Planting a Paradigm in Central Europe

This article selectively reviews the recent experiences of western management educators and trainers, drawing particularly on work done in Poland, Slovakia and Russia. It argues the need to develop alternative models of teaching and learning strategy which can at least ensure identification, if internalization is not found to be possible (to use Kelman's terms); models which address the learner's expectations within his or her own culture. Identification is a matter of perceived reward, and of the relationship between the learner and his or her role models, as these are encoded by the construct system of the individual trainee. The focus of the article is therefore on language: on the ideas which an eastern epistemology is capable of construing and expressing, and on the figures (idiom and metaphor), which encode meaning and understanding.

Working with Choice in Central Europe

This paper explores some of the issues associated with espousing the offer of freedom of choice within an action learning program for university faculty teaching management in central Europe-where both freedom of choice and management teaching are reputedly underdeveloped. It is argued that this reputation is ill deserved, and that the concept of 'freedom of choice' as applied in practice by the western partners, and as common currency in the West, lacks the level of clarity necessary for it to become more than dogma.

Blockbusters or Bridge-Builders? The Role of Western Trainers in Developing New Entrepreneurialism in Eastern Europe

Since the start of the transformation in Eastern Europe in late 1989, there has been a marked increase in training programmes and activities designed to modernize human capital in the region. Many of the initiatives are financed by the EU or other western sources and led by western training providers. This article deals with classroom training activities as a particular mechanism for developmental activity for post-socialist managers. Its empirical basis is a four-year training project that took place in Bulgaria from 1992 to 1996. The educators and trainers were from various EU countries while the trainees were Bulgarian middle and top-level managers from private and state-owned organizations. The article commences by considering why the western commitment to experiential learning appears to be compromised when trainers travel East, and relates this to broader issues of knowledge creation, ownership and transfer. As a prelude to describing the training programme itself we provide a brief insight into Bulgarian culture and then reveal trainee perceptions as to the value of the training initiative. We conclude by suggesting that if such training is to be meaningful to audiences in the post-command economies the principles of experiential learning need to be both reasserted and modified.

How Managerial Learning Can Assist Economic Transformation in Russia

Russian economic reform is still not effective at the institutional and individual levels, levels at which managerial learning is essential for success. In particu lar, Russian state enterprises, privatized or not, need to learn how to proceed with radical restructuring if they are to become effective. In doing this, they need to be dealt with as collectives in the Russian tradition rather than as corporations in the Western tradition. Russia also needs the managerial learn ing required to support a massive wave of entrepreneurship — especially in the creation of distribution and credit organizations. Finally, Russian managers need to be familiarized with a selected set of management skills and techniques relevant to dealing with the challenges of a competitive market, even though their skills in a number of other important management areas are fully recog nized.

How Transferable are Management Learning Systems? Reflections on 15 Years of Large-scale Transnational Partnerships

This article reflects on the largest, most sustained and widespread of the schemes to transfer `know-how' to Russia and eastern Europe. This programme introduced not only unfamiliar management ideas and pedagogy, but also a very different learning system. It operated through five partnerships that, from the outset, were intended to become sustainable. These therefore provide a set of `natural experiments' in the international transfer of a system of management learning. The article reviews the course of these partnerships and their varying achievements, highlighting the strains and dilemmas that those involved grappled with. The implications will be relevant to policy-makers as well as management educators.

Management development under adversity?

Examines the nature of management training in Poland, which has been largely technical and production oriented with little emphasis on strategic or behavioural aspects. Presents case studies of two companies in Poland which are typical of management development in general. Concludes that although there is a need for more professional and entrepreneurial managers at all levels, the economic, political and social changes that are under way are creating pressure to survive and are diminishing organizations′ capacity to commit resources to management development, should they even recognize its significance.