Robert V. (“Bill”) Daniels died in Burlington, Vermont, on March 28, 2010, at the age of 84. He was a distinguished scholar and teacher at the University of Vermont for more than three decades, a respected administrator in various university positions, a president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and an elected state senator in the Vermont legislature for nearly a decade. He authored two dozen books on themes of fundamental importance, mostly on revolution and modernization, power and authority, leadership and opposition, participation and bureaucracy, representation and communication, and ideology and culture in the Soviet Union.

Robert C. Tucker died on July 29, 2010, at the age of 92. He was an outstanding teacher and mentor at Indiana University from 1958 to 1961, and from 1962 to 1984 at Princeton University. He had a special gift for encouraging and assisting former graduate students, whom he viewed as colleagues and friends. His generosity and graciousness were much appreciated by the present writer and many others.

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.

The author analyzes recent efforts by Soviet and East European theorists to explain the interrelationships among science, technology, and social change in socialist and capitalist countries, and to understand the role that scientific and technical advances are playing and can play in the transition to new forms of “developed socialism.” Theories of “the scientific-technological revolution” are examined from various perspectives: their intellectual content, their social and ideological functions, and the reciprocal influences of ideas, policy, and administrative practice. This essay brings to the attention of Western readers a type of literature strongly encouraged by contemporary Soviet leaders; it is a major evolving component of Marxism-Leninism, and may be influencing or reflecting some of the changing policies and attitudes of communist political elites.

Few scholars have utilized contemporary social science theory in designing research on Communist countries. And fewer still have in systematically incorporated data from Communist countries into the existing body of social science theory. That is, middle-range theories such as organization, development, and socialization theory have not significantly shaped Western research on Communist systems. And surprisingly few one-, two-, and multivariable generalizations from the existing social science literature have been confirmed, rejected, or refined—even tentatively—with data from Communist countries.