Competing institutional logics in Soviet industrial location policy

ABSTRACT

The Soviet legacy has been widely demonstrated to have had negative impacts on the regional and economic development of Russia. This article studies the mechanisms of competing institutional logics in Soviet industrial location policies as a source of this adverse heritage. The results indicate that prolonged competition between three institutional logics complicated the adoption and practice of consistent industrial location strategies and contributed to structural problems in economic geography. An analysis of Soviet institutional logics demonstrates parallel forms of competition and coexistence with findings from other institutional environments, paving the way for a broader theoretical analysis of Soviet organizations and institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Union
• institutional logics
• industrial location
• economic geography
• economic history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Summary of Data Collection and Review Method

The analysis was conducted as an extensive, qualitative literature review of Soviet and Western-based textbooks and journal articles discussing the theory and practices of Soviet industrial locations. The goal of the review process was to identify and categorize different elements and factors which influenced industrial location and spatial allocation decision-making in the Soviet Union from 1920s to 1960s. For this reason the industrial location principles presented by Koropeckyj (1965) and subsequent scholars were not taken as the point of departure, since the analysis was conducted to holistically view elements in the institutional environment and discover possible overlooked factors. The time period of the analysis was selected to depict the emergence of the institutional field of industrial location policy as well as the initial development of Soviet industrial geography. Elements of industrial location policy had become established by the 1960s and the development during the following decades did not dramatically alter prevailing economic regionalization. The reviewed publications were selected to represent two sources of industrial location literature: (1) Soviet textbooks of economic geography which consisted of broad presentations of national economic geography and more narrow studies of economic regions in the Soviet Union, and (2) textbooks and journal publications outside the Soviet Union, which analyzed the development, economic policies and strategies behind Soviet industrial location decisions. A criteria used for inclusion was that the author presented explicit claims or appraisals of factors which, in the author’s view, influenced Soviet industrial location decision-making between 1920 and 1960. In addition, the claims, appraisals and analyses had to concentrate on location policies that either primarily or indirectly had an influence on actual industrial location decisions. The review process contained several phases. The first phase of data collection consisted of creating a comprehensive literature database around the subject literature. This phase was conducted using search engines (Web of Science, Google Scholar), available university library databases and bibliographies of the most relevant studies to identify relevant publications related to economic geography, economic history, economics and urban studies of Russia and the Soviet Union. The search results consisted of 217 publications, including 140 monographs, 59 articles and 18 book chapters. Of these, 30 publications were selected for in-depth analysis in the second phase based on criteria fulfillment and periodical and thematic relevance. From these publications, a total of 188 individual claims and appraisals were sketched (e.g. Lamberg, Laukia, and Ojala 2014) and arranged into an Excel database (available by request from the author). Economic logic contained 76 claims, military logic 21 claims (subject to censorship in Soviet publications) and regional logic 52 claims. During the later stages of research, the database was updated with ten selected articles from the Soviet journal Planovoye Khozyaystvo (Planning economy). Claims and appraisals were subjected to discursive analysis from which the proposed logic categories and their goals, expectations and outcomes were specified. A total of 39 outlier claims did not constitute any coherent entity of institutional logic and fell outside the analyzed categories. Logic entities were then evaluated in the light of institutional logic literature (e.g. Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012) to ensure their fit with the theoretical framework. Finally, a description of each logic was summarized in narrative form in section 4.

Notes

1. Gosudarstvennaya Komissiya po Elektrifikazii Rossii (State Commission for the Electrification of Russia).

2. Alfred Weber’s main work, Theory of the Location of Industries, was translated into Russian in the 1920s and reportedly received large attention (Friedrich 1969, xxix).

3. Nikolay Baransky (1881–1963) worked in the VSNKh in 1919–1920 and founded the officially supported Regional School approach in Soviet economic geography, while also setting up the chair of economic geography in Moscow State University (MGU). Baransky authored and supervised numerous publications and textbooks, including his major textbook Economic Geography of the U.S.S.R. (1956).

4. Nikolay Kolosovsky (1891–1954) took part in the GOELRO project and worked as the director of East Siberian and Far East sector in GOSPLAN from 1920 to 1925. He also participated actively in the buildup of the First Five Year Plan in 1928–29 and was put in charge of the UKC organization commission in 1930. After the Second World War, he was appointed to professorship in MGU where he worked until his death in 1954 (Kazanskij, Kalashnikov, and Saushkin 1969). Kolosovsky contributed significantly to conceptual development of territorial-production complexes (territorial’no-proizvoditel’nyj kompleks). His ideas emphasized the importance of interdependence between economic regions and natural and economic conditions of local geography in order to determine distribution of production in socialist system (Kolosovsky 1969).

5. Although the Ural development policies were repeatedly highlighted in official plans, the actual state demand for raw materials, products and machinery also led to the simultaneous strengthening and expansion of older industrial districts in Leningrad and Donbass in the 1930s (see Samuelson 2011, 43).