The Architecture of Russian Markets Organizational Responses to Institutional Change

This study addresses the co-evolution of institutional and organizational change in Russia. It focuses on changes in state-business relations, and on the forms of entrepreneurship that emerge in local environments at different degrees of economic complexity and at a variable distance from global markets.

The study engages with three key issues: firstly, it looks at the social construction of markets in different socio-economic environments. Secondly, it connects studies of Russian factories and institutional analysis with organizational institutionalism. Thirdly, it highlights turning points in the multidisciplinary debate on how the social embeddedness of economic action may be short-lived in transitional societies.

Based on the author's own research and evaluation, and a review of co-evolutionary literature, the study provides new insights into the debate on the economic sociology of post-socialist transformation.

Bruno Grancelli is a former professor of economic sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. He has carried out research and evaluation activities in organisational change, local development, management and emerging entrepreneurship in Russia and the former Soviet Union. He has published extensively on these issues.

1. Introduction: re-reading a program for an economic sociology of post-socialism
2. Toward capitalism without capitalists
2.1. A reminder of Soviet factory regime
2.2. The failure of 'market socialism': micro-outcomes of a macro-event
2.3. Privatization, marketization and organizational adaptations

2.4. Local problems and foreign solutions: the training of managers
3. Enterprises and the administrative regime: history matters
3.1. State and 'state concessionaires'
3.2. Labour market: normative rigidity and organizational flexibility

3.3. Human resource management: continuities and changes
3.4. Organizational environments and emerging entrepreneurship
4. Local environments and the minor architecture of markets
4.1.'Subaltern entrepreneurship' and Soviet legacies
4.2. Regional economies and small business
4.3. Governors and entrepreneurs
5. Organizations, institutions and the rebuilding of markets: new insights on the debate
5.1. Russian factories and company towns: a back-to-roots journey in organizational institutionalism and
a comparative look
5.2. Neoistitutionalism and area studies: notes on the multidisciplinary dialogue
6. Conclusions
References
Subject Index