Enterprise Restructuring And The Role Of Managers In Russia

This book tells the story of what might have been considered an unlikely source of dynamic change in Russia - formerly state-owned manufacturing enterprises and their managers. Based on interviews conducted over a six-year span with managers at 47 manufacturing, light industry, consumer durable, and food processing firms in four Russian cities, the study documents the real world challenge of turning hidebound, often dysfunctional manufacturing operations into thriving companies. With analytical rigor and theoretical creativity, this work will dispel some common misconceptions about the Russian economy and make a contribution to the literature about management, company strategies, and corporate governance.

Considers the achievements and challenges facing East Asia's workers. The report reviews labor outcomes and evaluates the benefits of rapid growth to workers and the impact that the region's role in the global economy has had on them. It also examines labor market policies and institutions in the region, labor in the transition economies, and the outlook for East Asian workers in the 21st century. Also available: World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World Stock no. 61102 (ISBN 0-19-521102-2).

The authors explore the labor dynamics of Russian enterprise restructuring, empirically assessing how patterns of job creation and destruction are related to various aspects of enterprise restructuring across firms in different sectors and regions, and to different forms, sizes, vintages, and performance characteristics of ownership. Evidence from case studies - based on more than 50 site visits in 2000 - suggests that jobs have been destroyed, but only to a limited degree in some sectors and regions, largely because of institutional and incentive constraints and a still-widespread "socialist" corporate culture. Jobs have been created - particularly in sectors where devaluation had the most pronounced effect on important substitution and export promotion - but only slowly, mostly for lack of skilled workers and because regional mobility is limited. Labor turnover appears higher within regions than across regions. Newly available data for 1996 - 99 (provided by Goskomstat) for about 128,000 enterprises in 24 industrial sectors in Russia's 89 regions indicates that the typical firm has experienced only modest downsizing - about 12 percent - in number of employees. Smaller firms have entered, and larger, mature businesses have exited some sectors. Except for a lull in 1998, the rate of job creation has steadily increased and the rate of job destruction has declined, dropping substantially in 1998 - 99. "Voluntary" worker separations remain the main - and growing - form of layoff, and the proportion of layoffs through redundancies is shrinking (now about 4 percent of total separations). Firm size and net employment growth are not statistically related, but form of ownership seems to matter. Firm size is also statistically correlated (positively) with profitability, but restructuring through changes in net employment growth appears not to be. It seems Russian restructuring needs to become more efficient.

Enterprise Restructuring and Foreign Investment in the Transforming East: The Impact of Privatization explores the dynamic interrelationships between enterprise restructuring and foreign investment in transition economies of postcommunist countries, especially those of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This important book offers investors and international businesses a continuum from theory to praxis as it discusses theoretical and methodological issues and empirical and practical implications of economic relationships to show how these interrelationships manifest themselves in prevailing trends, policy tradeoffs, and business strategies. Contending that the transformation to a state-owned enterprise to a capitalistic corporation involves more than reacting to economic incentives, Enterprise Restructuring and Foreign Investment in the Transforming East examines why enterprises need access to capital markets, finance investments, and acquire new capabilities in order to successfully compete in a market economy. Some of the strategies you will find that relate to common elements of the restructuring process include: a shift to a less hierarchal organization structure the adoption of Western financial management and accounting practices the introduction of stricter budget constraints the evolution of the marketing function and the rationalization of product ranges according to market needs Informative and intelligent, this book offers you a firsthand look at the complex and critical topic of restructuring as it relates to the realization of benefits of privatization at both the micro and macro levels. Using a case study approach, Enterprise Restructuring and Foreign Investment in the Transforming East gives you in-depth knowledge of the actual empirical/practical processes as they have been experienced in transition economies.

This book is designed to scrutinize the Russian business sector in transition with special attention to firm organization, business integration, corporate governance, and company management. Using a unique dataset of Russian joint-stock companies, the authors empirically analyze key issues for understanding the Russian corporate sector.

This book charts the experiences of a textile enterprise in Russia during the 1990s, analysing post-Soviet management and managerial practices in order to illuminate the content, nature and direction of industrial restructuring in the Russian privatised sector during the years of economic transition. Based on extensive factory-level fieldwork, it focuses upon changes in ownership, management and labour organisation, unveiling the complex texture of social, communal and gender relations in the workplace over an extended period of time, including through crisis and bankruptcy, acquisition by new capitalist owners and attempted restructuring. It argues, contrary to dominant Western managerial theories which blame the failure of transition on the irrationality of Russian managerial strategies, that the rationale for the continued reliance on Soviet era managerial practices lay in the peculiar form of social relations in the workplace which were characteristic of the Soviet system. It engages with key issues, often neglected in the literature, such as social domination, power and conflict, that capture the problematic and open-ended character of social and economic transformation in post-Soviet production. It demonstrates that far from a simple transition to a market economy, the post-Soviet transition has reproduced most of the features of the old Soviet system, including its patterns of labour relations.

Provides insight into the restructuring of Russian industrial enterprises, with an overview of industrial enterprise in transition and four in-depth case studies of enterprises, covering the period since the beginning of radical reform. Case studies look at the changing strategy of management in different types of former state enterprises, including pioneers in privatization, members of the military-industrial sector, and a passenger transport enterprise. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Providing integrated assessments as well as detailed country studies, this work provides a comparative analysis of the strategies employed by Russia, China, Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic to deal with the transformation of industrial enterprises.