Anna Soulsby

Transforming Former State Enterprises in the Czech Republic

The study of organizational transformation has emerged from the foundations established by contingency theory and research. While institutional approaches to organizational analysis have preferred to focus on the tendency towards organizational continuity and inertia, recent developments have begun to con sider institutional pressures leading to change, and to provide clues about how contingency and institutional theories might complement each other in improv ing our understanding of organizational change. The evidence presented in this paper, drawn from a study of organizational transformation in the Czech Republic, allows exploration of the relationship between transforming state enterprises and the wider processes of social, economic and institutional change. The values, motives and actions of the key enterprise managers are shown to be essential factors in explaining both the process of transformation in state enterprises, and the role of institutional factors in that process.

The Emergence of Post-Communist Management in the Czech Republic

This paper examines the sources and processes of management learning in four large, former state enterprises in the Czech Republic. These enterprises have all been privatized, but have not enjoyed foreign direct investment, which is often cited as a major source of post-communist management development. The findings indicate that current managerial knowledge in the enterprises has originated from a variety of domestic and foreign sources, but that the flow of ideas has been affected by a number of important filters, arising from the complexity of the Czech context, and the motives of the enterprise managers. In particular, the paper documents the continuing role of managerial knowledge emanating from pre-1989 sources, a factor which may have crucial implica tions for the nature of the emerging institution of post-communist Czech management.

Organizational Change in Post-Communist Europe : Management and Transformation in the Czech Republic

This book provides a unique and detailed examination of the complex processes of transformation in former state-owned enterprises in the Czech Republic. Drawing on in-depth case studies of organizational transformation, the authors adopt a social-institutionalist approach to the study of organizational change, applying it in order to develop an explanation of organizational restructuring and management redefinition during the early transition period of 1990-1996. In particular, they highlight how these processes have been shaped by continuing historical state-socialist legacies and the powerful role played by senior managers in their efforts to fashion the new privatized organizations in their own interests.

Understanding Top Management and Organizational Change Through Demographic and Processual Analysis

Top management theory has been strongly influenced by demographic studies of top management teams (TMTs), but not by research into organizational adaptation to conditions of extreme institutional turbulence. This article analyses the transformation of a post-socialist enterprise through a combination of demographic and processual methods to develop an enriched account of the micro-processes through which top management constructed organizational change. Adding layers of narrative data and processual explanation directly addresses the well rehearsed problems in demographic TMT studies. From the findings, we propose a set of theoretical arguments that conceptualizes top management in terms of management regimes, to which TMTs are politically tied and through which they seek to realize their values and strategies in organizational outcomes. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.

Controlling personnel: Management and motive in the transformation of the Czech Enterprise

The paper examines the position and function of personnel management during the transformation of four former state enterprises in the Czech Republic. The personnel department had become a strong symbol of the pre-1989 regime because of its communist associations, and the new enterprise managers found it necessary to exercise control over its development during the enterprise transition to privatized status. The paper reports on three processes of change: the structural re-positioning of the function; the re-staffing of its management; and the development of human resource management (HRM) ideas and practices. It is argued that underlying these changes in personnel were the motives and strategies of the senior managers, many of whom were surviving nomenklatura whose future managerial careers depended on successful enterprise transformation.

Organization-Community Embeddedness: The Social Impact of Enterprise Restructuring in the Post-Communist Czech Republic

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the enterprise restructuring process, which has typified the experience of post-communist industry, on local communities. It is argued that restructuring has had differential impacts on communities, and one key factor in making this judgment is the nature of the enterprise-community relationship inherited from the former state socialist regime. Conceptually, this relationship can be understood in terms of the social and institutional embeddedness of the enterprise in its local community. The paper draws upon research into three large former state enterprises in the now Czech Republic in order to examine the effects of different degrees of embeddedness on the impact of restructuring decisions to reduce enterprise overstaffing, and to unburden the enterprise of its social and welfare assets and activities.

The Re-formation of the Managerial Elite in the Czech Republic

UNDERLYING THE DYNAMICS of the political and economic shifts in the former state socialist societies of Central and Eastern Europe are fundamental processes of social re-formation. It has been argued1 that the pressures for political change for the most part originated from two levels: the grass roots and the top. In many of the communist regimes the pressures for change from below had been resisted, through force if necessary, for many years, so it could be proposed that the critical element in tipping the balance during the months leading up to the revolutions in 1989 was the reorientation of the interests of those at the top. While it is irrefutable that the changes in the political and economic systems of these countries have been revolutionary in character, paradoxically researchers and journalists alike who have considered the political and economic decision making

The Adoption of the Multi-divisional Form in Large Czech Enterprises: The Role of Economic, Institutional and Strategic Factors

In the Czech Republic and elsewhere in the region, researchers have noted the widespread adoption of the multi‐divisional form (MDF) by the former state‐owned enterprises. In contrast to the accepted explanations in western capitalist societies, the spread of the MDF in post‐Communist economies has had little or nothing to do with growth strategies such as diversification. Developing ideas from the existing western literature, the paper examines the role of economic, institutional and strategic choice factors in three large, former state enterprises within the Czech post‐Communist context. The findings suggest that all three factors are theoretically important, but neither equally nor independently so. In particular, economic factors acted as a major constraint on structural choice only under extreme conditions, while institutional factors and strategic choice are best understood as interdependent moments in a recursive process of structural enactment.

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

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.

Economic restructuring and institutional change: Post-communist management in the Czech Republic

Abstract Prior to 1989 it was virtually impossible for Western researchers to gain access to information that revealed how industrial enterprises in the Soviet bloc were actually managed, structured and interrelated. Since then serious research on the subject has begun, with an emphasis of considering the changes that have occurred following the fall of communism. This article represents a contribution to this literature, and applies an institutionalist framework to the examination of enterprise transformation in the former Czechoslovakia and the now Czech Republic. The findings are drawn from intensive case studies of two former state-owned enterprises, which have since been privatized. It focuses on the strategies used by enterprise managers both during the communist era and in the early transition period. We find that these managers responded to state socialism by developing more complex and subtle strategies than envisioned by the literature on centrally planned economies. Further, these pre-1989 managerial solutions, coupled with diverse operating experiences, have continued to affect in significant ways the approaches of post-communist managers to the privatization process.