The impact of national context effects on HRM practices in Russian subsidiaries of Western MNCs

This article contributes to the research on comparative human resource management by providing a model of the Russian business system and its effect on human resource management practices at Russian subsidiaries of Western multinational companies. Whitley’s approach was adopted to illustrate the links between institutional arenas, business systems, and human resource management practices. The empirical part is based on interviews with senior human resources managers of Western multinational companies operating in Russia. The findings provide insight into the interaction between the national business system and human resource management practices in Russia

The hysteresis effect as creative adaptation of the habitus: Dissent and transition to the ‘corporate’ in post-Soviet Ukraine

How might Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis effect be operationalized in order to understand dissent from, and compliance with, domination in a specific period of social and organizational transition? We employ the Bourdieusian concepts, in particular ‘forms of capital’, ‘hysteresis effect’ and ‘habitus’ to examine the production and reproduction of domination within a British international organization (the ‘Corporation’) operating in transitional post-Soviet Ukraine. Our argument is that the communist-era dissident habitus was better adapted to the changed socio-economic circumstances of postcommunism and was able to creatively adapt to the Corporation through identifying homological processes of domination and adopting homological dissident strategies. The hysteresis effect might therefore provide an explanation of how workers make sense of their new environment based on their habitus, on their capacity to decipher homologies between the previous context and the new one, and on how the dominated that dissent reuse or adapt their strategies in and to this new context. This article makes contributions to the study of domination in organizational contexts at three levels. At the theoretical level, through organizational-based empirical work we build on and develop Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis effect by demonstrating the role of the hysteresis effect in the creative reproduction of dissent as a habitus. Our substantive contribution adds a new perspective to the literature on ‘transition’, providing a fine-grained study of how domination was produced within the Western organization in post-Soviet Ukraine

Blockbusters or Bridge-Builders? The Role of Western Trainers in Developing New Entrepreneurialism in Eastern Europe

Original article can be found at: http://mlq.sagepub.com/ Copyright Sage Publications Ltd. DOI: 10.1177/1350507601324001 [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]Since the start of the transformation in Eastern Europe in late 1989, there has been a marked increase in training programmes and activities designed to modernize human capital in the region. Many of the initiatives are financed by the EU or other western sources and led by western training providers. This article deals with classroom training activities as a particular mechanism for developmental activity for post-socialist managers. Its empirical basis is a four-year training project that took place in Bulgaria from 1992 to 1996. The educators and trainers were from various EU countries while the trainees were Bulgarian middle and top-level managers from private and state-owned organizations. The article commences by considering why the western commitment to experiential learning appears to be compromised when trainers travel East, and relates this to broader issues of knowledge creation, ownership and transfer. As a prelude to describing the training programme itself we provide a brief insight into Bulgarian culture and then reveal trainee perceptions as to the value of the training initiative. We conclude by suggesting that if such training is to be meaningful to audiences in the post-command economies the principles of experiential learning need to be both reasserted and modified.Peer reviewe