In unison with the authors of this special issue, we argue that organizational research in European post-socialist contexts over the last 17 years has made a significant and enduring contribution to organization theory. This proposition provides the rationale for the special issue, which focuses on the formative relationship between the body of organizational knowledge forged largely within stable western market-economies and the findings of organizational research conducted within institutionally unstable and ambiguous post-socialist environments. We develop our argument through three phases. First, we seek to clarify the reasons why the context and process of postsocialism have posed special challenges to the conventional wisdom of 'western' organization theory. Second, we review post-socialist organizational research and consider how it has augmented our understanding of organizational structures and processes. Third, we place the five articles that comprise this special issue within this wider context, and outline their main contributions. The findings and lessons from post-socialist research have led organizational scholars to reevaluate many established theoretical propositions, and, by questioning the underlying rationality of organization theory, to explore the possibility of developing a more globally relevant discipline.

This paper examines the sources and processes of management learning in four large, former state enterprises in the Czech Republic. These enterprises have all been privatized, but have not enjoyed foreign direct investment, which is often cited as a major source of post-communist management development.The findings indicate that current managerial knowledge in the enterprises has originated from a variety of domestic and foreign sources, but that the flow of ideas has been affected by a number of important filters, arising from the complexity of the Czech context, and the motives of the enterprise managers. In particular, the paper documents the continuing role of managerial knowledge emanating from pre-1989 sources, a factor which may have crucial implications for the nature of the emerging institution of post-communist Czech management.

The study of organizational transformation has emerged from the foundations established by contingency theory and research. While institutional approaches to organizational analysis have preferred to focus on the tendency towards organizational continuity and inertia, recent developments have begun to consider institutional pressures leading to change, and to provide clues about how contingency and institutional theories might complement each other in improving our understanding of organizational change. The evidence presented in this paper, drawn from a study of organizational transformation in the Czech Republic, allows exploration of the relationship between transforming state enterprises and the wider processes of social, economic and institutional change. The values, motives and actions of the key enterprise managers are shown to be essential factors in explaining both the process of transformation in state enterprises, and the role of institutional factors in that process.

Top management theory has been strongly influenced by demographic studies of top management teams (TMTs), but not by research into organizational adaptation to conditions of extreme institutional turbulence. This article analyses the transformation of a post-socialist enterprise through a combination of demographic and processual methods to develop an enriched account of the micro-processes through which top management constructed organizational change. Adding layers of narrative data and processual explanation directly addresses the well rehearsed problems in demographic TMT studies. From the findings, we propose a set of theoretical arguments that conceptualizes top management in terms of management regimes, to which TMTs are politically tied and through which they seek to realize their values and strategies in organizational outcomes. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the enterprise restructuring process, which has typified the experience of post-communist industry, on local communities. It is argued that restructuring has had differential impacts on communities, and one key factor in making this judgment is the nature of the enterprise-community relationship inherited from the former state socialist regime. Conceptually, this relationship can be understood in terms of the social and institutional embeddedness of the enterprise in its local community. The paper draws upon research into three large former state enterprises in the now Czech Republic in order to examine the effects of different degrees of embeddedness on the impact of restructuring decisions to reduce enterprise overstaffing, and to unburden the enterprise of its social and welfare assets and activities.

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In the Czech Republic and elsewhere in the region, researchers have noted the widespread adoption of the multi-divisional form (MDF) by the former stateowned enterprises. In contrast to the accepted explanations in western capitalist societies, the spread of the MDF in post-Communist economies has had little or nothing to do with growth strategies such as diversi®cation. Developing ideas from the existing western literature, the paper examines the role of economic, institutional and strategic choice factors in three large, former state enterprises within the Czech post-Communist context. The ®ndings suggest that all three factors are theoretically important, but neither equally nor independently so. In particular, economic factors acted as a major constraint on structural choice only under extreme conditions, while institutional factors and strategic choice are best understood as interdependent moments in a recursive process of structural enactment.

This article develops an alternative theoretical framework to the dominant 'top-down' macroeconomic and institutional views that have been so influential in studies of the post-socialist economic transition. The authors argue that in order to understand economic outcomes more fully, researchers need to adopt a theoretical approach that combines the sociological reasoning of the institutionalist view with micro-processual arguments that theorize employment and unemployment as outcomes of everyday social construction. Inverting the normal economic approach of starting from macro-economic trends and inferring the motives and practices of local socio-economic actors, the authors, therefore, seek to develop a 'ground-up' mode of explanation of unemployment dynamics that commences from the examination of the real decision-making practices and processes of socially embedded enterprise managers. Drawing on evidence from longitudinal case study research, the authors demonstrate that enterprise restructuring has not been a uniform or monocausal process and highlight the dangers of over-generalization from aggregated data.