Full Description
This work on the industrial sociology of the USSR examines how the structure of Soviet bureaucracy prevents industry making technical innovations, even though individual managers, using their initiative, try to introduce them. The author argues that this restraint on new inventions is an important cause of the failure of Soviet industry in recent years, and illustrates his points with case studies from a range of Siberian industries, which have been recently hit by strikes.
Contents
Part 1 From stagnation to development: restructuring the social machinery of innovative processes; the market as precondition for stimulating innovations. Part 2 Innovations and innovators in state enterprises: renewal of methods of production in enterprises; the level of employees innovative activities; the innovating consciousness; the climate of innovation in enterprises; the economic immunity-defiency syndrome. Part 3 Reasons for stagnation in innovative processes: what holds back innovative processes; defects in economic institutions; political institutions and the problem of stagnation in innovation; the spread of innovations - not diffusion but innovation drives; the cultural and ideological reasons for obstruction; socialist monopolization - the prime cause of stagnation.
