Since the late 1980s the "new economic sociology" (see, Swedberg 1993; Smelser and Swedberg 1994) has been a very dynamic current attempting to unify sociological and economic traditions, and has proven itself to be a fruitful approach to research. In 1985 Mark Granovetter proposed the analysis of the embeddedness of economic processes in social structure, and his article became very influential, serving perhaps as a "program manifesto" for this current of thought. It opened the road to a number of interesting studies which brought a broader, more diverse view of the socio-economic realm.

In the light of all these analyses, there is no doubt that today the concept of capitalism is, culturally speaking, heterogeneous (Bell 1979; Sachs 1995), and that we have to do with different patterns of capitalism: Anglo-Saxon, German, Scandinavian, Mediterranean, to mention only European variations. The cultural variation of economic activity is wide and multidimensional. In my presentation I will refer to the analyses of the culture of capitalism provided by Alfons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 1998; Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 1993). According to them there are seven processes and related dilemmas which are important in analyzing the construction of a cultural system of economy. I will focus only on one of them, universalism versus particularism.

Using the database of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner I will show how this dilemma was solved by managers from different European countries. That will be starting point for my analysis of universalism-particularism attitudes of respondents of European Social Survey. I will be particularly interested in verification of hypothesis on the place of post-communist countries on the mosaic of European cultures of capitalism.

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1. Multiples of ten in the survey data on the number of friends