Bulgarian Healthcare System Reform through the Prism of Its Timeframe: Dynamics and Conflicts of a Complex Social Change
The present article explores the temporal dimension to the health care reform introduced in Bulgaria in the late 1990s. The author inscribes her analysis in recent research on both gradual structuring of change and historical sociology. She thus shows the reform’s dual temporality: even if the paradigmatic change introduced by the reform suggests the idea of immediacy, the reform remains strongly influenced by long term processes. Beyond its double nature, the temporality of change introduced by the reform also appears accelerated as a consequence from the complex relations between time and space, and the introduction of neo-managerial ideas in the reform’s implementation sequence. Those temporal phenomena impact on the main actors involved in the health sector’s expectations from change and suggest that the communist past remains a dominant time of the Bulgarian health system history, reviving the conflictual dynamics inherent to the system.