Dissertation_Paula Aleksandrowicz_12 ... - Jacobs University

of home country nationals in managerial positions (Edwards 2004: 395). The dominance
might be higher in countries like Poland in which the new HRM models are at inception
phase.
The institutional legacies from the socialist past have both positive and negative aspects.
The negative aspect is the sometimes still practised nepotism in hiring decisions, low
sensitivity to discrimination, short planning horizon in terms of personnel policy and
deficiencies in the realm of occupational safety. Positive is the large involvement of firms
in issues of workplace health promotion. Comprehensive health checks have been retained
from that period. However, in the process of rationalisation firms outsourced own health
centres, own departments of labour medicine and cut the financing of extramural college
education of their workers.
The conclusions reached by Naschold et al. (1994b: 142) with regard to the personnel
policy of German companies at the beginning of the 1990s (no attempts to initiate a policy
aimed at integrating older workers), which I had refuted in the German chapter (section
4.2.10.) still applies to Poland at the moment being. There are no Polish firms in my sample
which pursue age management strategies, even in the case when their foreign owner is
active in this field in the country of origin. Moreover, Polish firms to a large extent still rely
on the “productivity logic” – firm actors are guided by assumptions about the lower
productivity of older workers as carried by the deficit thesis of old age, and neo-classical
arguments play a larger role in assessing their usability for the firm (see section 4.3.2.). In
Germany, both the analysis of Naschold et al. (1994b: 148-9) and my case studies have
established that German firms are rather orientated towards stabilising the current age
structure of the workforce rather than raising productivity by means of rejuvenation.
On the basis of evidence from previous sub-sections, the 17 Polish firms in my sample
can be arranged into types along the two dimensions ´muddling through´ vs. ´HRM
strategy´ and ´externalisation´ vs. ´internalisation´ (Table 23; see Annex C for
explanations).
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