This special section aims to shed light on moral milieus and agencies in contemporary
capitalist Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech
Republic, Romania, and Russia, it offers insight into changing perceptions of a proper
economy and proper practice amongst a broad range of actors - from landfill workers to
business managers, to the super-rich. The contributors explore how actors at various scales
morally construct, contest, and defend ideas of justice, (re-)distribution, and social worth, as
well as socio-economic hierarchy, inequality, and harm. They analyze the capitalist moral
transformation and order in the region, and examine the local appropriation of and buy-in to
(as well as critique of) aspects of neoliberal moral orders - a topic side-lined in much of the
existing moral economy scholarship. Exploring a broad range of moral-economic
phenomena, they move beyond the conventional definition of morals as prosocial norms and
action, approaching morals as a broader empirical phenomenon of economy and politics.
They examine the actions, practices, and reasoning of different actors in relation to shifting
notions of acceptable and unacceptable, just and unjust, and praiseworthy and blameworthy
behavior. As such, this collection makes the case for widening the empirical object and
analytical purchase of moral economy to include the study of not only moral critiques and
resistance to capitalism, but also the (diverse) moral agencies, milieus and orders of capitalism, and the ways in which the advancement and embedding the capitalist moral
order has shaped economic life in the region.
