Ed Clark

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.

Subsidiary Integration as Identity Construction and Institution Building: A Political Sensemaking Approach

This paper develops a political sensemaking approach to the post-acquisition integration process, which directs attention to how powerful social actors construct the relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and their multiple local contexts. This political, processual, and actor-centred perspective explores subsidiary integration as identity construction and institution building. The different characteristics that local and head office managers attribute to the subsidiary establish diverse interests in and political stances towards it and, through actions to resolve these differences, senior decision makers shape the subsidiarys strategic and structural location in the MNE. We illustrate this argumentation with reference to post-socialist acquisitions by Western multinationals, whose contrasting institutional and management experiences put the problem of multiple contexts and subsidiary integration into sharp relief. This approach complements mainstream international business research by attending directly to the neglected processual nature of subsidiary integration and examining different socio-political dynamics resulting from sensemaking and sensegiving interactions between key actors in the MNE.

Knowledge and learning in transnational ventures: an actor‐centred approach

The aim of this article is to develop the foundations of an actor‐centred, processual approach to examining the influence of cross‐border knowledge transfer and management learning on transnational institution building in post‐socialist countries. We argue that there is a need for more research to understand how key social actors go about (re)structuring, (re)defining and sharing knowledge within new international ventures. We contend that social actors can play a significant role in creating and structuring the “transnational social space” in which the new venture takes shape, exercising strategic choice that can mediate, adapt or even reject the apparently constraining effects of technical‐economic or cultural‐institutional factors. The role of social actors is conceptualized as a socio‐political sensemaking process, a perspective that would complement the current structuralist bias in the discussion about the emergence of transnational social space in international management research literature.

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.

Power, Action and Constraint in Strategic Management: Explaining Enterprise Restructuring in the Czech Republic

One significant strand of organization and management theory has been the development of approaches that focus on the active role of management in formulating strategic responses, such as organizational restructuring, to the external business environment. Despite subscribing to the idea that ‘management matters’, however, influential theories have often ignored or minimized the role of human agency. This article examines the strategic management process by placing the interaction between management power and action at the heart of the empirical and theoretical enterprise. The theory construction process evolves inductively from case study research on the restructuring processes and outcomes in four large Czech enterprises. The empirical findings and theoretical arguments strongly support the importance of introducing a political dimension into a sensemaking framework as a fruitful way of progressing the theory of strategic management action.

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.