The Modernization of Soviet Industrial Management: Socioeconomic Development and the Search for Viability

This book first published in 1982 considers the problems of efficiently managing large enterprises which are common to both the West and to the Soviet Union. The growth in management science in the West has been paralleled in the Soviet Union in the years since Khrushchev's fall. Professor Conyngham provides a comprehensive discussion of the efforts in the Soviet Union to develop techniques of scientific management that are consistent with the requirements of communist ideology and a planned economy. The opening chapter outlines the reforms of Soviet industrial management during the post-Khrushchev era and, in particular, indicates the role that increased decentralization has played in the developing importance of management science. Conyngham then concentrates on the generation of management theory and its application to the existing economic system. Topics covered include the emergence of systems analysis as the basic approach to management reform, the application of mathematical models and computers to decision making, and the introduction of economic and behavioural methods of management control. The last part of the book deals with the impact of functional rationalization on the structure of the existing system and the ministerial reforms of the 1970s.