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State Terror as a Management Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

NATALYA VINOKUROVA
NATALYA VINOKUROVA*
Affiliation:
Natalya Vinokurova is an assistant professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on decision making in fragmented systems with a particular interest in the antecedents of the 2008 mortgage crisis. Her recent publications include: “Failure to Learn from Failure: The 2008 Mortgage Crisis as a Déjà Vu of the Mortgage Meltdown of 1994,” in Business History, and “How Mortgage-Backed Securities Became Bonds: The Emergence, Evolution, and Acceptance of Mortgage-Backed Securities in the United States, 1960–1987,” forthcoming, in Enterprise and Society. Management Department, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: natalyav@wharton.upenn.edu
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Abstract

This comment, in response to Phil Scranton’s article, suggests that communist business practices differ from those adopted in the West along three dimensions: (1) the locus and degree of centralization of production decisions, (2) the mechanism for coordinating the producers’ actions, and (3) the use of state terror in shaping the workers’ and the managers’ incentives. My analysis focuses on the third dimension—state terror, which I define as workers and managers experiencing extreme penalties for failing to meet the state’s goals. I argue that business history and allied disciplines of management and economics would benefit from studying state terror as a management practice and outline several avenues for pursuing such research.

Type
Symposia
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 546 - 560
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. 

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Footnotes

I thank Pál Germuska, Andrew Popp, Philip Scranton, Lee Vinsel, and participants in the Managing Communist Enterprises symposium at Rutgers-Camden for valuable comments.

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

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Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973.Google Scholar
Blass, Thomas, ed. Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.Google Scholar
Brandenberger, David. Political Humor under Stalin: An Anthology of Unofficial Jokes and Anecdotes. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009.Google Scholar
Chukovskaya, Lidia. Sofia Petrovna. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Granin, Daniil. Zubr. New York: Doubleday, 1990.Google Scholar
Hašek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.Google Scholar
Jachimowicz, Jacek. Pockets of Freedom: A Portrait of My Mother. Self-published, iUniverse, 2007.Google Scholar
Latané, Bibb, and Darley, John M.. The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970.Google Scholar
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.Google Scholar
Abramson, Lyn Y., Seligman, Martin E., and Teasdale, John D.. Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 87 (1978, February): 49–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Anteby, Michel. “Identity Incentives as an Engaging Form of Control: Revisiting Leniencies in an Aeronautic Plan.” Organization Science 19 (2008, March): 202–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashforth, Blake E., and Humphrey, Ronald H.. “Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity.” Academy of Management Review 18 (1993, January): 88–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartov, Eli. “The Timing of Asset Sales and Earnings Manipulation.” Accounting Review 68 (1993, October): 840–855.Google Scholar
Baumol, William J. “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive.” Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990, October): 893–921.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chan, Tat Y., Li, Jia, and Pierce, Lamar “Compensation and Peer Effects in Competing Sales Teams.” Management Science 60 (2014): 1965–1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dougherty, Deborah. “Interpretive Barriers to Successful Product Innovation in Large Firms.” Organization Science (1992, May): 179–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fedotov, Georgy P. “The Religious Sources of Russian Populism.” Russian Review 1 (1942, April): 27–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hewlin, Patricia F. “And the Award for Best Actor Goes to…: Facades of Conformity in Organizational Settings.” Academy of Management Review 28 (2003, October): 633–642.Google Scholar
Hooper, Cynthia. “Trust in Terror? The Search for a Foolproof Science of Soviet Personnel.” Slavonic and East European Review 91 (2013, January): 26–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hosking, Geoffrey. “Trust and Distrust in the USSR: An Overview.” Slavonic and East European Review 91 (2013, January): 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kilduff, Martin, and Day, David V.. “Do Chameleons Get Ahead? The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Managerial Careers.” Academy of Management Journal 37 (1994, August): 1047–1060.Google Scholar
Kogut, Bruce, and Zander, Udo. “Did Socialism Fail to Innovate? A Natural Experiment of the Two Zeiss Companies.” American Sociological Review 65 (2000, April): 169–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lant, Theresa K., Milliken, Frances J., and Batra, Bipin. “The Role of Managerial Learning and Interpretation in Strategic Persistence and Reorientation: An Empirical Exploration.” Strategic Management Journal 13 (1992, November): 585–608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manz, Charles C., Sapienza, Paola, and Zingales, Luigi. “Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (2006, Spring): 23–48.Google Scholar
March, James C., and March, James G.. “Almost Random Careers: The Wisconsin School Superintendency, 1940–1972.” Administrative Science Quarterly (1977, September): 377–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milliken, Frances J., and Lant, Theresa K.. “The Impact of an Organization’s Recent Performance History on Strategic Persistence and Change: The Role of Managerial Interpretations,” 129–156. In Vol. 7 of Advances in Strategic Management, edited by Dutton, J., Huff, A., and Shrivastava, P.. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Morrison, Elizabeth W. “Employee voice Behavior: Integration and Directions for Future Research.” Academy of Management Annals 5 (2011): 373–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Elizabeth W., and Milliken, Frances J.. “Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World.” Academy of Management Review 25 (2000, October): 706–725.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Samoilov, Vladimir O. “Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936).” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 16 (2007): 74–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steele, Claude M., Spencer, Steven J., and Aronson, Joshua. “Contending with Group Image: The Psychology of Stereotype and Social Identity Threat.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 34 (2002): 379–440.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yurchak, Alexei. “The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and the Anekdot.” Public Culture 9 (1997): 161–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar