After 25 years studying the role of informal systems in shaping communist and post-communist societies, Wedel also turned her attention to the United States, and has identified some parallels.
Labeling the new breed of U.S. and international political operators "flexians", Wedel finds these ultra-nimble players moving seamlessly among roles in government, business, think tanks, and media, advancing their own personal agendas and those of their associates (not the public and private organizations they are paid to serve), at the expense of democracy and accountability.
By a flexian wearing several hats simultaneously (think tanker, retired military or government official, corporate representative, so-called "objective" expert), as did Barry R. McCaffrey in the run-up to the Iraq war, Wedel claims to show how a flexian can gain extraordinary insider knowledge and influence in order to custom-tailor a version of the "truth" benefitting the highest monetary bidder.
Flexians and flex nets are the consequence of an unprecedented confluence of four transformational 20th and 21st century developments: government privatization, outsourcing and deregulation; the end of the Cold War; the growth of new information technologies; and "the embrace of 'truthiness.'"
In Wedel's view, today's American and, more generally, Western socio-economic and "democratic" political systems look increasingly similar to many communist and post-communist societies in the ways that they merge state and private power.
In a 2009 Salon article she wrote: "The way that government and business now interlock in the U.S., notably in the wake of Wall Street's meltdown, is beginning to resemble the tangle of self-interested government-business "clans" and other such informal networks that emerged during the East's transition to a market economy in the 1990s.
Janine Wedel's argument is that political culture at the beginning of the 21st century has changed in such a way" as to make it easier, and even obligatory, for individuals to mask their true agendas and conflicts of interest in creating policies.
"[11] Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor, wrote about Collision and Collusion: "Very critical and troubling analysis of the shortcomings of Western aid policy, particularly to Russia.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that "Janine Wedel's admirable new book... argues convincingly that the lack of accountability on both sides ultimately compromised all those involved....Aid, it seems, can hurt as well as help."
[12] Wedel's research about western aid in former-Soviet states may in the future help to shed light on the untimely death in 1991 of the president of the Polish Supreme Audit Office, Walerian Panko.
[13] Wedel's first book was The Private Poland: An Anthropologist's Look at Everyday Life (1986) which Osteuropa Wirtschaft called "a brilliant account of contemporary Polish society".