—Martha Lampland, author of The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary

"This is a pathbreaking book. Elizabeth Dunn is the first to allow us to feel what postcommunist transformation is all about. Dunn's detailed account of the concrete ways in which people's lives have changed makes dry social concepts like 'transition,' 'class formation,' and 'privatization' come alive. How are people working differently? How are they made to think differently? How has 'democratization' been used to create a new subordinate type of worker, as well as new types of managers? Postcommunism has never been captured like this before."

—David Orst, author of The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe

"In this stimulating book, Elizabeth C. Dunn renews an anthropology of capitalism, and will stir debates about postsocialist transition. In the land of Solidarity, management techniques seek to remake labor discipline as well as Polish worker identities in accordance with neoliberal ideals of privatized responsibility. Workers, however, struggle to reclaim values that sustain a moral vision of solidarity. The author's vivid ethnography and engaging style make this book a pleasure to read."

—Aihwa Ong, author of Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America

Elizabeth Dunn is a young assistant professor with a lot on her plate. Along with the usual rigors of research, advising, and preparing for tenure review, she is the single mother of a small boy. Her 2004 book, Privatizing Poland: Baby food, big business, and the remaking of labor, grew out of her dissertation work at Johns Hopkins University (in Anthropology) but, more importantly, has strongly influenced the way she lives her life. She is an active foster parent who attempts to build and nurture community through children because her academic work showed her the value of caring for those around her.

Privatizing Poland takes place in the post-Berlin Wall years in a country and society trying to work out its own mix of communism, solidarity, and capitalism. It’s not really about baby food (originally her research site was to be a General Motors automobile plant). This is a work that is meant to overturn fundamental assumptions about economics such as its rationality, innateness, and universality across cultures. Dunn wanted to find out why the expected triumph of capitalism didn’t happen in this place. She got a job on the shop floor of a newly privatized baby food plant then owned by Gerber and concentrated on cultural clues like the company’s quality control procedures; accounting practices; networks of kinship, belonging, and religion; and the interaction of the firm with its Communist roots. All of these clues shed light on the individuality, capability, and value of the people she worked with and researched.

Dunn spent a year with the workers on the floor and then a year with the management, realizing that these workers could not be instantly and “naturally” transformed into commodified capitalist labor. She concluded that capitalism, far from the default mode of human exchange, requires certain fundamental cultural beliefs before it can function in the way most scholars expect.

Dunn originally picked this topic for her dissertation because she recognized that she needed a subject that would continue to interest her for the next decade of her life. Being in China just after the Tiananmen Square protest sparked her interest in democratic movements that fail. In Poland she saw a chance to study a movement that sort of succeeded but not in the way it was intended: in Poland, neoliberal capitalism has had to confront the social and cultural legacies of the Solidarity movement, which gave Poles a strong communitarian ethos.

Dunn did not design her book to influence either public policy or managerial practice. “It’s not a how-to manual,” she says, “it’s much more a theoretical and philosophical work that asks us to rethink our ideas of self, community, and market.”  Asking these questions has influenced her personally as well as professionally. It has changed her approach to parenting and her ideas about the nuclear family and herself as an individual. Because Dunn believes it is the exchange of gifts of labor that breaks down the barriers of the individual, she decided to become a foster parent and give gifts of time and work that improve the lives of children, families at risk, and the community as a whole. This echoes her experience in the baby food plant, where she saw mothers who believed that it was the entire community, not just the mother and the father, who raise children.

Every book needs to be written with an audience in mind and she struggled with this question while writing. This book has found its biggest audience with scholars in Eastern European and post-Socialist studies and even some in science and administration studies but Dunn figures that, while writing, she may been thinking most of just three people:  Katherine Verdery (her dissertation advisor at Johns Hopkins), Erica Schoenberger (a human geographer there as well), and one of her informants in Poland, Lucyna Kiedrzyńska. Lucyna showed her an alternate way of existing as a social person – a node in a network and not just an individual with labor to sell or be exploited.

We all know that books are not written in a vacuum. The long road to the published volume saw a post-doc in Germany, landing a job at the University of Colorado, the rise and fall of a serious relationship, three near-total rewrites and, just as the final revisions were to be made, the foster placement (and subsequent adoption) of 21-day old Aaron.  She points out the appropriateness of revising a book ostensibly about baby food while being herself covered in baby urp.  How she managed to do all this remains a mystery.

Her answer to the question “are you an anthropologist or a geographer” is “yes.” Dunn was trained as an anthropologist but has worked closely with geographers like David Harvey, Julie Guthman, Jamie Peck, and Susanne Friedberg.  Even now that she’s teaching and researching in a geography department, she finds no real intellectual barriers between the two. Referring to her new-found place within the two disciplines, she told a friend that she was “doing some intellectual cross-dressing.”  Her friend replied that in the case of anthropology and geography it was really “only wearing an earring.” She sees the line between human geography and cultural anthropology as being a very fluid one, and doesn’t see the need to pick sides.

She does, however, find that the two disciplines share a foible: the tendency of both to turn out unreadable research in their short-sighted desire to sound like a “hard” science.  This tends to take anthropologists and geographers out of the very debates they proclaim to be important. She says that engaging in public debate about the lived world need not adopt science’s stilted prose or a cloak of rigor to be relevant – in fact it can’t.

Far from unrecognized, this book has won the Orbis Prize for the best book on any aspect of Polish affairs from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Ed A. Hewett Prize for Political Economics of Soviet Bloc or its Successor States from the National Council on Soviet and Eastern European Research.  It’s also been assigned in several undergraduate classes.

Privatizing Poland will be translated into Polish soon and Dunn is looking forward to a greater audience for and more discussion of her ideas. She feels that the younger people in Poland, the new Polish left, will be better able to see how her arguments might be used to improve economic life there.

                Still grounded in the cultural and political, Dunn finds herself moving more toward the food end of her subjects. A former Boulder County, Colorado Board of Health member, she’s interested in the effects of food safety regulations and the global market on small-scale producers. Born of that, Dunn’s next book (hopefully out in Fall ’08 from Indiana University Press) is about quality control and the state regulation of food safety.  She’ll argue that, contrary to Eric Schlosser’s (Fast Food Nation) assertion that more state regulation is needed to protect the food supply (which privileges large companies over local providers), rather it is a different kind of relationship between producer and regulator that is called for.

                Also in the works is Dunn’s “secret book” which is to be a popular memoir about foster care.  This may lead to a more scholarly work on the different Eastern European states’ stakes in child welfare.

Elizabeth Dunn is an economic geographer (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 1998) whose research interests focus on the origins and effects of foodborne illnesses. Recently, she has been investigating how new rules about cattle production affect farmers, meatpackers, consumers and the environment. She has also looked into how rules about pig production have forced smallhold farmers out of the market in Poland, and how the collapse of the canning industry in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia has led to hyperendemic botulism. Her previous research concentrated on labor and industrial management. Dunn teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder and serves on the Boulder County Board of Health and as a foster parent for Boulder County.