Historical legacies, late-industrialization and institution-building: A comparative study of industrial enterprises and worker commitment in Japan (1868-1940, 1950-1980) and Russia (1917-1990)

This dissertation is an attempt to generate theoretical insights and plausible hypotheses concerning the effects of inherited historical legacies and strategies of institution-building on the commitment of socially mobilized individuals encountering new institutional environments in the course of late-industrialization.;The study begins with the assumption that values and patterns of social relations embedded in pre-industrial communities do not inevitably dissolve and give way to individualism in non-Western late-developers as was the case in much of the West. However, in contrast to an earlier generation of modernization theorists who viewed the persistence of "traditional" values and structures as obstacles to economic development, I view the collectivist legacies inherited from pre-industrial communities as potentially compatible with, and even conducive to, the building of stable, purposive complex institutions in late-industrializers.;I focus the study on the large-scale industrial enterprise as a case of a complex, bureaucratic institution that is extremely relevant not only to the process of national economic development but also to the day-to-day work experiences of millions of individuals experiencing the drama of industrialization. Within the context of industrial enterprises, the problem of institution-building may be translated as one of generating worker commitment. My main argument is that economic elites and managers in late-industrializers are more likely to succeed in generating and maintaining worker commitment where they pursue a syncretic institution-building strategy, i.e. where the company ideology and the organization of workplace social relations in large-scale industrial enterprises are communicated and understood in terms of the collectivist values and patterns of social relations inherited from typical pre-industrial corporate groups.;This argument has been developed on the basis of some compelling comparisons of pre-industrial legacies and enterprise management in Japan and Soviet Russia. For each country, I describe the dominant pre-industrial values and structures, focusing mainly on village communities. I then examine the evolution of managerial ideologies and enterprise organization.;In Japan, the deployment of traditional images of the "family firm" did not prove effective in the Meiji period; employees did not respond well to the absence of job security or the increasingly specialized division of labor, nor did they feel that the managers and employers were fulfilling their obligations as benevolent "fathers". Even less effective were the powerful industrial managers of Soviet Russia who were unable to sustain worker commitment partly because management practices began to increasingly emphasize the competitive performance of individuals, thus deviating from the collectivist ideals and egalitarian norms evident both in the official communist ideology and in pre-revolutionary Russian communities. In contrast, the post-war Japanese firm (1950-80) serves as the pre-eminent example of effective and purposive modern institutions where authority relations, work responsibilities and incentive structures may be understood in terms of collectivist values, norms and social relations not unlike those found in pre-industrial communities. I conclude that modernizing elites should view the post-war Japanese "miracle" neither as a unique phenomenon nor as the basis for an alternative development model, but as evidence of the merits of a syncretic institution-building strategy in which the collectivist values, norms and structures of pre-industrial strategy are reconstructed in the context of the ideologies and organizational devices supporting new, complex institutions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).