The aim of this introduction is to show the range of possible relationships between economic change and civil society. Although I concentrate my attention on Poland in the 1980s when the nexus between the two phenomena became clearly visible, I shall begin with a characterisation of attempts made by the political authorities to carry out economic reforms in the pre-Solidarity period. My point is that these changes were doomed to failure because the power centre was not able to get social support for them. The characteristic feature of the period was the absence of civil society. In effect these changes did not deserve to be called "economic changes", but were rather reorganisations or false reforms. They happened to be made under the slogan of "economic decentralisation", outlined in the next section.