The Myth of Restructuring, ‘Competent’ Managers and the Transition to a Market Economy: a Romanian Tale
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00127 |
| Author | Mihaela Kelemen |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
Introduction
Current economic restructuring and reform
in Romania place a critical emphasis on anti-
bureaucratic and flexible forms of organization
(Adevarul, 1997a; Russu, 1997). The development
of such organizations is seen to require, first and
foremost, the development of particular abilities
and skills among Romanian managers. Govern-
ment reports (Government Medium Term Strategy
Programme, 1997; Macrostabilisation Programme
until the year 2000) and current economic wisdom
(Romanian Business Journal (1996), pp. 21–31;
Tribuna Economica (1996), pp. 51–52) repeatedly
stress that a significant number of Romanian
organizations are about to collapse because their
managers do not have appropriate skills to meet
the challenges posed by the transition to a market
economy. Thus, a new logic has emerged which
points to the necessity for developing new types
of managers who could deal with the challenge.
Drawing on an institutionalist framework, this
paper departs from structural approaches to the
management of change in Central and Eastern
Europe (Clark and Soulsby, 1995). It also departs
from those perspectives which make human agency
the very core and the primary drive of the change
process (Boter, 1994; Srica, 1994). The approach
taken here allows one to steer between structural
determinism and voluntarism, by acknowledging
the importance of structural forces for change,
and also by placing an emphasis on actors’ inter-
pretations of the process of change.
The transition to a market economy is a complex
economic, political and social phenomenon which
affects organizational life in a dramatic way. De-
spite such processual complexity, the boundaries
British Journal of Management, Vol. 10, 199–208 (1999)
The Myth of Restructuring,
‘Competent’ Managers and the
Transition to a Market Economy:
a Romanian Tale1
Mihaela Kelemen
Department of Management & Keele European Research Centre, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
A great deal of rhetoric surrounds the transformation from socialism to free-market
capitalism. This paper explores to what extent the restructuring of Romanian companies
has been an attempt to pay lip-service to prevailing rhetoric and to what extent it has
been premised upon economic rationality. To restructure along structural, technological,
financial but primarily managerial fronts has become a cultural value which is applauded,
praised and heralded as the only way forward by the Romanian institutions of the
transition. The companies under the study subscribe to such rhetoric only when they
regard it as being embedded in economic rationality, as is the case with structural,
financial and technological restructuring. Managerial restructuring, on the other hand,
is not regarded as a technical necessity, given the view held by existing senior managers
that skills and qualities acquired in the socialist regime are still appropriate to run a
business successfully in the free-market economy.
© 1999 British Academy of Management
1The author thanks Tima Bansal, Jodi Evans, Valérie
Fournier and Martin Parker for their comments on
earlier drafts of this paper, as well as the two anony-
mous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.
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