Stakhanovism

Related to Stakhanovism: Stakhanovite, Stakhanovite movement

Stakhanovism

(stäkä`nəvĭzm, stə–), movement begun (1935) in the Soviet Union aimed at increasing industrial production by the use of efficient working techniques. It was named for Aleksey Grigorevich Stakhanov, a coal miner in the Donets Basin, whose team increased its daily output sevenfold by organizing a more efficient division of labor. The Soviet government, eager to ensure the success of the Five-Year Plan, encouraged the Stakhanov movement by offering higher pay and other privileges. In many cases the emphasis on speed resulted in poor quality. Stakhanovism was widely criticized outside the Soviet Union as another form of the speed-up system and was fought by labor unions in other countries. After World War II the Stakhanov movement gradually lapsed.

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Heroism

References in periodicals archive ?

317 in a state that made it unsuitable to run, managed with his assitant Polezhaev to repair the locomotive and took second place in a competition between locomotive engineers in the Soviet Union [so-called socialist emulation or socialist competition, a sort of forerunner to Stakhanovism, already became popular in the First Five Year Plan of 1928-32, trans.

The Stakhanov movement and the fight against sabotage on the soviet far eastern railway in the 1930s

For more on opposition to Stakhanovite instructors, see Randall, "'Revolutionary Bolshevik Work': Stakhanovism in Retail Trade," 437.

Legitimizing Soviet trade: gender and the feminization of the retail workforce in the Soviet 1930s

With the rest of us working longer and longer hours just to make ends meet, we can only wonder at this elite Stakhanovism.

Lo, the Poor WASP

Stakhanovism is another ironic case in point: industrial workers became robots basically, and the official propaganda advertised their machinic dehumanization as a model to be followed by the rest of society.

Jenseits der Arbeit. Der vergessene sozialistische Traum von Marx, Fromm, und Marcuse

As early as 1927, all experiments in alternative work organization were abandoned in the Soviet Union as policymakers embraced Fordism and Taylorism, even if the latter were supplemented by Stakhanovism, in which shock workers were encouraged to achieve enormous increases in output by emulating the standards set by the "labor hero" Stakhanov (Littler, 1984).

Recognizing the possible: the organization and control of a socialist labor process

In particular, an entrepreneurial Stakhanovism may be promoted, as well as state entrepreneurship (which is not necessarily influenced by profit rate but only requires the consideration of relative profit rates of firms to evaluate the convenience to finance them).

Paths of economic development: modelling factors of endogenous growth

There were those who labelled the employee-of-the-month scheme as a kind of new Stakhanovism (a Russian miner who was displayed as a role model, the 'hero of the socialist work' - see McGregor 1946) or who resented the forced company identity.

A contextual approach to management learning: the Hungarian case

The reward of this delicate Stakhanovism is a nonpareil tour de force of photographic color: pearlescent, plush, at once ultravivid - lurid almost - and superbly specific and subtle, capable of registering exotic minor hues, the textures and patterns of fabrics and furnishings, and all the rosy suffusions, mottlings, shiny creams, and blue-veined translucent grays of a strong-lit nude.

Paul Outerbridge, Jr

Dr MacShane tells of how an Iron and Steel Trades Confederation delegation that visited the Soviet Union in 1945 later irritated its hosts by reporting its concerns over the ban on strikes, Stakhanovism, and the identification of unions with management.

International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War

Seidman's discussion of Stakhanovism would certainly be improved by Siegelbaum's 1988 study.

Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts

Culturally, Castro pleaded for Stakhanovism at work and integration in culture as the most noble forms of collective conduct.

Castro, the Blacks, and Africa

Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Chris Ward, Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy: Shop-Floor Culture and State Policy, 1921-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Lewis H.