The Transformation of the Soviet Enterprise and its Management: A Literature Review

This article reviews literature on the transformation of the Soviet enterprise and its management. The review shows that Soviet management was much more multidimensional than previously assumed on the basis of official management descriptions. According to the official descriptions, the position of the Soviet manager mainly corresponded to that of the plant director who was responsible for the internal production processes of the factory. However, in reality, a Soviet manager's field of duties expanded from internal production management to struggling against the shortages of the centrally planned economy. Correspondingly, the review on transformation literature indicates that some of the empirical studies suffer from a rather inadequate methodology, as they tend to study enterprises and their management only at one point in particular time. Regardless of this, they sometimes draw very strong conclusions on transformation. In other words, several studies are based on a certain 'commonly accepted' view of Soviet management, instead of truly analysing the transformation taking place in post-Soviet companies. As previous empirical studies have not reached an unambiguous conclusion on the important topics linked to successful transformation, the article proposes some essential themes, which could increase understanding on the organisational and managerial transformation, and hence support the overall economic transformation process in the former Soviet Union.

Learning New Productivity Criteria in Transition Economies: Evidence from 450 CIS Companies

The empirical data suggests that the ownership structure of the CIS firms studied did not determine productivity improvements during the years 1995-97. This finding indicates that within this time period, ownership structure was not the main determinant in explaining improvement in organisational performance, but rather than this reflected the transition path, i.e. whether the transformation occurred via the reconstruction of the old or through developing a new organisational entity. The main difference between these two transition paths can be summarised as follows: the transition path of privatised companies can be characterised as organisational revolution whereas the transition path of private start-ups can be described as organisational evolution in a revolutionary business environment. Moreover, the empirical data indicates that there was a significant relationship between the younger age of the top manager and productivity improvement in a company. This finding suggests that adapting Soviet management culture into the post-Soviet environment can be a more complex task than merely learning new organisational practices.

The effects of culture, attitudes and perceptions on industrial cluster policy – the case of Russia

Culture, attitudes and perceptions have an underappreciated effect on industrial cluster policies particularly in transition economies, where long-established local social norms are confronted with hard-pressed external imperatives. This paper examines the impact of cultural and governmental peculiarities in the Russian context on the development of Special Economic Zones and Industrial Parks. Based on some stylised facts about the Russian context, in-depth interviews and surveys of the managing companies and tenants of all industrial clusters in Russia, we find cultural and governmental characteristics emerge as major influences on the effective development of industrial cluster policies. We develop an adapted industrial cluster model that accommodates these factors and suggests a policy pathway for mitigation

Predprinimatel'skaja sreda v Respublike Belarus': ocenka vedushhimi finskimi kompanijami

Inward foreign investment stock has grown remarkably in Belarus. It increased tenfold since 2000 to reach over $14 billion by the end of 2012. According to the Central Bank of Belarus, Finnish firms have invested nearly$100 million in Belarus making Finland the sixteenth most active foreign investor in the country. Approximately 7,000 companies with foreign capital were registered in Belarus by the beginning of 2013. Finnish companies founded three dozen of these foreign firms. A lack of scientific reports on the perception of foreign businesspeople in the Belarusian business environment necessitated an empirical study. This article studies the attitudes of the directors of Finnish firms operating in Belarus on the Belarusian business environment. In September-October 2013, the author conducted interviews with directors of 10 Finnish corporations. The PEST model was used to describe the perception of the Belarusian business milieu by Finnish businesspeople. The main empirical finding can be summarised by quoting a Finnish CEO, “Belarus is like any other market on the globe with the exception that foreign firms do not want to attract publicity about their activities in the country due to the poor public image of Belarus.

Проникновение иностранных банков и банковская деятельность в странах Центральной и Восточной Европы

The purpose of this paper is to estimate empirically the short-term effects of foreign banks entry on bank performance in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) Countries. A sample of 319 banks from ten CEE countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia) is used in the analysis. Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimation technique is used in regressions. The research results show that foreign banks entry affects negatively domestic banks’ revenues from interest-earning assets, non-interest income, and profitability. Foreign banks entry can also raise the overhead costs of the local banks. The general conclusion is that foreign banks entry increases competition in the host country in short run. Цель статьи – эмпирически оценить краткосрочные эффекты проникновения иностранных банков и банковскую деятельность в странах Центральной и Восточной Европы. Для нашего анализа мы взяли 319 банков в десяти странах (Болгария, Хорватия, Чехия, Эстония, Венгрия, Латвия, Литва, Польша, Словения, Словакия). Результаты исследования показывают, что проникновение зарубежных банков имеет негативное воздействие на доходы местных банков. Проникновение зарубежных банков может также увеличить косвенные расходы местных банков. Общее заключение таково, что проникновение иностранных банков повышает конкуренцию в стране в краткосрочном периоде

A SPARQL query engine for binary-formatted IFC building models

To date, widely implemented and full-featured query languages for building models in their native exchange formats do not exist. While interesting proposals exist for querying Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) models, their functionality is often incomplete and their semantics not precisely defined. With the introduction of the ifcOWL ontology as an equivalent to the IFC schema in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), an option to represent such models in RDF (Resource Description Framework, a general information modeling method) is provided, and such models can be queried using SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language). The size of data sets in complex building projects, however, renders the use of clear-text encoded RDF infeasible in many cases. A SPARQL implementation, compatible with ifcOWL, is proposed, directly atop a standardized binary serialization format for IFC building models. This novel format is the binary equivalent of traditional IFC serialization formats but with more compact storage and less overhead than the graph serialization in RDF. The format is based on ISO 10303-26 and relies on an open standard for organizing large amounts of data: Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5). Due to hierarchical partitioning and fixed-length records, only small subsets of the data are read to answer queries, improving efficiency. A prototypical implementation of the query engine is provided in the Python programming language. In several realistic use cases, the proposed system performs equivalent to or better than the state of the art in SPARQL querying on building models. For large datasets, the proposed storage format results in files that are 2–3 times smaller than the current, most concise, RDF databases while offering a platform-neutral, containerized exchange file