Hands-on Management: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches and Russian Practice of State and Municipal Management

Abstract

1. Introduction Over the recent years Russian researchers have published a lot of monographs and scientific articles devoted to the problems of state and municipal management. Scientific definitions were developed, and serious researches of the applied management mechanisms were made. However, in spite of the considerable scope of works made by the scientific community, some aspects of the practice of state and municipal management were not duly interpreted in terms of research and theory (Shekhovtsov et al., 2017; Medvedeva et al., 2016; Irizepova, 2015). They are still in the zone of "white spots" and weakly researched by the contemporary science. We can refer the hands-on management method to the category of such problems insufficiently studied by national researchers. Over the recent years this method has been rather widely used by all bodies of state and local authorities in Russia. In recent years the word-combination hands-on management itself has become rather popular and is from time to time used in public speeches of Russian state and public persons, officers, experts and representatives of mass media. Herewith, the scientific community has not yet formed general approaches to defining this notion and has not developed a general acknowledged system of criteria related to the results of its practical use and determination of the level of impact on political and social and economic life of the Russian state. Without claiming about the completeness of the scientific research of this problem, we will let ourselves share the results of our consideration about the practice and legitimacy of hands-on management and impact of this method on social and economic development of the contemporary Russia with the readers within the limited framework of this work. 2. Methodology The methodological framework of the conducted research was based on the provision of the entity of logical and historical approaches. The authors used methods widely used in the research activity--descriptive method, analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, generalization, observation, forecasting, scientific abstraction, statistical analysis, system analysis as well as techniques of grouping, classifying, comparative historical and inter-industry analysis, expert judgements. The combination of these methods enabled the authors to provide the veracity of the conducted research and stipulation of its conclusions. The informational basis of the research included Russian and foreign works in state and municipal management, philosophy, sociology, economics, etc., materials of scientific conferences and seminars, scientific reports of institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The experience of state and municipal management was fixed in official documents: the Constitution of the Russian Federation, current legislation, orders of the President of the country, decrees of the Government of the Russian Federation, programs of various parties and trade unions, materials of Russian legislative bodies, speeches of officials, experts, etc. 3. Results of Research 3.1. Basic Notions and Principal Categories of General Theory of Management Having studied a lot of sources, the authors of this work have not managed to find in scientific literature the definition of the notion hands-on management as one of the methods of state regulation of political and social and economic processes that take place in the contemporary Russian community accurately formulated and, what is the main, accepted by the majority of the scientific community. Without interfering scientific and theoretical disputes of researchers who deeply study this problematics, we will let ourselves remind the readers about the most general definition of the notion "management". In the future it will allow us to transfer to the analysis of the hands-on management practice considering it as an individual method of the management influence. …