By the mid 1990s, Western as well as Eastern social scientists, businessmen and policy makers seemed to agree that one could not bring capitalism to Eastern Europe without bringing also "capitalist values." Elizabeth Dunn's book is a detailed and competent analysis of the engineering of souls and human relations entailed by the need for new values that accompanied the transformation of a Polish state enterprise, Alima, into a joint Polish-American private business, Alima-Gerber.
The book recalls the socialist and the Fordist organization of work, the context of disordered and contested privatization and work restructuring in the 1990s in Poland, and the new "flexible management" techniques of the post Fordist era. E. Dunn analyses the change in labor discipline not only as a key factor in changing the economy, but also as a key factor in changing notions of personhood, gender, kin relations and "home." The author spent sixteen months spanning 1995-97 working aside Alima- Gerber employees in the plant, during the years of transformation from a socialist to a capitalist enterprise. She makes a strong case for her own position in the field: "Not until I spent time working both in the factory and in my friendsā homes did I truly understand why the workforce was so passive. They were exhausted, and so was I" (p. 25).
This sincere and realistic statement of her own relations to work and to Polish workers reveals her third underlying concern with power as it relates to the transformation of the company. Indeed the book shows how labor relations, notions of personhood and human relations on the shop floor are negotiated by Alima workers, who arrive at the encounter with the American Gerber company with their own (socialist or Christian) values. This power axis, with its emphasis on the dynamics of empowerment and disempowerment, is finally the strongest argument in Elizabeth Dunn's writing, as it underlines her whole analysis of data. Because of its strength, it could also expose the book to criticism, as one might sense a Marxist reading of available data, which is especially problematic in the study of postsocialist societies. However it would be unfair to reduce the complexity of Dunn's study to this.
The first two chapters explain the state socialist system of production and redistribution, as well as the need for and the difficulties of privatization: the lack of auditability of socialist assets, the accusations of corruption during the privatization process, the negative popular opinions regarding the lack of moral accountability of the privatizing state agent. While the busy social scientist could be tempted to skip over these chapters, a student would find here an invaluable clear and concise description of these postsocialist macro processes and of their impact on the daily life of workers, only alluded to in most research articles.
The following two chapters focus on the way in which the new organization of labor and structure of production, through the practices of audit, niche marketing, quality control and standardization of products, work processes and consumers, create new persons out of Alima's employees and of Alima's clients. The doctrine of "flexibility" promoted by Gerber in the post Fordist era of "self-management" is shown to "also have a starkly disciplinary, and often discriminatory side" (p. 7), though acting in a subtler way than socialist ideology did. This is illustrated by the differentiated treatment of shop floor workers as opposed to salesmen, or of older "socialist" generations of consumers as opposed to young "creative" generations of consumers. The first in each pair of categories are promoted as capable of change, self-management and creative work; the second are deemed to remain behind as "proste" (simple people). The transformation of bodies and persons is resisted especially by those falling into the last categories, who assert their "flexibility" by challenging the deskilling brought by standardized quality controls, or resist discipline by continuing to rely on networks of znajomosci (acquaintances, connections) as during the socialist period. Power relations under capitalism are made visible by Elizabeth Dunn's description of the encounter between Polish shop floor workers and the technologies of management.
The last chapter tackles the reconstruction of ideas of kin, gender and home, by drawing symbolic parallels and transfers between the way these notions are understood on the shop floor and outside it. Thus for instance the establishment of the joint Alima-Gerber business was celebrated by Poles as a "wedding" and carried the same expectations that a Polish "bride" has from her husband: care and protection. And, women workers' production of baby food was compared to the "natural" female duty to feed her children.
To conclude, Elizabeth Dunn underlines the idea of inequality of power in the West/East encounter and of the resulting destruction of socialist valuable assets, which corresponded just to different (and not necessarily "bad socialist") ideas of personhood, social relations and work organization. By rescuing these ideas, as Polish workers do when trying to negotiate them through practice, one could envisage an alternative to the current ideology of capitalism -- so the author suggests (p.174).