Claudio Morrison

Legacies, Conflict and ‘Path Dependence’ in the Former Soviet Union

This article analyses management–union–worker relations in a foreign‐owned Moldovan clothing factory. Studies of post‐socialist industrial relations have focused on explaining labour quiescence, advancing ‘path dependence’ and ‘Soviet legacy’ arguments. These draw attention to strong links between management and unions, and weak relations between the latter and workers. We show how the union has, in one case, drawn creatively on Soviet legacies to develop strong articulation between itself and women workers. This was part of a wider adaptive strategy within which the union transformed the meaning of previous functions and developed novel ones. The outcome is a well‐organized representative union capable of challenging management at the negotiating table, as well as on the shop floor. This seems unlikely to be universal but equally unlikely to be unique.

LABOUR AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISCIPLINE: CHAOS AND ORDER IN A RUSSIAN TEXTILE COMPANY

This article analyses the issue of discipline violations in a Russian textile company. Discipline violations proliferated in Soviet times and were tolerated by managers. The cause has been identified in the limited form of control exercised over the production process, resulting from the social relations existing in the Soviet Union. Evidence from the case study indicates that no fundamental change has occurred in this area since the transition. The research documents the material and psychological hardships experienced by workers, the relational practices constraining line managers, and it tries to discern the conceptual and operative limits of disciplinary campaigns by top management.

The transformation of work and industrial relations in the post-Soviet bloc: 25 years on from 1989

The uprisings of 1989 in the Soviet sphere were momentous in their political impact. Examination of this prolonged transformation is timely. We progress from case study analysis of the workplace – important in the early stages of transformation – to reflective overviews which consider the accumulated experience of a quarter of a century of post-communism. Our overview studies highlight, for example, aspects of gender difference within the frame of ‘winners and losers’. The commonalities of ‘state capture’ are revealed across the states and geographical differences emerge in post-communist ‘recovery’ which highlight processes of uneven and combined development. Finally we identify relationships between state, labour and capital which stand outside the economic prescribed orthodoxy and the expected convergence of East with West. Instead of convergence to liberal economic values and practices we find crony capitalism associated with clientelism and mafia crime forming the backdrop to institutional failure.

Management, Worker Responses, and an Enterprise Trade Union in Transition

We examine management and labor process changes in a Moldovan factory to examine their impact on the trade union as institution. Changes in management structures and work organization have hollowed out key legacies, notably the “labor collective” and informal bargaining, and evoked resistance from workers. The union is disconnected from worker resistance and is faced with major issues concerning its role. We conceptualize it as a “suspended institution.”

Informal economic relations and organizations: everyday organizational life in Soviet and post-Soviet economies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the role of informal economic relations (IER) in the day-to-day working of organizations, thereby opening a way to theorizing and informed practice. The authors will present and discuss about the manifestation of informality in “everyday” reality of Soviet and transformation economies. Informed by Cultural theory and in particular the work of Gerald Mars, the authors are taking account ontologically and methodologically of Labour process theory. Design/methodology/approach – Through presentation of ethnographic data of detailed accounts and case vignettes in production and retail in the Soviet period of the late 1970s and 1980s and from the construction sector in contemporary Russia, with a focus on the labour process, the authors inform and discuss key processes in the informal working of organizations. Findings – In the Soviet system the informal economy co-existed in symbiosis with the formal command economy, implicitly adopting a “live and let live” a...

