3 - Developing a technology of management

Summary

During the Brezhnev era, the drive to modernize industrial management has developed in two distinct, but overlapping phases. In both phases, technical and economic factors have prevailed over social concerns in the rationalization of the management system. From 1965 through 1969, the economic reforms gave priority to changing structural relationships and motivation. Its apparent failure to improve significantly the efficiency of industrial organization resulted in a shift of priorities. Brezhnev announced the turn to a scientific and technological strategy of rationalization at the December 1969 Plenum of the Central Committee. He declared, “We are giving great significance to speeding up the tempo of development of systems of administration, information, and electronic technology.” The technological thrust maintained dominance through the mid- 1970s, when it, too, became caught up in the familiar cycle of excessive expectations and rapid disillusionment.

The shift to a scientific–technical strategy of rationalization coincided with a broader reassessment of Soviet economic development and international political status. A basic economic factor was the recognition that a declining growth rate and capital–output ratio and a threatening labor shortage required a new strategy of economic development. Technological progress, Brezhnev announed in 1969, had become the core of a new growth strategy replacing the older “extensive” growth based upon high capital investment and large increments to the labor force.

The turn to a technical strategy also appears to have been influenced by domestic and foreign political considerations.