JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. Does the relationship between social structure and personality during times of apparent social stability obtain as well under conditions of radical social change? There are good reasons to think that it might not. To find out, we conducted surveys in Poland and Ukraine during 1992-1993, with dramatic results. In those respects in which the socialist Poland of 1978 had shown a pattern of relationships similar to that of the capitalist United States and Japan (notably, the relationship of social structure to self-directedness of orientation), the pattern remains the same; but where socialist Poland in 1978 had differedfrom the United States and Japan (notably, in the relationship of social structure to a sense of distress), Poland now fully exemplifies the capitalist pattern. Ukraine seems to be following a similar trajectory, albeit at a slower pace. n this paper, we refine and extend a general interpretation of the relationships between social structure and for help in translating interview questions from Pol-immediately impinging conditions of life. For the dimensions of social structure we consider here-social class and social stratification-the most pertinent conditions are apt to be occupational. Thus, an advantageous class position or a high position in the social stratification hierarchy affords greater opportunity to be self-directed in one's work, that is, to work at jobs that are substantively complex, are not subject to close supervision, and are not routinized. The experience of occupational self-direction, in turn, leads to a high valuation of self-direction for oneself and one's children, to greater intellectual flexibility, and to a more self-directed orientation to self and society (Kohn 1969(Kohn , 1977 ish to Russian; to Michael Haney for training the Ukrainian interviewers; and to Michael Swafford for further training of the Ukrainian interviewers. We are also indebted to Jeylan Mortimer, Carrie Schoenbach, Carmi Schooler, Kenneth Spenner, and the ASR Editor for their critical readings of early drafts of this paper. 614