This book addresses these questions in a comprehensive way. It delves into the inter-relations between the major factors of developmental performance and looks at their effects on sustained societal development. A vast amount of statistical data on social and economic factors in selected European countries is grouped into 31 easy-to-handle tables and analyzed along the following constructs: civilizational competence; social capital; cognitive mobilization; quality of governance; entrepreneurial spirit; social cohesion; and openness to the international environment. The analysis, based on theories and indicators of development, reveals that, in spite of the progress since the fall of Communism, countries in Central and Eastern Europe still fall short of having been transformed into propulsive, "vibrant" societies, with intellectually open-minded, socially and technologically innovative environments

Multi-faced Social Transformations: Challenges and Studies brings together the proceedings of the 7th Slovenian Social Science Conference, "The Challenges of Social Transformations", held in September 2014. It was organized by the School of Advanced Social Studies (SASS), the Slovenian National Committee of the Management of Social Transformations programme (MOST), and the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO. The multidisciplinary contributions presented here analyse various aspects of the economic, social, and cultural transformations that accompany the contemporary globalized world.The book consists of four sections dealing with particular areas of transformations. These include a range of political, economic and cultural dimensions that are observed from the macro-level, in social systems and structural changes, to the micro-level, in aspects of individuals' lives. The book will be of interest for academics in the field of social sciences, as well as for civil society activists and policy makers. The frames of the transformations are not limited to the European space, and provide a more global perspective.