Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (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 selfauditing, selfregulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to selfmanage. Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' selfconcepts; 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 AlimaGerber factory in Rzeszów, Poland, formerly a stateowned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan. AlimaGerber 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 sidebyside with AlimaGerber 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. Author BioRElizabeth 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. Foreign Affairs 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. 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 'Privatising Poland' chronicles the process of reshaping the Polish economy using as a case study the Alima baby food factory on Rzeszow. The new American owners decided they needed not only to reorganize production, but the workforce, who were to have anew capitalist-orientated identity Gerber Products Company, the baby food company, is headquartered in the tiny town of Fremont, Michigan, population four thousand.