Mihai Varga is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has recently finished his doctoral studies at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation on the political economy and sociology of labor relations in the post-communist context (cum laudae, February 2011). From September 1, 2012, Mihai Varga will join the team of the Economic Sociology Chair at the Eastern Europe Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. Generally his research focuses on problems of interest representation and consequences for quality of democracy (with post-communist Europe as the geographical focus). He is in particular interested in the labor movement and in patterns of working-class mobilization and collective action.