Among the most memorable experiences of Preston Keat's Fulbright year in Poland was walking through the Gdansk shipyard, being introduced to its few remaining workers as they completed the last two ships to be built there.

In 1981, the Gdansk shipyard was the site of a confrontation between Poland's then-Socialist government and its labor union, Solidarity. For the next few years, Gdansk and Solidarity were regularly in the news: In a sense, the shipyard was the cradle of Polish independence, which set off a wave of change that dismantled the socialist system in eastern Europe.

But 15 years later, the Gdansk shipyard had fallen on hard times. Failing to adapt to a capitalist economic system, it was about to go bankrupt. Preston had made it his business to find out why. With the fall of communism in eastern Europe, "democracy came, but so did free market economic systems," Preston says. Some companies "have managed to reform very successfully while others have not." The goal of his dissertation is to explain why, and Gdansk is a crucial case study.

The situation is ironic: "The same workers who brought down communism are the ones who are most threatened by a rapid movement to capitalism because they are workers in these big, inefficient, state-run companies," Preston says.   And yet their role as revolutionaries seems to be linked directly to the shipyard's failure.

Because "we brought down communism," the workers told Preston, they felt they had a "political umbrella" offering them protection from management's demands for restructuring in the new capitalist era. "Our people were running the government," the workers said, and indeed, Gdansk obtained government subsidies that kept it afloat for many years without restructuring.

In the meantime, shipyard workers at Gdynia and Szczeczin, feeling themselves in relative isolation from Poland's political power, moved forward with restructuring, even when it meant initial reductions in the work force. Now they are employed by flourishing enterprises, and Gdansk is on its way to becoming a place of purely historic value.

Some might think that it was Solidarity's particularly militant union stance that brought down the shipyard. However, in coal mining and steel mills, other industries that Preston visited, strong union values did not necessarily lead to economic failure. He is currently analyzing his data to find alternative explanations.

Preston says the Fulbright fellowship was the key to completing his work. "A lot of the research on this part of the world looks at aggregate-level national statistics how many companies have you privatized? What is your inflation rate? I don't think that really explains why half the steel mills are doing terribly and half of them are doing well. They only way to get an answer was to go to the factories." Now when someone challenges the source of his findings,   he can reply, "I interviewed the key people who would know, and here's what they said."

Miriam Golden, Preston's adviser, praises "his great skill at fieldwork." His study, she says "is likely to be relevant not only for previously socialist countries undergoing transitions to market economies, but may also provide an understanding of the microbases of successful economic performance in established market systems."

Preston's interest in international affairs goes back to his undergraduate years at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. While earning a master's degree at the London School of Economics, he began to look more closely at what used to be called the Eastern bloc. A job at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D. C., immersed him in this region for several years, as he helped develop programs for the new democracies in the East: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The programs offered guidance in reforming education systems, training media people, writing constitutions, and giving young politicians an opportunity to observe American government at work.

Then, the headmistress of a high school in southern Poland, who was seeking Marshall Fund help, offered Preston the chance to teach there for a year. This gave him the opportunity to pursue two interests, in Poland and in teaching. He came home ready to begin work on a PhD, and UCLA's program, with its strengths in political economy and comparative politics, was very attractive.

Studying and working overseas have given him a priceless experience. Being abroad "makes you think a little bit differently about your own country," for better and worse, Preston says. It also gives meaning to all the talk about international markets and permeable borders: "Without going there and experiencing that, I wouldn't have understood it nearly as well."

Preston's long-term plans include university teaching, perhaps a government assignment, and a secret passion for journalism: On the train back to Warsaw from Gdansk, he flirted with the idea of turning his material into a New Yorker article before it became a dissertation. "I wrote about half of the article and lost steam, and got back to my dissertation."

Published in Spring 1999, Graduate Quarterly