Managerial practices, ethnic entrepreneurship and the labour market of Central Asia migrants in the Russian construction sector

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse those management practices in Russia’s contemporary construction sector regulating the profession and the process of its reproduction. The Russian professional environment in the construction sector is evolving under the pressure of two tendencies. The first is the transformation of the Soviet management practices that had, at their core, Taylorist principles of labour management, which was seen the most effective instrument for the construction sector. In contemporary situation, the construction sector relies on the influx of foreign workers and the outsourcing of innovative or managerial tasks. The preservation and reproduction of Soviet management practices embedded in the construction sector are attracting large-scale labour migration (mainly from CIS countries) to Russian construction sites. Moreover, these management practices mainly favour the use of informal migrant labour activity to replace the resources of cheap or unpaid and unskilled labour. The second is referred to as management rent. In the socio-cultural context of management practices throughout Russian history, it can be observed that in most cases management duties have been given to others, mainly externally invited, and these were more progressive foreign specialists. Thus, the Russian construction sector created an original management rent, whereby high turnover is a result not only of the capital, land and property, but also professional activity, i.e. performing management functions generates rent. Foreign construction workers today are managed more by ethnic entrepreneurs than by the modern principles of human resource management. Ethnic entrepreneurs have been partially replacing personnel management functions in the construction sector. As this paper will show, however, innovation by managers is structurally inhibited by the existence of an inexhaustible labour force in the construction sector.