| The transformation of work and industry in the Czech Republic since the Velvet Revolution in 1989 has not been an simple process. The country and its people have had to tolerate high levels of bankruptcies, corruption and insecurity. Despite this, there have been successes at the level of individual enterprises and at the national level. This dissertation has at its core two case studies of factories in the city of Brno which are relative success stories. These are places where daily activity itself has not changed substantially, but the social, cultural and economic framework in which they occur has been fundamentally transformed. A new system has been created in each organization which effectively allows it to recover from a significant disjuncture with the past, in this case the end of forty years of communist planned economic production, and create a new equilibrium at all levels of the organization. Today, there are fundamentally new ways of producing social capital, and systems for reconfiguring existing relationships to bridge gaps in crumbling formal systems and nascent ones. This transitional system serves two broad purposes. It ameliorates some of the impact of the changes for individuals, and helps the company to articulate new relationships with the national, regional and global systems. The process of the creation of social capital is examined through the rubric of four characteristics important to any organization: legitimacy, engagement, established value, and security. It is through these characteristics that individual workers and managers have attempted to establish a new moral economy, based on values they see as archetypically Czech, as the basis for their interaction with the broader political economy of a global system which is seen as increasingly threatening. This dissertation attempts to capture a specific system at a specific moment in a specific setting. However, it is also an attempt to suggest how these specifics might be interpreted to derive a more general understanding of how certain aspects of transitions, social capital and industry may operate in other more diverse settings. |
