Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

POLISH BUSINESS REFERENCES LITERATUR – POLITICS RELATIONS
In terms of social status, a paradoxical
situation emerged, where private owners
constituted a privileged group in terms of
income, but operated at the margins of the
official socio-economic life and enjoyed little
social prestige. Growing consent of authorities
to private economic activities resulted only
from the basic needs of the society that
could not be satisfied in the framework of
the normative socialist order. In terms of
assumptions underlying the communist
system, private ownership was perceived as a
systemic deviation. But it led to the emergence
of new pathological phenomena, taking the
form of informal adaptation mechanisms.
The latter involved practices of ‘arranging
things’, abuse of public resources for private
gain, creation of interdependent networks of
the management of state-owned companies,
administration and party officials based on
bribery, as well as trading of permissions and
licenses (Balcerowicz, 1997). These networks
have survived the transformation process,
particularly in the heavy industry sector,
blocking restructuring efforts and privatization
as well as petrifying clientelistic ties between
political and economic elites.
The socialist system led to an emergence of
specific forms of interest representation, fully
dysfunctional from the point of view of market
economy and democratic governance. As the
expression of particularistic interests
was excluded for ideological reasons
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and administration enjoyed utterly
arbitrary power over the economy,
influence could only be exerted
through secret and corruptive means. In the
absence of channels of dialogue between the
state and society, corruption became the sole
facilitator of communication with authorities
(Lissowska, 2008).
Economically speaking, transformation from
socialist to market economy consisted of
macroeconomic stabilization, microeconomic
liberalization and institutional change. Due to
serious economic crisis in Poland, emphasis was
placed on the former two while institutional
change was neglected. As a consequence,
market mechanisms were introduced, while
no efficient governance institutions (economic,
judicial, and political) were in place to support,
control and correct those mechanisms in the
first period. This is one of the main elements of
the specificity of hybrid Polish economy, which
is well reflected in the field of privatization and
corporate governance in the privatized and
state-owned companies (Kozarzewski, 2006,
pp. 73-74).
As a consequence, the ‘semi-periphery’ or ‘semicore’
capitalist systems of CEEC have a number
of features that distinguish them from the
developed market economies of Western EU
member states. These features are embedded
in the initial transition paths from socialism
to capitalism 4 . The relative domination of one
of the paths in each particular state determines
the degree of success in transformation to
market economy. Capitalism from above leads
to patron-client relationships, notably typical
for Ukraine and Russia. On the other hand,
capitalism from without, with its substantial
reliance on foreign investors, leads to a more
liberal, but also more externally dependent
market economy (King, Szelenyi, 2005; King,
2007). Foreign direct investments also play an
important role in technology transfer, gradually
modernizing outdated technological structures,