Labour Relations in Eastern Europe: Organisational Design and Dynamics

CROSS REFERENCE SMALL BUSINESS AND SOCIETY By focusing on the radical reforms undertaken in Eastern Europe over the last decade, this full length collaborative study - the first in its field - analyses the structures and mechanisms of labour relations in Eastern Europe. It looks at the action processes within enterprises and at the processes of strategy formulation at national level in Bulgaria, and compares them with such processes in other Eastern European countries, especially Yugoslavia and Hungary but also the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The radical nature of the reforms in Bulgaria are of particular interest in the light of recent events; the comparative and historical analysis this book offers puts impending changes into context. The book provides a wealth of case studies, rich in empirical material. They give illustrations of incidents and events in factories, based on the accounts of key informants and observations of meetings and elections. Drawing on concepts and approaches from both the Western and Eastern social science tradition, Labour Relations in Eastern Europe is distinctive in its historical depth. The analysis extends back to 1917; it explains the Soviet model of the 1920s and 1930s, and shows how it was transferred to Bulgaria and other countries after the war as a universal’ model. The process of change is then traced to the eve of revolution, and a postscript analyses post-revolutionary developments in Bulgaria up to the beginning of July 1990 and compares them with Hungary and Czechoslavakia.