ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes results gathered from intensive interviews with 53 expert informants, individuals who formerly held responsible positions in the Soviet economic bureaucracy. In accordance with the general theme of hierarchical reform in the Soviet economic bureaucracy, It focuses on those responses dealing with organizational change. An extensive presentation of the interview data underlying the chapter is available from the Soviet Interview Project. Several features stand out in the interview evidence regarding management’s perception of the “treadmill” of Soviet economic reforms. Qualitative data are useful in providing information to reduce uncertainty in specifying relationships among economic agents, and in spelling out the nature of the uncertainty a particular agent faces. Ministry and other planning officials were initially to identify supply-client relationships between enterprises, giving enterprises the responsibility to maintain such relationships over time. Managers viewed counterplanning as an unsuccessful effort by planners to increase output; unsuccessful in large part because higher plan targets were not supported by additional supply allocations.
