Osa's study is part of a larger literature that looks at the decomposition of communism and postcommunist politics through the prism of the literature on social movements. The book stands out, along with Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik's Rebellious Civil Society and John Glenn's Framing Democracy, as among the best in this school of research. Osa concentrates on the creation of networks of resistance in communist Poland from early 1950s to the period of Solidarity's formation and suppression in 1980–1982.