I don't know anything about sociology. I am trying to write a book about how Eastern Europeans ended up so far behind Western Europeans in mostly everything, but leaving wars and such aside, my main idea is about how fast the cultural changes were happening in E. Europe and how they affected the average individual. In the span of 100 years, people went from having wooden ploughs to having nuclear energy. The differences from generation to generation were too big . Today, I started doing my research for the book, luckily I came across "acculturation" which describes what I mean somewhat, but I can't find cases\studies\information about the effects that changes like that can have on people.

For example: I grew up in a democracy in a capitalist system, but my parents grew up during communism. They grew up farming, not very different from people in the 1850s, by the time communism fell (which coincided with their mid 20s). Naturally that made them very ill adapted for the modern world, since their world view was not compatible with the reality of life anymore.
Any ideas about other situations like this? Most cases of acculturation happen very slowly (Like the Native Americans). I can't think of any other cases in which, even before a culture had time to adapt to the new one, the new one was already becoming obsolete. In the case of Eastern Europe, culture was not really evolving by itself, it was being imposed by the circumstances.