The principal aim of this chapter is to shed more light on the relation- ship between objective and subjective mobility in the course of the first stage of postcommunist transformation in east central Europe. Almost 60 percent of economically active respondents in both years experienced a change in their position on a scale of subjectively defined socioeconomic status, while only 25 percent have changed their objective class or socioeconomic status. In other words, the feelings of change in relative socioeconomic status occurred among 60 per- cent of those who have been objectively immobile. It is certainly true that the transition to the market allowed an expansion of life chances for a large segment of the population, while for others it meant a loss of privileges or relative advantages, growing feel- ings of insecurity, and serious difficulties in coping with a new economic environment. According to Rolf Dahrendorf, if there is any progress in historical development, it is primarily in the expansion of human life chances.
Life chances have to be understood as a function of two elements, options and ligatures.
Spoons are structural opportunities for choice, to which in- dividual choices or decisions correspond. From this point of view, the collapse of communist regimes in east central Europe simultaneously introduced improved opportunities and increased inequality between social classes and strata, which in fact can be interpreted as an emergence of new links between options and positions in the social structure. Be assured, I am far from arguing that collective mobility can be iden- tified with the feelings of change in a person's life chances. Objective intragenerational mobility has been determined by, among other things, structural changes that have so far been modest. But the subjective dimension of mobility was affected primarily by the consequences of market transition on the life conditions of entire social classes and strata.