ABSTRACT
The restructuring of industrial enterprises in Russia has ubiquitously been seen as the key to the transition to capitalism. On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the leading international financial institutions in an extensive study concluded that the specific nature, functions and institutional character of Soviet enterprises made them ‘one of the principal barriers to economic progress in the Soviet system’ (IMF et al. 1991). The importance attached to the management and institutional character of large firms in an advanced industrial society should not surprise us, given the importance of enterprise management reform and its effect on the shape of the institutional environment in the experience of global restructuring of capitalism. Yet, the results of enterprise restructuring have matched neither the hopes of radical reformers nor the fears of their critics, and insofar as Russia’s experience has been conceived of explicitly within the framework of the global economic restructuring, the apparent absence of workplace transformation along the lines anticipated by various commentators appears as originating from individual or institutional barriers to reforms.
