Mapping students’ organizations in post-communist Romania: a structuration perspective

Abstract

Who is who in Romanian student representation? In this article we answer this (apparently) simple question. We start with early 1990, when the Romanian campuses experienced ample changes – part of the societal transformations which swept over Central and Eastern Europe. Our ambitions in this text are twofold: (1) to construct a map of student federations in post-communist Romania, and (2) to identify and describe the waves of structuration of the field. In doing so, we revert to classical social theory and document the emergence of “organizational archetypes” of student representation. We identify two types of structuration, “bottom-up” and “top-down”. We find evidence regarding the resilience of the “bottom-up” organizational archetypes in relation to the successive attempts of “top-down” (re)structuration.