Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor / Edition 1

by Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

Overview

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 Rzeszów, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801489297
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2004
Series:	Culture and Society after Socialism
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth C. Dunn is Assistant Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is coeditor of Civil Society: Challenging Western Models.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Road to Capitalism

Chapter 2. Accountability, Corruption, and the Privatization of Alima

Chapter 3. Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies

Chapter 4. Quality Control, Discipline, and the Remaking of Persons

Chapter 5. Ideas of Kin and Home on the Shop Floor

Chapter 6. Power and Postsocialism

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Aihwa Ong

"In this stimulating book, Elizabeth C. Dunn renews an anthropology of capitalism, and will stir debates about postsocialist transition. In the land of Solidarity, management techniques seek to remake labor discipline as well as Polish worker identities in accordance with neoliberal ideals of privatized responsibility. Workers, however, struggle to reclaim values that sustain a moral vision of solidarity. The author's vivid ethnography and engaging style make this book a pleasure to read."

David Ost

"This is a pathbreaking book. Elizabeth C. Dunn is the first to allow us to feel what postcommunist transformation is all about. Her detailed account of the concrete ways in which people's lives have changed makes dry social science concepts like 'transition,' 'class formation,' and 'privatization' come alive. How are people working differently? How are they made to think differently? How has 'democratization' been used to create a new, subordinate type of worker, as well as new types of managers? Postcommunism has never been captured like this before."

Martha Lampland

"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."

Editorial Reviews

Privatizing Poland is a study based on participant-observation of the takeover of Alima, a baby-food factory in the medium-sized Polish city of Rzeszów, by the Michigan-based Gerber Corporation.... Dunn succeeds admirably in presenting the clash between the frameworks of flexible accumulation and actually existing socialism.... It stands out as one of the best case studies of the process of privatization in Eastern Europe.

American Ethnologist

Privatizing Poland is a study based on participant-observation of the takeover of Alima, a baby-food factory in the medium-sized Polish city of Rzeszów, by the Michigan-based Gerber Corporation.... Dunn succeeds admirably in presenting the clash between the frameworks of flexible accumulation and actually existing socialism.... It stands out as one of the best case studies of the process of privatization in Eastern Europe.

-- "American Ethnologist"

From the Publisher

"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

"This is a pathbreaking book. Elizabeth C. Dunn is the first to allow us to feel what postcommunist transformation is all about. Her detailed account of the concrete ways in which people's lives have changed makes dry social science concepts like 'transition,' 'class formation,' and 'privatization' come alive. How are people working differently? How are they made to think differently? How has 'democratization' been used to create a new, subordinate type of worker, as well as new types of managers? Postcommunism has never been captured like this before."

David Ost

"In this stimulating book, Elizabeth C. Dunn renews an anthropology of capitalism, and will stir debates about postsocialist transition. In the land of Solidarity, management techniques seek to remake labor discipline as well as Polish worker identities in accordance with neoliberal ideals of privatized responsibility. Workers, however, struggle to reclaim values that sustain a moral vision of solidarity. The author's vivid ethnography and engaging style make this book a pleasure to read."

Aihwa Ong

Dunn, an anthropologist, offers a ground-level appraisal of the new capitalism's impact on the Polish worker. She spent 16 months working alongside women on the shop floor, attending training programs, and talking to middle and senior management in a rural baby-food plant that had been privatized by Gerber, an American company. She wanted to see firsthand how workers and managers who had labored in a state socialist system took to an alternative economic model with different performance criteria, organizational forms, incentive structures, and marketing strategies. She found that the new ways were rapidly taking root, but with meanings and effects heavily shaped by the values and defenses Polish workers developed under the old order, with its chronic shortages, discontinuities, and self-help recourses. She focuses not just on worker behavior, but also on the way identity through labor is being reshaped in contemporary Poland.

Foreign Affairs