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The purpose of this paper is to focus on organisational change in Romania at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. This research raises the question on how transition and the change of conditions have contributed to the development of organisational culture after 1989. The paper seeks to clarify the characteristics of the organisational culture profile in Romania.

The study is based on two types of questionnaires, one for the regular employees of the firm and one for the managers, and questions were formulated, using the experiences of those who actually work in Romanian companies. The research was made under supervision, and the focus of the research was on the employees' perception of their company and not on how an outsider would see those things.

The paper emphasizes the specific characteristics of the actual evolution, generated by some internal factors, and the “imported” variables from the international economy. Although created less than two decades ago, the paper has found that the Romanian enterprises have a well‐defined culture, even if some specific features of personality are manifest.

The research is correlated to diagnose the organisational culture and to analyse the process of change within the company domains in that it is intending to extend the study, in the future.

The study allows emphasis on some characteristics of the organisational culture developed during the last years in Romania: concern about the work quality; the firm's concern of the human resource quality; the concern about the technical level of work and the motivation system; the interest in stimulating employees' loyalty to the firm and the internal marketing; application at group level of labour principles and rewards; and the importance given to labour conditions, employees' health and old age insurance.

The survey was made within three representative companies from Transylvania, their main purpose being to observe the way organizational culture was influenced by different factors, such as: privatization, capital used, forms of ownership, and domain of activity.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the employment relations context in South Eastern Europe from a variety of capitalism perspectives. Particular attention is accorded to the uneven nature of change at both the levels of institutions and practice. This is followed by a review of the individual papers that make up this special issue.

This paper is primarily a theoretical one, providing a review of the papers that make up this special issue and giving an overview of the foundation being provided.

While the term “transitional” has often been deployed to describe employment relations across the region, the process has been an extremely protracted one. There is little doubt that the nature and form of employment relations in the countries encompassed in this review is still coalescing, with further ruptures likely as a result of the 2009 depression. At the same time, the papers in this special issue point to long‐standing continuities with employment.

While the papers that make up this special issue may present the most recent research in the region, they also point to future areas for research. First, there is particularly little research that has been undertaken on peripheral areas of a generally peripheral region. Not only do we know very little about, say, Albanian employment relations, but we know little about employment relations in peripheral areas of large countries such as Turkey. Second, the 2009 depression is likely to accelerate trends to downsizing and insecure work, in the short term at least. Finally, there is a growing consensus that a sustainable economic recovery from the current crisis will depend, at least in part, on new social compromises both globally and regionally.

Employment relations in the region are undergoing an extended transition. In the short term, the most likely trend will be towards a further weakening of the bargaining position of employees, and towards more insecure working. However, a sustained recovery is likely to see a reversal of this, with employers being more likely to be forced to contemplate new social compromises.

This study applies the comparative capitalism literature to the South Eastern European region context. It also introduces some of the most recent applied research in the region.