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Modernity, Modernization, and Management: Comparative, Historical, Theoretical, and Policy Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Erik P. Hoffmann
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Abstract

This essay explicates, develops, and assesses the basic argument in Rudra Sil's Managing “Modernity”: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. Sil presents “a flexible, integrative theoretical framework” and an interdisciplinary, comparative historical narrative. He hypothesizes that a “syncretist” strategy, when founded on durable legacies and when filtered through “congruent” intrafirm relationships, is much more likely than “modernist,” “revolutionary,” and “traditionalist” strategies to strengthen “managerial authority” and economic performance in large industrial enterprises. Four case studies (pre- and postwar Japan and Russia) attest to the benefits of “synthetic institutionalism” as a theory-building strategy and of syncretic incrementalism as an institution-building strategy. Sil's book focuses on the sources of managerial authority and the patterns of shop-floor behavior, not on system dynamics and interinstitutional interactions. Nonetheless, Managing “Modernity” is a major work for multiple authences and for multiple reasons.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 138 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Stuthes. 2006

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References

The author would like to thank Frederic J. Fleron Jr. and George P. Richardson for their very thoughtful comments on a draft of this essay.

1 Sil, Managing “Modernity,” 47.

2 Ibid., 55.

3 Ibid., 10, 51, 328.

4 Ibid., 55, 290.

5 Ibid., 283.

6 Ibid., 32, 115-22, 283. Harry Eckstein's classic essays on congruence theory and syncretic change, respectively, are “Congruence Theory Explained” and “Lessons for the 'Third Wave’ from the First: An Essay on Democratization,” botii in Harry Eckstein, Frederic J. Fleronjr., Erik P. Hoffmann, and William M. Reisinger, Can Democracy Take Root in Post- Soviet Russia? Explorations in State-Society Relations (Lanham, Md., 1998), 3-33, 249-85.

7 Sil, Managing “Modernity,” 324.

8 Ibid., 50-53.

9 Ibid., 277, 284.

10 Ibid., 53.

11 Ibid., 290. Note the significant difference between Sil's approach and the advice a prominent multidisciplinary team proffered to future researchers three decades ago: “The lessons of the rapid modernization achieved by Japan and Russia do not provide a single model to be followed, but they do focus attention on certain universal requirements for modernization and on the blend of past and present necessary for meeting them.“ Black, Cyril E., Jánsen, Marius B., Levine, Herbert S., Levy, Marion J. Jr., Rosovsky, Henry, Rozman, Gilbert, Smith, Henry D. II, and Starr, S. Frederick, The Modernization of Japan and Russia (New York, 1975), 351 Google Scholar.

12 Sil, Managing “Modernity,” 16, 56, 62.

13 Ibid., 295.

14 Ibid., 173,181, 243, 247.

15 Ibid., 290. Cf. Philip G. Roeder, “Transitions from Communism: State-Centered Approaches,” in Eckstein, Fleron, Hoffmann, and Reisinger, Can Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet Russia? 202-8.

16 Sil, Managing “Modernity,” 290 (emphasis in original).

17 Ibid., 287, 321.

18 Ibid., 282. Note the complementarity of Sil's “lesson” and a “major conclusion” in Black, Jánsen, Levine, Levy, Rosovsky, Rozman, Smith, and Starr, The Modernization of Japan and Russia, 344-45: “The kind of borrowing of institutions and techniques in which Japan and Russia both engaged so successfully is possible only under quite unusual circumstances … when the borrower nation is capable of maintaining a concert of coordination and control between governmental leaders and a variety of domestic interest groups in a period of rapid institutional changes and of rising public expectations of political participation.“

19 Sil, Managing “Modernity,” 285.

20 See the editor's introduction and afterword in Fleron, Frederic J. jr., ed., Technology and Communist Culture: The Socio-Cultural Impact of Technology under Socialism (New York, 1977), 1–67 Google Scholar, 457-87, esp. 11.

21 Ibid., 12.

22 Tucker, Robert C., The Soviet Political Mind: Stalin and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed. (New York, 1971), esp. 121–42Google Scholar; and Tucker, , Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, 1987)Google Scholar.

23 Russia's state budget could barely finance the Trans-Siberian Railroad, even though it was constructed largely by hand (for example, without dynamite and state-of the though it was constructed largely by hand (for example, without dynamite and state-ofthe- art tunneling, bridging, and earth-moving technologies) and was funded “on the cheap” (for example, one track, light rails, low wages, and convict labor). The railroad's completion and subsequent improvements vividly illustrate the costs and benefits of “lowtech“ modernization and the importance of Witte's political and managerial skills.

24 See Yergin, Daniel and Stanislaw, Joseph, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, 2d ed. (New York, 2002), 399–418 Google Scholar.

25 See Walder, Andrew G., Communist Neo- Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1986), 252 Google Scholar. For a critique of Max Weber's and Talcott Parsons's views on modernity and modernization, see 125-30.

26 “The Sun Also Rises: A Special Issue on Japan's Economic Revival,” The Economist, 8-14 October 2005,11, 3 (“A Survey of Japan“).

27 Sergeyev, Victor M., The Wild East: Crime and Lawlessness in Post-Communist Russia (Armonk, N.Y., 1998), 164 Google Scholar.

28 Klebnikov, Paul, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York, 2000), 321 Google Scholar.

29 “Gazprom: Russia's Energetic Enigma: A Special Report,” TheEconomist, 8-14 October 2005, 77, 79.

30 Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin, 322.

31 Ibid., 322-23.

32 Managerial authority can vary considerably in states of the same political type. In the factories of communist China and the USSR, especially since the late 1950s, one finds distinctive national forms of party-state controls, mobilization campaigns, clientelist networks, incentive structures, and worker dependencies and commitments. Cf. Sil's Russian case stuthes and Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism.

33 Cf. Breslauer, George W., Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge, Eng., 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Breslauer, , Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

34 Richardson, George P., Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (Philadelphia, 1991), 2 Google Scholar.

35 Sterman, John D., Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World (Boston, 2000), 91 Google Scholar.

36 For an analysis of pre-perestroika Soviet literature on the NTR and NUO, see Hoffmann, Erik P. and Laird, Robbin F., Technocratic Socialism: The Soviet Union in the Advanced Industrial Era (Durham, 1985)Google Scholar. On the NOT from Lenin to Gorbachev, see Beissinger, Mark R., Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar. On Soviet “old” and “new” thinking, mostly about domestic and foreign policy linkages, see Hoffmann, Erik P. and Laird, Robbin F., The Politics of Economic Modernization in the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 1982)Google Scholar; English, Robert D., Russia and the Idea oftlie West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Sil, Managing “Modernity,” 290.