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Chinese State Enterprises
A Regional Property Rights Analysis
David Granick
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"We are indebted to David Granick for his thoughtful, careful, empirically documented study of the Chinese state industrial enterprise that not only provides a rarely attained comparative analysis but also possesses an explanatory power in suggesting how this system might evolve in the future."—Jeanne L. Wilson, Business Horizons
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Economic Adjustment and Reform in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
Essays in Honor of Franklyn D. Holzman
Josef C. Brada, Ed A. Hewett, and Thomas Wolf, eds.
Duke University Press, 1988
Economic reform, structural adjustment, macroeconomic stabilization, and participation in the world economy are interconnected aspects of the same issue: the long-term economic viability of centrally planned economies in the rapidly changing economic environment of the modern world. Any economic strategy that focuses on only one or two of these aspects at the expense of the others is likely to fail; yet even strategies that build on all of these bases may well fail unless political leaders can muster exceptional skill, garner international support, and enjoy some good luck.

The contributions to this volume reflect the recent research on this issue by various specialists on the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Each author emphasizes macroeconomic stabilization, structural adjustment, participation in the larger world economy, or ecomonic reform.

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Economic Reform in China
Problems and Prospects
James A. Dorn and Wang Xi
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In this volume, distinguished Chinese and Western scholars provide a detailed examination of the problems associated with China's transition to a market-oriented system. A variety of reform proposals, aimed at resolving the contradictions inherent in piecemeal reform, are discussed along with the chances for future liberalization.

These clearly written and insightful essays address the roots of China's crisis. The authors focus on institutional changes necessary for a spontaneous market order and point to the close relation between economic reform and political-constitutional reform. Topics include the speed and degree of the transition, whether ownership reform must precede price reform, how inflation can be avoided, steps to depoliticize economic life, how to create an environment conducive to foreign trade and investment, and how to institute basic constitutional change and open China to the outside world.

The revolutionary changes now shaking the foundations of socialism and central planning in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe are sure to have an impact on China's future. Despite their seriousness, the events of Tiananmen Square may constitute only a temporary detour on the road toward a private market order. The essays in this volume help lay a rational framework for understanding China's present problems and for discussing the prospects for future reform.
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Partisan Ruptures
Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia
Gal Kirn
Pluto Press, 2019
Yugoslavia's twentieth-century bore witness to civil war, sharp ideological struggles and a series of 'partisan ruptures'; revolutionary events that changed the face of Yugoslavian society, politics and culture, which were felt on a global level. This book is a comprehensive historical and political analysis of the three major ruptures; the People's Liberation Struggle during World War Two, the self-management model and the Non-Aligned Movement. In order to understand what provoked and what came out of these revolutionary ruptures, Gal Kirn examines the implications of communism and socialism's productive relationship, the Yugoslavian 'experiment' of market socialism that marked the political and economic shift towards 'post-socialism' already in the 1960s, which crystallised new class coalitions that will later on - together with austerity politics - lead the way towards des-integration of Yugoslavia. Filling a much-needed gap in English language literature, this book's interrogation of the Yugoslav socialist experiment offers insights for left projects and democratic socialist discussions today, as well as historians of Yugoslavia and revolutionary movements.
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Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power
Mark R. Beissinger
Harvard University Press, 1988

How does the excessive bureaucratization of central planning affect politics in communist countries? Mark Beissinger suggests an answer through this history of the Soviet Scientific Management movement and its contemporary descendants, raising at the same time broader questions about the political consequences of economic systems.

Beissinger traces the rise and decline of administrative strategies throughout Soviet history, focusing on the roles of managerial technique and disciplinary coercion. He argues that over-bureaucratization leads to a succession of national crises of effectiveness, which political leaders use to challenge the power of entrenched elites and to consolidate their rule. It also encourages leaders to resort to radical administrative strategies—technocratic utopias, mass mobilization, and discipline campaigns—and gives rise to a cycling syndrome, as similar problems and solutions reappear over time. Beissinger gives a new perspective and interpretation of Soviet history through the prism of organizational theory. He also provides a comprehensive history of the Soviet rationalization movement from Lenin to Gorbachev that describes the recurring attractions and tensions between politicians and management experts, as well as the reception accorded Western management techniques in the Soviet factory and management-training classroom.

Beissinger uses a number of unusual sources: the personal archive of Aleksei Gastev, the foremost Soviet Taylorist of the 1920s; published Soviet archival documents; unpublished Soviet government documents and dissertations on management science and executive training; interviews with Soviet management scientists; and the author's personal observations of managers attending a three-month executive training program in the Soviet Union. Beissinger's skillful handling of this singular material will attract the attention of political scientists, historians, and economists, especially those working in Soviet studies.

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Tocqueville’s Revenge
State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France
Jonah D. Levy
Harvard University Press, 1999

This book offers a new interpretation of the transformation of French economic policymaking and state-society relations over the past twenty-five years. In so doing, it challenges widely held views about the preconditions for state leadership and for a vibrant civil society.

France has long been characterized as a statist or dirigiste political economy, with state "strength" predicated on autonomy from a weak and divided civil society. Jonah Levy shows that this disdain for societal and local institutions has come back to haunt French officials--what he terms "Tocqueville's revenge." The absence of societal partners undermined the operation of dirigiste policymaking in the 1970s and early 1980s and has made it difficult to forge alternative forms of economic coordination in the post-dirigiste period.

Levy argues that just as the French state has been weakened by an absence of societal and local partners, French civil society has been weakened by the absence of a supportive state. In the 1980s, French authorities invited societal and local institutions to relay state intervention, but did little to cultivate their economic capacities. Taking the dirigiste state out of the French economy did not suffice to bring civil society back in, however. The broader lesson is that revitalizing civil society requires an active, empowering state, as opposed to an absent or indifferent state.

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