Exotic Deviance Medicalizing Cultural Idioms--from Strangeness to Illness

Focusing on the gap between democratic ideals and performance, three European academics study the common experience and even more common perception of the corrupt behavior of bureaucrats in post-communist Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The authors conducted focus-group studies, one-on-one interviews, and large-scale surveys to reveal plentiful details about the ways ordinary citizens cope in their day-to-day dealings with low-level officials and state employees, whose decisions can have a critically important impact on people's lives. c. Book News Inc.