ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses issues of management against the background of social change. It deals with an examination of the development of factory management in state socialism. The chapter focuses on to discuss theoretical approaches concerning enterprise management in state socialism and some empirical findings on managerial change in Estonia. The adoption of the principle of democratic centralism in business companies meant that factories were administered according to a system of ‘one-man management’. Among wage labourers, Soviet thinking accepted only one internal division, i.e. that between mental and manual labour the communist ideology was that there existed no divisions based on power resources. The Soviet understanding of management contained one inherent paradox: The idea of’one-man management’ said that managers occupy a position of power. In the Soviet Union the managerial labour process was based on functions imposed by the planning system. Estonian managers are agents who are really performing the functions of business management Differences between occupational groups have increased.
