ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on property transformation, especially privatization. It discusses enterprise strategies and senior management behaviour against a background of increasing market forces. The chapter also discusses emerging patterns of relations, in terms of power and politics, between institutional actors at enterprise level, namely management, trade unions and employees’ councils. The most classical type of privatization, despite a relatively small number of cases, is important, because it has had the most significant economic impact. A form of property transformation specific to Poland is privatization by “liquidation”. The beginning of the 1990s in Poland was a period of turbulent change, the principal cause of which was the “Balcerowicz Plan”. Co-operation is implicit in industrial organization, because those who choose to be employed accept the nature of their contract. Trade unions are interested almost exclusively in pay, working conditions, some production issues and the training of the managerial staff.
