DOI: 10.18848/2327-8013/cgp/a181 ISSN: 2327-932X

Socialist Imprint Decay

Elitsa Banalieva, Alexandra V. Roth
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<p>The authors draw from insights in the neo-institutional and evolutionary economics literatures to develop a Theory of Speed of Socialist Imprinting Decay that extends existing theory in three new directions. First, extant theory has exclusively focused on the beginning and reinforcement of socialist imprinting at the time of a firm’s founding during socialism (<em>traditionalizing forces</em>). Instead, we focus on the understudied <em>end and decay</em> of socialist imprinting after the start of pro-market reforms. Second, we study the <em>speed </em>with which a firm’s socialist imprinting decays after the start of the country’s pro-market reforms. Third, we suggest that countries’ speed of pro-market reforms acts as <em>modernizing forces</em> and firms’ duration of socialist legacy acts as traditionalizing forces that jointly affect firms’ speed of socialist imprinting decay, yielding four types of transitioning-to-market firms: <em>Market Sprinters, Market Preemptors, Market Saunterers, </em>and <em>Socialist Anchors. </em>We draw on existing case studies of socialist-imprinted firms to illustrate our framework.</p>

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