Research ethics in an unethical world: the politics and morality of engaged research

This article explores ethical dilemmas in researching the world of work. Recent contributions to WES have highlighted challenges for engaged research. Based on the emancipatory epistemologies of Bourdieu, Gramsci and Burawoy, the authors examine moral challenges in workplace fieldwork, question the assumptions of mainstream ethics discourses and seek to identify an alternative approach. Instead of an ethics premised on a priori, universal precepts that treasures academic neutrality, this article recognises a morality that responds to the social context of research with participation and commitment. The reflection in this study is based on fieldwork conducted in the former Soviet Union. Transformation societies present challenges to participatory ethnography but simultaneously provide considerable opportunities for developing an ethics of truth. An approach that can guide engaged researchers through social conflict’s ‘messy’ reality should hinge on loyalty to the emancipation struggles of those engaged in it

Primary accumulation in the Soviet transition

The Soviet background to the idea of primary socialist accumulation is presented. The mobilisation of labour power and of products into public sector investment from outside are shown to have been the two original forms of the concept. In Soviet primary accumulation the mobilisation of labour power was apparently more decisive than the mobilisation of products. The primary accumulation process had both intended and unintended results. Intended results included bringing most of the economy into the public sector, and industrialisation of the economy as a whole. Unintended results included substantial economic losses, and the proliferation of coercive institutions damaging to attainment of the ultimate goal - the building of a communist society

E.A. Preobrazhensky and the theory of expanded reproduction in the USSR during the period of primitive socialist accumulation

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Management, worker responses and an enterprise trade union in transition

We examine management and labour process changes in a Moldovan factory to examine their impact on the trade union and to test the utility of institutionalist approaches. Changes in management structures and work organisation have hollowed out key legacies, notably the ‘labour collective’ and informal bargaining, and evoked resistance from workers. The union is disconnected from worker resistance and is faced with major issues concerning its role. We conceptualise it as a ‘suspended institution’

Employee involvement in Ukrainian companies

This paper examines the hypothesis that the introduction of Western quality standards has brought some development of employee involvement in Ukrainian manufacturing and service companies and analyses the consequences for managements' use of the institutions of employee representation. The subject is pursued through eight case studies, four in a test and four in a control group. Quality developments were driven by top managers and not by human resource (HR) practitioners. In the test companies, managerial hierarchies were flattened and process orientations adopted; training was increased; communication was improved and in some cases teamwork was established. These developments were largely absent in the four control cases. The consequences for employee representative institutions are examined. In three cases, management revived the previously anachronistic 'Assembly of the Working Collective' as an employee involvement tool, thereby demonstrating a preference for picking workplace institutions 'off the path' for adaptation rather than either using unions or limiting involvement to non-institutional modes

Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization

This 1992 book is a comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Dr Filtzer examines the main features of labour policy, shop-floor relations between workers and managers, and the position of women workers. He argues that the main concern of labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This 'de-Stalinization' had to be carried out without undermining the power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built. The author convincingly demonstrates how labour policy was thus limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of a long-term decline into economic stagnation. The labour problems under Khrushchev are shown to be the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and his ill-fated perestroika, thus helping to explain the failures of Gorbachev's policies.</jats:p