ABSTRACT
In soviet enterprises line managers had a high degree of autonomy in the methods by which they achieved plan targets. This autonomy was strengthened with the disintegration of the soviet system as enterprises struggled to survive by all the means at their disposal. With economic stabilisation since 1998 there has been an increasing tendency to the centralisation of management, as the enterprise is subordinated to the capitalist priority of achieving the profitable production of a marketable product. This tendency has been expressed in attempts to integrate line managers into the management hierarchy and to encourage them to adopt the ideology of capitalist management, with its priority of financial results over technical achievements, in order to ensure that they more effectively meet the demands of top management in the workplace. However, the attempt to achieve such an integration is strikingly contradictory. Line managers face apparently insuperable difficulties in their attempt to carry out the tasks assigned to them as a result of their contradictory position. Underlying these difficulties is the fact that line managers are at the intersection of the aspirations of top management and the reality of the workplace, squeezed between pressure from top management and from the workers they manage. On the one hand, they are responsible for the achievement of the plan targets, on the other hand, they depend on the discipline, loyalty and will of the workers to achieve these targets. In some cases this leads to resistance on the part of the line managers to the demands imposed on them from above, in some cases they ignore or passively subvert those demands, and in some cases they do their best to achieve the demands imposed on them, using their traditional methods.
