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Revolutions have both intended and unintended societal consequences. One of the intended consequences of the Velvet Revolution s in Eastern Europe was the start of an ambitious political and economic programme called ‘market transition’, ie the politically instigated and supervised transition from a command to a market economy. From 1989 onwards a profound and sometimes heated discussion has been ongoing in the leading sociological journals pertaining to the question of what the largely unintended consequences of this market transition are for social inequality and, more particularly, for systems of social stratification. 1 This market transition debate has put the study of formerly communist countries at the forefront of international sociological research (Nee & Matthews, 1996). The debate started with an original and, as later turned out, fruitful article by Victor Nee (1989). In this article Nee constructs an …