Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
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POLISH BUSINESS REFERENCES LITERATUR – POLITICS RELATIONS<br />
In terms of social status, a paradoxical<br />
situation emerged, where private owners<br />
constituted a privileged group in terms of<br />
income, but operated at the margins of the<br />
official socio-economic life and enjoyed little<br />
social prestige. Growing consent of authorities<br />
to private economic activities resulted only<br />
from the basic needs of the society that<br />
could not be satisfied in the framework of<br />
the normative socialist order. In terms of<br />
assumptions underlying the communist<br />
system, private ownership was perceived as a<br />
systemic deviation. But it led to the emergence<br />
of new pathological phenomena, taking the<br />
form of informal adaptation mechanisms.<br />
The latter involved practices of ‘arranging<br />
things’, abuse of public resources for private<br />
gain, creation of interdependent networks of<br />
the management of state-owned companies,<br />
administration and party officials based on<br />
bribery, as well as trading of permissions and<br />
licenses (Balcerowicz, 1997). These networks<br />
have survived the transformation process,<br />
particularly in the heavy industry sector,<br />
blocking restructuring efforts and privatization<br />
as well as petrifying clientelistic ties between<br />
political and economic elites.<br />
The socialist system led to an emergence of<br />
specific forms of interest representation, fully<br />
dysfunctional from the point of view of market<br />
economy and democratic governance. As the<br />
expression of particularistic interests<br />
was excluded for ideological reasons<br />
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and administration enjoyed utterly<br />
arbitrary power over the economy,<br />
influence could only be exerted<br />
through secret and corruptive means. In the<br />
absence of channels of dialogue between the<br />
state and society, corruption became the sole<br />
facilitator of communication with authorities<br />
(Lissowska, 2008).<br />
Economically speaking, transformation from<br />
socialist to market economy consisted of<br />
macroeconomic stabilization, microeconomic<br />
liberalization and institutional change. Due to<br />
serious economic crisis in Poland, emphasis was<br />
placed on the former two while institutional<br />
change was neglected. As a consequence,<br />
market mechanisms were introduced, while<br />
no efficient governance institutions (economic,<br />
judicial, and political) were in place to support,<br />
control and correct those mechanisms in the<br />
first period. This is one of the main elements of<br />
the specificity of hybrid Polish economy, which<br />
is well reflected in the field of privatization and<br />
corporate governance in the privatized and<br />
state-owned companies (Kozarzewski, 2006,<br />
pp. 73-74).<br />
As a consequence, the ‘semi-periphery’ or ‘semicore’<br />
capitalist systems of CEEC have a number<br />
of features that distinguish them from the<br />
developed market economies of Western EU<br />
member states. These features are embedded<br />
in the initial transition paths from socialism<br />
to capitalism 4 . The relative domination of one<br />
of the paths in each particular state determines<br />
the degree of success in transformation to<br />
market economy. Capitalism from above leads<br />
to patron-client relationships, notably typical<br />
for Ukraine and Russia. On the other hand,<br />
capitalism from without, with its substantial<br />
reliance on foreign investors, leads to a more<br />
liberal, but also more externally dependent<br />
market economy (King, Szelenyi, 2005; King,<br />
2007). Foreign direct investments also play an<br />
important role in technology transfer, gradually<br />
modernizing outdated technological structures,