Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Empirical studies of attitudes toward work have long been among the strongest areas of Soviet sociology. The studies of Leningrad workers by Iadov and Zdravomyslov in the early 1960s (see Soviet Sociology, Summer-Fall 1970) and by Iadov in the late 1970s (see Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 1983, no. 3) served as models of genuine scholarship in this area. The lead article in our current issue, by V. E. Gimpel'son and V. S. Magun ("Waiting for Change: Workers' Views on the Situation at Industrial Enterprises"), is in the tradition of these earlier studies. The authors' findings presented here concern the job attitudes of a sample of Moscow workers drawn from both state and cooperative enterprises in December 1988. It should be recalled that legislation providing for increased enterprise independence and opportunities for worker participation in management (the Law on the State Enterprise) had been in effect since the beginning of 1988, so that gauging the impact of such legislation on work attitudes was one of the main objectives of the study. Among the authors' principal findings were the following: (a) although work satisfaction generally could be characterized as "low," it was lower at state enterprises than at cooperatives; (b) work dissatisfaction was generally higher in the 1988 study than in the Leningrad study of the late 1970s; (c) a negative assessment of the work performance of managerial personnel was common among workers, and "almost half" of the latter regarded strikes as an appropriate means of resolving conflicts with enterprise management. Of special interest was the substantial decline between 1976 and 1988 in the proportion of workers expressing satisfaction with opportunities to participate in managerial decision making. Paradoxically, recently established procedures for elections of managers and of workers' councils with decision-making authority (at least on paper) only served to heighten workers' aspirations and thus their discontent with prevailing conditions at the workplace. This article may be viewed as a case study of how policies associated with perestroika increased workers' sense of grievance more than their sense of participation in plant-level decisions.