This book, first published in 1984, is the first systematic attempt in English to produce an analytical as well as a descriptive outline of the operations, management and role of the Soviet industrial enterprise. The microeconomics of central planning is a relatively neglected area of analysis with most effort being directed towards the theory of economic incentives. This book fills that gap by presenting an integrated view of the theory of the socialist firm. It concentrates on the day-to-day activities of the Soviet enterprise, and uses a wealth of unused Soviet data to project its findings.

Study of management activities at the enterprise level in USSR industries. The problem for managers is to combine central economic planning of the collective economy and local level decision making. Wage incentives and profits. Management attitudes during planning process. Personnel management, an occupational sociology problem. Significant comparisons with management activities in the USA.

Monograph on industrial management in the USSR - covers industrial administration, the managerial role in industrial enterprises, management techniques and innovations, industrial planning and plan implementation, etc. References.

"Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." —The Times (London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.