Privatizing Poland

Privatizing Poland PDF Author: Elizabeth Cullen Dunn
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150170219X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The transition from socialism in Eastern Europe is not an isolated event, but part of a larger shift in world capitalism: the transition from Fordism to flexible (or neoliberal) capitalism. Using a blend of ethnography and economic geography, Elizabeth C. Dunn shows how management technologies like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and standardization make up flexible capitalism's unique form of labor discipline. This new form of management constitutes some workers as self-auditing, self-regulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to self-manage.Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' self-concepts; how changes in "personhood" relate to economic and political transitions; and how globalization and foreign capital investment affect Eastern Europe's integration into the world economy. Dunn investigates these topics through a study of workers and changing management techniques at the Alima-Gerber factory in Rzeszów, Poland, formerly a state-owned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan.Alima-Gerber instituted rigid quality control, job evaluation, and training methods, and developed sophisticated distribution techniques. The core principle underlying these goals and strategies, the author finds, is the belief that in order to produce goods for a capitalist market, workers for a capitalist enterprise must also be produced. Working side-by-side with Alima-Gerber employees, Dunn saw firsthand how the new techniques attempted to change not only the organization of production, but also the workers' identities. Her seamless, engaging narrative shows how the employees resisted, redefined, and negotiated work processes for themselves.

Privatizing Poland

Privatizing Poland PDF Author: Elizabeth Cullen Dunn
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150170219X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The transition from socialism in Eastern Europe is not an isolated event, but part of a larger shift in world capitalism: the transition from Fordism to flexible (or neoliberal) capitalism. Using a blend of ethnography and economic geography, Elizabeth C. Dunn shows how management technologies like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and standardization make up flexible capitalism's unique form of labor discipline. This new form of management constitutes some workers as self-auditing, self-regulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to self-manage.Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' self-concepts; how changes in "personhood" relate to economic and political transitions; and how globalization and foreign capital investment affect Eastern Europe's integration into the world economy. Dunn investigates these topics through a study of workers and changing management techniques at the Alima-Gerber factory in Rzeszów, Poland, formerly a state-owned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan.Alima-Gerber instituted rigid quality control, job evaluation, and training methods, and developed sophisticated distribution techniques. The core principle underlying these goals and strategies, the author finds, is the belief that in order to produce goods for a capitalist market, workers for a capitalist enterprise must also be produced. Working side-by-side with Alima-Gerber employees, Dunn saw firsthand how the new techniques attempted to change not only the organization of production, but also the workers' identities. Her seamless, engaging narrative shows how the employees resisted, redefined, and negotiated work processes for themselves.

Reassessing Communism

Reassessing Communism PDF Author: Katarzyna Chmielewska
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863791
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon. The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves. The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.

Being Poland

Being Poland PDF Author: Tamara Trojanowska
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442650184
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 853

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Book Description
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.

Cambodia: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture

Cambodia: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture PDF Author: David Joel Steinberg
Publisher: New Haven : HRAF Press
ISBN:
Category : Cambodia
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description


Europe's Growth Champion

Europe's Growth Champion PDF Author: Marcin Piatkowski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198789343
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
What makes countries rich? What makes countries poor? Europe's Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland seeks to answer these questions, and many more, through a study of one of the biggest, and least heard about, economic success stories. Over the last twenty-five years Poland has transitioned from a perennially backward, poor, and peripheral country to unexpectedly join the ranks of the world's high income countries. Europe's Growth Champion is about the lessons learned from Poland's remarkable experience, the conditions that keep countries poor, and the challenges that countries need to face in order to grow. It defines a new growth model that Poland and its Eastern European peers need to adopt to grow and catch up with their Western counterparts. Poland's economic rise emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth- institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders- in economic development. It demonstrates that a shift from an extractive society, where the few rule for the benefit of the few, to an inclusive society, where many rule for the benefit of many, can be the key to economic success. *IEurope's Growth Champion asserts that a newly emerged inclusive society will support further convergence of Poland and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe with the West, and help to sustain the region's Golden Age. It also acknowledges the future challenges that Poland faces, and that moving to the core of the European economy will require further reforms and changes in Poland's developmental character.

Historical Dictionary of Poland 1945-1996

Historical Dictionary of Poland 1945-1996 PDF Author: Piotr Wróbel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135927014
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Located between the former Soviet Union and eastern Germany, Poland has the potential to become a political and economic bridge between the East and West. It is crucial to European security and stabilization; yet the list of reference books on recent Polish history is very short. This book fills that gap, providing information on Polish political, economic, and cultural history since 1945.

The Generation

The Generation PDF Author: Jaff Schatz
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520370600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

A Polish Factory

A Polish Factory PDF Author: Jiri Kolaja
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813182085
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Industrial sociologists for many years have been limited almost entirely to studies of Western factories. For the Communist world they have been compelled to advance hypotheses based upon the assumption that political ideology determines the character of management-labor relations. Now for the first time, Mr. Kolaja's pioneering examination of worker participation in the management of a textile factory in Lodz, Poland, provides specific evidence for testing these theories. For eight weeks in the summer of 1957, while the liberal atmosphere of the "Polish October Revolution" of 1956 still prevailed, Mr. Kolaja observed the behavior of two work groups in the weaving department of the Lodz factory, supplementing these data by interviews and questionnaires. The workers he found for the most part eager to talk-particularly to complain-perhaps finding in this American citizen who spoke Polish with a Czechoslovak accent an outlet for repressed feelings. In general, Mr. Kolaja found, the weavers were almost untouched by the Communist ideology. The Lodz workers, like their counterparts in the West, worked for the pay envelope, blamed poor output upon technological and managerial deficiencies beyond their control, and sought to relieve the monotony of mass production by activities outside the factory. They responded little to efforts to involve them in the problems of the plant, and they considered the management people to be in a different, and opposed, class. Unwilling to abandon the doctrine that management-labor conflict does not exist in a Communist society, the Polish government had tried over the years to motivate the workers' participation in operational decisions. The latest of these attempts, coming shortly after the October political change, was the workers' council. This body, superimposed upon the existing management, labor union, and party structures in the Lodz factory, served both to stimulate some interest among a few workers and to complicate the task of the plant director, a forceful man, who had to promote the participation of workers whom he knew were unmoved by the principle of collective ownership. This he did, Mr. Kolaja observed, by reporting decisions to the workers' council as accomplished facts and asking its delegates to communicate them to their fellow laborers. The workers faced no such dilemma. They tended to accept the workers' council as yet another management organization, particularly after it had agreed to delay sharing the plant's profit. Yet one of them-denoted here as I -5 and surely the "hero" of the book-took his election to the workers' council more seriously and several times at its meetings embarrassed subordinate managers with his forthright statements. He was unable to fluster the plant director, however, who relied upon I-5's regard for his responsibilities to place him in the position of having to justify the profit sharing decision to his fellow weavers. The direction seemed clear by the time of Mr. Kolaja's departure: I-5 had been invited to join the party (no workers in the two groups studied were members), and he was about to be "coopted" by management.

Background Notes

Background Notes PDF Author: United States. Department of State. Office of Media Services
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Area studies
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description


Poland

Poland PDF Author: Zoran Pavlovic
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438105312
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
For a better part of its history, Poland's destiny has often been influenced, if not determined, by actions of its neighbors. From the west, Germans often advanced eastward; from the east, Russians, and later Soviets, expanded toward the west. This book helps readers discover Poland's culture, history, and political and economic situations.