Changing patterns of employment in post-socialist organizations in Central and Eastern Europe: management action in a transitional context

Abstract

This article develops an alternative theoretical framework to the dominant ‘top-down’ macroeconomic and institutional views that have been so influential in studies of the post-socialist economic transition. The authors argue that in order to understand economic outcomes more fully, researchers need to adopt a theoretical approach that combines the sociological reasoning of the institutionalist view with micro-processual arguments that theorize employment and unemployment as outcomes of everyday social construction. Inverting the normal economic approach of starting from macro-economic trends and inferring the motives and practices of local socio-economic actors, the authors, therefore, seek to develop a ‘ground-up’ mode of explanation of unemployment dynamics that commences from the examination of the real decision-making practices and processes of socially embedded enterprise managers. Drawing on evidence from longitudinal case study research, the authors demonstrate that enterprise restructuring has not been a uniform or monocausal process and highlight the dangers of over-generalization from aggregated data.

Keywords:

• Transition societies
• post-communism
• the Czech Republic
• organizational restructuring
• employment patterns
• privatization
• state-owned enterprises

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors for their helpful comments and advice. In addition, we would like to thank Miloš Keřkovský, Miloš Drdla, Thaddeus Mallya, Subodh Kumar, Hana Škývarová, Miroslava Čermaková, Alena Hanzelková, and Sylva Pešková for their invaluable assistance.

Notes

1 Both Poland and Hungary, for example, were far more cautious and reticent about privatization per se, and voucher privatization in particular.

2 The authors do not attend to the ways in which statistics are socially constructed through administrative processes in employment offices. This is a completely different, though equally fascinating, set of arguments (e.g. Cicourel, 1964). For example, Jackman (1994) shows how aggregate unemployment statistics reflect assumptions and rules of measurement, as well as hidden and diverse motives among the registered and unregistered unemployed.

3 The fourth enterprise, named Agstroj, has been in deep financial trouble for the last few years, and research access to it has been very limited. This has prevented the authors from obtaining the quality of information needed to make the comparisons that follow.

4 The names of the enterprises and their locations have been changed to maintain assurances of confidentiality.

5 Only Montáže Jesenice's shares were entirely sold in the first wave, with the National Property Fund, a state agency, continuing to manage a minority shareholding in Vols and Jesenické Strojírny.