Formal and informal relations in the period of transition
Formal and informal relations in Soviet industrial production informal relations in the Soviet system of production on a particular kind of love and the specificity of Soviet production the mechanism of paternalistic management of the enterprise - the limits of paternalism paternalism in Russian enterprises - our understanding the position of women in production middle management in industrial production in the transition to the market we didn't make the plan payment systems and the restructuring of production relations in Russia.
Institutional change of business networks: Russian transition revisited
Dynamics has been a key issue for investigations of business networks. This paper concentrates on rules that shape business interaction between actors: institutions. It makes an attempt to develop further the model of industrial business networks that consists of the governance structure and the production system (Johanson & Mattsson 1992) by involving institutional aspects. The aim of the paper is to analyse institutional change forces (i.e. formal and informal rules) and their influence on network structures. Institutional change of business networks is discussed in general terms, but it is investigated in particular in the Russian context: here most dramatic changes have been witnessed as new markets are being created. The paper directs attention to the dynamic forces (interplay of formal and informal rules; co-operation and competition; dyadic and network changes) and the relevance of time. The paper is mainly conceptual in character, but it summarises relevant empirical studies. The time span of more than a decade between the end of Soviet era and today’s Russian market conditions allows us to make already some conclusions about the dynamics, showing major results of the interplay of formal and informal institutional rules. It is believed that the analysis of institutional change and economic transition will increase our understanding on business markets (what is a market) and their dynamics (how are markets created) more generally.
The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialism
Soviet political culture is rooted in the historical experience of centuries of autocracy.1 Isolated from the major trade routes and located in a territory which offered little potential for agricultural development, the early Russian state was not one in which powerful and autonomous social formations were likely to take root; and at least since medieval times the country has typically been ruled by a strong, autocratic monarch, with countervailing institutions—parliamentary, legal or whatever—remaining weak and undeveloped. ‘If there is one single factor which dominates the course of Russian history, at any rate since the Tartar conquest’, writes Professor Seton-Watson, ‘it is the principle of autocracy.’2 It would be a mistake to suppose that the country’s pattern of political development held no other potential. The early Russian state, on the contrary, was characterised by the emergence of popular assemblies (the veche) which were similar in character to city governments elsewhere in Europe at this time and which similarly exercised important prerogatives with respect to the choice of a ruler, legislation, the imposition of taxes, and questions of war and peace.3 But in most Russian towns the Tartar invasion of the thirteenth century brought this pattern of development to an abrupt end; and the expansion of the Muscovite principate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to the termination of city self-government in its last remaining outposts, Novgorod (in 1478) and Pskov (in 1510).4