3 - The emergence of a corporate structure in Polish industry, 1958–68

Summary

It is conventional for Western economists to evaluate the success and worth of economic reform in terms of the amount of independence accorded to the industrial enterprise, and to assume a dichotomy of interest between central planners and the enterprise. However, in a complex economy, the interaction of different levels in the planning and management apparatus is considerably more complex. That intermediate levels in the planning and management hierarchy could act to ‘enrich’ and ‘impoverish’ the communication between central planning authorities and industrial enterprises had been remarked upon by Oskar Lange, and had also been the consideration of the Economic Council when it recommended the abolition of the central boards and their replacement by industrial associations that would be more sensitive to the needs of the economy. Whereas studies of the operation of bureaucracy in both the public and the private sector in the West have revealed that it is facile to describe it as an impartial executive mechanism implementing policy made at the top of an organisation or by outside policy-makers, Polish sociologists have also acknowledged that intra-organisational conflicts and the socio-cultural and political environment play an important role in defining the cohesion of and goals pursued by an organisation. The pursuit of greater specialisation in the division of labour and a speedier rate of technological innovation has expressed itself in a number of reforms carried out at ‘intermediate’ levels in the planning and management apparatus which were expressed in the form of various types of merger and concentration of industrial enterprises.