Consent in autoritären Gesellschaften

This book investigates the mechanisms employed in authoritarian countries to generate consent at the workplace level, using the examples of automobile plants in China and Russia.
It focuses on three main mechanisms used to create consent: socialisation mechanisms responsible for the learning and internalisation of conduct rules by employees, incentive systems, and mechanisms of control and involvement. It shows how the factory regimes in the Chinese plants contribute to the development of high work discipline and a ‘community feeling’ at the workplace, while the Russian factories suffer from tensions and conflicts which undermine consent. The development of such different factory regimes can be traced back to different forms of labour regulation, culture, and organisational legacies in China and Russia. This micro level analysis of factory regimes contributes to the discussion about the conditions for stability in authoritarian societies.