Article

 

The post-socialist Russian firm and the explicative power of the economic theories of organization (p.33-52)

by

Leonidas Maroudas, University of the Aegean, Business Administration Department

Yorgos Rizopoulos, CRIISEA, University of Picardie

Keywords : Economic theories of organization, managerial strategies, organizational change, transition, Russia

JEL classification : D21, J53, L21, L60, M10, P31

Abstract

Economic research on privatization, restructuring and corporate governance of the post-socialist Russian firm, has usually been based on the hypothesis of isolated maximising agents, the principal-agent model assuming inadequacy of incentives or, to a lesser extent, transaction costs theory. The interesting insights of such approaches do not always seem appropriate to explain some major internal and external features (barter and demonetization of exchanges, networking and labour hoarding) of the post-socialist Russian firm. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the explicative power of economic theories of organization concerning the specific features of Russian firm and the process of its transformation into a capitalist firm. The adoption of an approach focusing on the negotiation process between groups of participants, power structure and control, core competencies, abilities, accumulated knowledge and the ambivalent conflict/collaboration nature of the organizational games at both the internal and external level, shed some light on the Russian enterprise’s evolving organizational equilibrium during the first years of systemic transformation.