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

ALEKSANDRA JANOVSKAIA
the present day. This commitment is associated
with what I call a ‘productionist stance’ of
local actors. It is embedded in their desire to
preserve employment numbers and develop
local industrial capabilities, even if it sometimes
goes contrary to the pure logic of cost efficiency
and financial competitiveness.
In the four VW subsidiaries that served as a
case study for this paper – the Czech Skoda,
Slovak VW Bratislava or VW Slovakia, Polish
VW Poznan and Hungarian Audi Györ - an
important industrial upgrading took place
during the late 1990s and early 2000s in
production volumes but, most importantly, in
production depth, product range and strategic
positioning within the VW Group. It also
related this industrial upgrading to a dramatic
increase in employment volumes in all four
subsidiaries. To a certain extent, this industrial
upgrading and employment increase have been
part of the overall group’s strategy, which largely
depended on decisions about transnational
distribution of production volumes and
technology investments mainly made in the
VW Group headquarters. Yet I was able to
identify an important role of local stakeholders
in this process. The valuation of the industrial
capabilities has been an important factor for
industrial upgrading and employment growth.
Despite the new ‘market’ organising logic
of greater efficiency and increased market
competition, local management has preserved
a clear ‘productionist’ attitude in its desire to
attract more investment to the production
location, ensure production over time and
upgrade. This ‘productionist’ norm is rooted in
the experience of state socialism. Its overarching
goal has been to develop local capabilities and
make companies a full-fledged partner within
the VW group. Both local unions and local
management have shared this productionist
attitude. Local managers were looking for
German know-how to modernise their plant,
but they still perceived it as their main task
to ‘develop’ the company. Thus, whenever the
opportunity emerged, local managers, together
with unions, showed through their actions that
high employment and industrial upgrading
remained their highest priority, while market
efficiency rationale remained a secondary
factor.
The rest of this paper develops this
argument further. Several dimensions of
this productionist attitude are brought out.
First, stakeholder attitudes and strategies of
preserving the industrial capabilities at the
time of privatisation are discussed. The role
of local coalitions between government and
unions as guarantors for brand survival for the
case of Škoda is discussed. Second, Section
II disentangles the productionist logic that
underpinned the actions of the stakeholders,
while Section III elaborates the formal
agreements between management and union
representatives that followed this implicit
coalition. The last section underlines the role
of the external dimension – the role of public
opinion – in strengthening and reinforcing
the local ‘productionist’ commitment to firm
industrial capabilities.
This paper argues that the organis-
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ing logic of economic liberalism of
increased cost-efficiency and financial
performance standards affected the firms
when the institutions of ownership and control
changed. Yet the local norms that set up the