as a means for conceptualising and investigating how East European communist regimes helped shape the evolution of West European welfare states during the Cold War. The article retraces the 1960s struggle over expert discourse within the International Labour Organization (ILO) in which communist regimes, including Yugoslavia and Poland, struggled to win the bureaucratic legitimacy of the ILO for their domestic policies. In focus are vertical, horizontal and temporal dimensions of glocalisation and the ensuing perceived or superficial similarityso-called isomorphismof legislation on worker participation in decision-making at the workplace. The article maps the timing of reforms across Europe, showing how East European reforms preceded and were co-constitutive to a pan-European process of policy isomorphism.

The 1976 Swedish landmark law on workplace democracy, Medbestämmandelagen (MBL), has traditionally been regarded as a victory of social democracy over recalcitrant employers. In contrast, this article shows how, in fact, before the law, the Swedish Employers' Confederation (SAF) was the main driver behind Swedish research on work life reform, and the main promoter of employer-union dialogue on the matter. Crucially, in the 1960s, SAF endorsed the internationally pioneering thinking of economist Eric Rhenman, who argued that conflict within the firm between managers and unions was unavoidable, healthy, and could be good for business if framed in a productive manner. Today, this line of management thinking is termed the Scandinavian Cooperative Advantage.However, in the early 1970s, Swedish social democracy radicalized abruptly. The SAF board initially interpreted the new radicalism as a masquerade to appease activists. SAF assumed that, behind the scenes, the Swedish spirit of consensus-oriented labour market dialogue would prevail, as it had since the 1938 Saltsjöbaden agreement. And assuredly, the actual effects of the MBL law proved to be considerably less radical than advertised, and broadly compatible with Rhenman's thinking. Still, social democracy's new ideological rhetoric helped prompt SAF's late 1970s shift from cooperation to conflict.

/ preface and acknowledgements for being there. To my family-my parents, my two elder sisters, brothers-in-law and six lovely nieces and nephews-I look forward to adding a fifth Doctoral degree, which will be the first one in the social sciences. I would like to thank a number of institutions that have funded my research: The Department of Political Science at Lund University generously employed me as a Ph.D. candidate and teacher for a good four years. The Swedish Institute supported my extended stay in Berlin, which was crucial for this study. Together with the daad (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst), the Swedish Institute also financed my language training, where I acquired a gds diploma. The most faithful financiers of my travels to various conferences have been Ekedahl-Lundbergska fonden and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Lund University. Last but not least, I would like to thank all of my interviewees. Interviewing not only supplied the case study with indispensable information, but was also an irreplaceable experience, a first-hand exposure to a unique historical legacy and transformation. aim of the study / 13 chapter 1 Compared to the field of communist studies, other theoretical perspectives are applied to a different subject matter: I apply general organization theory not to the sed organization during the gdr, but to the efforts of organizational entrepreneurs reforming the sed into the pds after the fall of the sed-regime. Research on the PDS There is a plethora of good empirical overviews of the pds, but a dearth of theoretically focused analyses of specific phases or aspects of the party (