Factory and Manager in an Era of Reform

Abstract

Just over three decades ago Joseph Berliner, in his book Factory and Manager in the USSR , explored the world of the socialist manager. Drawing on interviews with Soviet emigres, he illuminated a world of informal management behaviour hidden beneath the seemingly formidable confines of a highly centralized system. The Soviet manager of the 1930s and 1940s employed a number of deceptive strategies made rational by a taut system of output planning and by chronic supply shortages: hoarding of plant capacity, labour and inventories; “storming” at the end of plan periods, in order to meet quotas; neglect of customer needs in favour of products easy to produce; and an overriding concern with the procurement process, relying heavily on procuring agents (tolkachi) who employed personal connections (blat) at other plants in order to secure inputs. Despite extensive social and economic change in the Soviet Union since that time, this pattern of managerial behaviour has survived, albeit in slightly altered form, into the 1980s.