Heintz, Monica <br/><br/>
Changes in Work Ethic in Eastern Europe: The Case of Romania 

 -  2008.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> After 1989 in Romania, the concept of a “work ethic” was one of the first to be discarded, “compromised” by its association with the old regime. For most people the concept contained the socialist meaning they were used to thus as they rejected socialist practices, they rejected the concept as well. As a result, there was a lack of conceptualisation of what one would call a “work ethic” in capitalist countries and a lack of framework for debating practices, attitudes and expectations about work. This gap was superficially filled by an imported ideology of work inspired by the Protestant work ethic. This article reveals the play between socialist legacy and different ideologies of capitalist work ethic in eastern Europe, on the basis of concrete examples of work practices and discourses from service enterprises in Bucharest, Romania. It questions the adequacy of defining values pertaining to work in Romania on the basis of the ethnocentric concept of work ethic and proposes to refer instead to an ethic of human relations at workplaces.