Centrally Planned Development: A Comparison of Polish Factories with Equivalents in Britain, Japan, and Sweden

Abstract

The first data collected by Aston Programme methods in Eastern Europe are reported from Poland. In a sample of factories matched for size, product, and unit status with equivalents in Britain, Japan, and Sweden, striking results are obtained. First, relation ships among size, interorganizational dependence, and technology, and structural characteristics of formalization, specialization, and centralization continue to support the hypothesis that these relationships will be similar in all societies. Second, and more importantly for this particular cross-national comparison, the Polish factories are found to be uniquely and uniformly formalized, functionally specialized, and centralized, to a high degree. This distinctiveness is attributed to the dual effects of an economy which is both a late developer and state planned.