The Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives

A handbook for the socialist boss.

It teaches the Soviet manager how to read the moods of his workforce, how to build standing among the people he directs, how to run a meeting, resolve a quarrel, and raise output without leaning too hard on threats. It is the Soviet counterpart to the Western literature of industrial and organisational psychology - the same genre of advice book that filled American management shelves after the war - translated into the vocabulary of Marxism-Leninism and printed for export.

Stolyarenko writes as a practitioner of what the Soviet Union called the science of management, a fashionable applied discipline of the 1970s that borrowed from systems theory, cybernetics and social psychology and bent them to running the socialist enterprise. His audience at home is the executives, directors and heads of departments; abroad, the reader curious about how the other superpower proposed to manage people.

That comparative interest is the reason to have it. On the psychology of the work collective, on authority and persuasion, on incentives and discipline, on how a manager was expected to handle conflict, it is the clearest statement available in English of what Soviet management doctrine actually taught.

For once the date is close to honest: its supreme authority is the Twenty-Sixth Congress of February 1981 and its citations run out around 1977-78. A book of the very end of the Brezhnev years, issued in English during the interregnum that followed.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what everything it recommends quietly assumes.