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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ALEKSANDRA JANOVSKAIA<br />
the present day. This commitment is associated<br />
with what I call a ‘productionist stance’ of<br />
local actors. It is embedded in their desire to<br />
preserve employment numbers and develop<br />
local industrial capabilities, even if it sometimes<br />
goes contrary to the pure logic of cost efficiency<br />
and financial competitiveness.<br />
In the four VW subsidiaries that served as a<br />
case study for this paper – the Czech Skoda,<br />
Slovak VW Bratislava or VW Slovakia, Polish<br />
VW Poznan and Hungarian Audi Györ - an<br />
important industrial upgrading took place<br />
during the late 1990s and early 2000s in<br />
production volumes but, most importantly, in<br />
production depth, product range and strategic<br />
positioning within the VW Group. It also<br />
related this industrial upgrading to a dramatic<br />
increase in employment volumes in all four<br />
subsidiaries. To a certain extent, this industrial<br />
upgrading and employment increase have been<br />
part of the overall group’s strategy, which largely<br />
depended on decisions about transnational<br />
distribution of production volumes and<br />
technology investments mainly made in the<br />
VW Group headquarters. Yet I was able to<br />
identify an important role of local stakeholders<br />
in this process. The valuation of the industrial<br />
capabilities has been an important factor for<br />
industrial upgrading and employment growth.<br />
Despite the new ‘market’ organising logic<br />
of greater efficiency and increased market<br />
competition, local management has preserved<br />
a clear ‘productionist’ attitude in its desire to<br />
attract more investment to the production<br />
location, ensure production over time and<br />
upgrade. This ‘productionist’ norm is rooted in<br />
the experience of state socialism. Its overarching<br />
goal has been to develop local capabilities and<br />
make companies a full-fledged partner within<br />
the VW group. Both local unions and local<br />
management have shared this productionist<br />
attitude. Local managers were looking for<br />
German know-how to modernise their plant,<br />
but they still perceived it as their main task<br />
to ‘develop’ the company. Thus, whenever the<br />
opportunity emerged, local managers, together<br />
with unions, showed through their actions that<br />
high employment and industrial upgrading<br />
remained their highest priority, while market<br />
efficiency rationale remained a secondary<br />
factor.<br />
The rest of this paper develops this<br />
argument further. Several dimensions of<br />
this productionist attitude are brought out.<br />
First, stakeholder attitudes and strategies of<br />
preserving the industrial capabilities at the<br />
time of privatisation are discussed. The role<br />
of local coalitions between government and<br />
unions as guarantors for brand survival for the<br />
case of Škoda is discussed. Second, Section<br />
II disentangles the productionist logic that<br />
underpinned the actions of the stakeholders,<br />
while Section III elaborates the formal<br />
agreements between management and union<br />
representatives that followed this implicit<br />
coalition. The last section underlines the role<br />
of the external dimension – the role of public<br />
opinion – in strengthening and reinforcing<br />
the local ‘productionist’ commitment to firm<br />
industrial capabilities.<br />
This paper argues that the organis-<br />
page 81<br />
ing logic of economic liberalism of<br />
increased cost-efficiency and financial<br />
performance standards affected the firms<br />
when the institutions of ownership and control<br />
changed. Yet the local norms that set up the