Privatizing Poland

Name: Privatizing Poland
Price: 64.12 AUD
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ISBN: 9780801489297

Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

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Paperback

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English

Cornell University Press
01 May 2004

Food manufacturing & related industries

Series: Culture and Society After Socialism

The transition from socialism in Eastern Europe is not an isolated event, but part of a larger shift in world capitalism: the transition from Fordism to flexible (or neoliberal) capitalism. Using a blend of ethnography and economic geography, Elizabeth C. Dunn shows how management technologies like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and standardization make up flexible capitalism's unique form of labor discipline. This new form of management constitutes some workers as self-auditing, self-regulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to self-manage.

Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' self-concepts; how changes in ""personhood"" relate to economic and political transitions; and how globalization and foreign capital investment affect Eastern Europe's integration into the world economy. Dunn investigates these topics through a study of workers and changing management techniques at the Alima-Gerber factory in Rzeszow, Poland, formerly a state-owned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan. Alima-Gerber instituted rigid quality control, job evaluation, and training methods, and developed sophisticated distribution techniques. The core principle underlying these goals and strategies, the author finds, is the belief that in order to produce goods for a capitalist market, workers for a capitalist enterprise must also be produced. Working side-by-side with Alima-Gerber employees, Dunn saw firsthand how the new techniques attempted to change not only the organization of production, but also the workers' identities. Her seamless, engaging narrative shows how the employees resisted, redefined, and negotiated work processes for themselves.

By: Elizabeth Cullen Dunn
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780801489297
ISBN 10: 0801489296
Series: Culture and Society After Socialism
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 01 May 2004
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is the author of Privatizing Poland, also from Cornell.

Reviews for Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor

Well organized and well crafted, Privatizing Poland is an excellent addition to the literature on the postsocialist transition in Eastern Europe. Both participant and observer, Elizabeth C. Dunn worked side-by-side on the shop floor and behind the sales desk with those in the midst of the transition. Martha Lampland, author of The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary