Constraints on Modernization

In the mid 1960s, the Soviet leadership launched a campaign to develop a science of administration for socialist society. Its goal was simple yet ambitious: the creation of a theoretical foundation for the optimal management of a socialist economy, thereby helping to reverse the negative economic trends already becoming apparent. (The concern with management has since spread to the noneconomic sector as well, though state administration still receives far less attention.) Since that time, administrative science has become an established academic discipline, as evidenced by the creation of research institutions and management training programs and by the vitality of its publications infrastructure. Some twenty years have passed, however, since this modernization drive got underway, and its impact remains limited at best. Despite the public commitment of three successive regimes to administrative modernization, and despite some well publicized experiments with this, the theorists' research seems to have made a negligible impression on the everyday behavior of the practicing Soviet manager. There appear to be two principal reasons for this. First, the Soviet manager is notoriously resistant to change, for reasons well known to students of the Soviet economy.' This is true not only among enterprise-level managers, but also among their superiors in branch management and even among some of those highest ranking of managers in the council of ministers. Second, the research itself has been unable to justify much administrative innovation, due to ideological constraints on theory-building. Consequently, little work has been produced that is persuasive enough to overcome the bureaucratic roadblocks to putting theory into practice. This study will examine three components of Soviet administrative theory: decision-making, organization design, and effectiveness evaluation, each of which is subject to various bureaucratic and ideological constraints imposed by the Soviet system. For example, decision theory must develop within the confines of the Leninist model of organizational behavior and by means of ideologically approved methodologies; organization design is constrained by a preference for centralization that owes more to tradition and an entrenched bureaucracy than to ideology; and effectiveness evaluation is hampered by a lack of clarity in goal setting, especially on the part of the Communist Party. This combination of ideological and political constraints has strongly influenced administrative science's development in the USSR

Modernization theory · Political science · Regional science · Sociology · Law · Policy Transfer and Learning · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies · Public Administration · Public Policy and Administration Research

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  Robert W Campbell•Soviet Studies•1972

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