Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Necessity or Luxury? Welfare Work in the Company Towns of the Russian Empire

Necessity or Luxury? Welfare Work in the Company Towns of the Russian Empire AbstractBased on research into company towns in late imperial Russia, the author investigates the reasons why businesses financed welfare work. It is argued that companies targeted different social layers in their towns with various programmes offered as fringe benefits to retain their competitive edge for skilled employees on the labour market. Corporate money was also spent on luxuries such as theatres, social clubs, and similar provisions. All these were designed to attract managers and other salaried professionals whose economic and social weight increased dramatically after the managerial revolution in the late nineteenth century. However, the so-called “principal-agent problem” meant that some salaried managers spent corporate money for their own benefit, effectively turning welfare work into their own privilege. To prevent the misuse of welfare work, business owners had to control and incentivize their salaried managers (agents) to act in accordance with the company stockholders’ (the principals) best interests. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook de Gruyter

Necessity or Luxury? Welfare Work in the Company Towns of the Russian Empire

Download PDF
24 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/necessity-or-luxury-welfare-work-in-the-company-towns-of-the-russian-6D0vIxu64H

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2196-6842
eISSN
2196-6842
DOI
10.1515/jbwg-2019-0017
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractBased on research into company towns in late imperial Russia, the author investigates the reasons why businesses financed welfare work. It is argued that companies targeted different social layers in their towns with various programmes offered as fringe benefits to retain their competitive edge for skilled employees on the labour market. Corporate money was also spent on luxuries such as theatres, social clubs, and similar provisions. All these were designed to attract managers and other salaried professionals whose economic and social weight increased dramatically after the managerial revolution in the late nineteenth century. However, the so-called “principal-agent problem” meant that some salaried managers spent corporate money for their own benefit, effectively turning welfare work into their own privilege. To prevent the misuse of welfare work, business owners had to control and incentivize their salaried managers (agents) to act in accordance with the company stockholders’ (the principals) best interests.

Journal

Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook – de Gruyter

Published: Nov 26, 2019

Keywords: welfare work; corporate social responsibility; welfare capitalism; company towns; Iuzovka; Kamenskoe; Donbas; Russian Empire; soziale Fürsorge; soziale Verantwortung der Unternehmen; Wohlfahrtskapitalismus; Arbeitersiedlung; Juzovka; Kamenskoje; Zarenreich; N 33

There are no references for this article.