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The impact of economic transformations in Poland has been highly differentiated depending on the different professional sectors. While workers have suffered the brunt of industrial reorganization, farmers have better managed to stand their own. New social categories have emerged at the top of the social pyramid, given the growing importance of university degrees as main factors of upward mobility, or at the bottom of the pyramid with the poor, the unemployed and the disadvantaged. A greater flexibility of employment combined with the maintenance of certain traditions has produced a powerful dynamic of adaptation of Polish society.