The evolution of post-socialist projects: Trajectory shift and transitional capacity in a Polish region

Existing perspectives on the social and institutional underpinnings of regional economic performance lack an account of how regions in post-socialist or developing countries lacking embedded, cohesive, trust-based networks could organize to transform themselves. This paper shows how provisional, contingent post-socialist projects - in opposition to more stable firm, market or network forms of organization - temporarily drawing together sets of actors from diverse organizational environs can enable regions to overcome social impediments to development. Drawing on an in-depth field study of the Lodz' old industrial district in central Poland, the first part of this paper demonstrates the projectification of regional restructuring efforts and links it to regional trajectory shift embodied in a variety of far-reaching industrial, institutional and social transformations. The second part of the paper explores the question of how trajectory shift could have occurred in Lodz', despite the lack of incremental interactive learning across project stages. The region is shown to possess a distinctive transitional capacity producing learning by switching in which contingent collective projects are continually and competitively generated across stages to deal with the myriad practical restructuring problems facing regional firms and institutions.