Informal and uncertain: employment relations through the broken mirror of Russian social sciences

Twenty five years of intense market reforms have not contributed to Russia developing a coherent and effective set of institutions regulating employment relations. The world of work instead has grown into a wilderness of highly differentiated, shadowy arrangements ruled by employers’ arbitrariness (Bizyukov 2011, 2013). By contrast, scholarship contributing to the sociology of work and employment remains underdeveloped, theoretically timid and highly fragmentary. Several reasons have been put forward to explain Russian scholars’ lack of interest in this field. The rejection of the pseudo-scientific Marxism of the Soviet era still casts a long shadow on labour-related research. Post-Socialist transformations have generated such wide-ranging and chaotic change that scholars struggle to collect reliable data and make sense of it. Researchers face new constraints such as unreliable statistics, access restrictions to privatised companies as well as historical limitations in qualitative research design. Furthermore, the post-Soviet scholar is facing challenging questions regarding the status of wage labour. Questions surrounding acceptable levels of unemployment or the fairness of now privately arranged wages or working time have proved controversial for a generation of scholars moving from a perspective where institutions regulating the employment relationship are assumed as centrally planned and universally provided by the state. The monographs selected for this review are the most representative of the state of the art in the field, presenting comprehensive accounts of features and trends in the world of work but also displaying the limitations of prevailing scholarship.

Research ethics in an unethical world: The politics and morality of engaged research

This article explores ethical dilemmas in researching the world of work. Recent contributions to Work, employment and society have highlighted challenges for engaged research. Based on the emancipatory epistemologies of Bourdieu, Gramsci and Burawoy, the authors examine moral challenges in workplace fieldwork, question the assumptions of mainstream ethics discourses and seek to identify an alternative approach. Instead of an ethics premised on a priori, universal precepts that treasure academic neutrality, this article recognises a morality that responds to the social context of research with participation and commitment. The reflection in this study is based on fieldwork conducted in the former Soviet Union. Transformation societies present challenges to participatory ethnography but simultaneously provide considerable opportunities for developing an ethics of truth. An approach that can guide engaged researchers through social conflict’s ‘messy’ reality should hinge on loyalty to the emancipation struggles of those engaged in it.

Catene del lavoro e delle migrazioni tra Veneto e Romania

Il paradigma della catena globale del valore o delle merci (Global Value Chain o GVC e Global Commodity Chain o GCC) sviluppata da Gary Gereffi et al. (1994) mira a spiegare le trasformazioni nella gestione delle nuove strutture produttive che si sono sviluppate nel corso degli ultimi trent’anni incorporando molti elementi dei processi economici. In particolare questa letteratura si e concentrata sui rapporti di potere tra le imprese e sul dispiegamento dei processi di ascesa lungo la catena del valore (Humphrey, Schmitz 2002). Alcuni autori hanno criticato questo approccio poiche tralascia il ruolo svolto da soggetti diversi dalle imprese, quali le istituzioni statali e internazionali (ad esempio l’Organizzazione mondiale del commercio), cosi come le influenze delle dinamiche sociali e lavorative nei processi economici (Smith et al., 2014). In questo articolo manteniamo un approccio che si basa sul concetto di produzione a rete globale, poiche riteniamo essenziale l’analisi sociale, politica e storica delle localita in cui i nodi della rete si articolano (Bair, Werner 2011). Ci soffermiamo in particolare su due elementi cruciali nella produzione a rete globale: il contesto socio-istituzionale e le mutevoli caratteristiche della forza lavoro.Il focus sui soggetti che sono gli artefici delle istituzioni permette di comprendere in maniera dinamica l’uso e l’evoluzione degli apparati normativi e istituzionali.

Between Welfare and Bargaining: Union Heterogeneity in Europe’s ‘Far East’

Institutional theory has only recently begun to extend beyond the developed, relatively stable societies of Western Europe and the USA; recognition of heterogeneity in union functions is likely to constitute a prerequisite for its further extension within post-socialist Europe. This chapter identifies the sources and nature of union functional diversity in Moldova. We illustrate that this type of internal diversity, in part a product of external influences and incoherent reform, is greater than in much of the rest of Europe where unions’ key industrial function is collective bargaining.Trade union functions, as we illustrate, may not be assumed or derived from Central and East European countries (CEE)(for an institutionalist analysis of CEE countries see Noelke and Vliegenhart, 2009), still less from West European or American models.