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Globalization and the Politics of Office Communication in Urban Russia

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Globalization and the Politics of Office Communication in Urban Russia COMMUNICATING CHANGE IN A TRANSFORMING STATE: GLOBALIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF OFFICE COMMUNICATION IN URBAN RUSSIA by Susanne M. Cohen A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy (Anthropology) in the University of Michigan 2010 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Alaina M. Lemon, Chair Professor Judith T. Irvine Associate Professor Douglas T. Northrop Assistant Professor Krisztina E. Fehervary © Susanne M. Cohen 2010 Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking all those who shared their time, experiences, and everyday lives with me in St. Petersburg. While many of these people unfortunately need to go unnamed, I am deeply indebted to the management of Razorsharp, the Neptune Group, Fokus, and PFZ for graciously allowing me access to their communities and helping with much else as well. I also thank the many psychologists, trainers, and training center staff members in St. Petersburg and Moscow who took time out of busy schedules to teach me about the trainings of the present and the past and generously allowed me to participate in and observe their training groups. Special thanks go to my dissertation chair, Alaina Lemon, whose careful readings and nuanced insights have been invaluable in developing and carrying out this project. I would also like to express my great appreciation to my committee members Judy Irvine, Kristztina Fehervary, and Douglas Northrop for their always attentive analyses and thoughtful guidance. I am also grateful to Sonja Luhrmann, Jessica Smith, Karen Smid, Jonathan Larson, John Thiels, and Francis Cody for their comments on preliminary versions of these chapters. I have learned much from presenting this work in various contexts. I would particularly like to thank participants at the annual Soyuz conferences on postsocialist studies, as well as participants in the University of Toronto Workshop on Language and Neoliberalism, for their stimulating and helpful comments. ii I benefitted greatly from discussions with faculty and students at the European University of St. Petersburg. Thanks especially to Elena Zdravomyslova and Ol‘ga Shek, as well as to Ol‘ga Chepur‘naia and Nastia Zolotova, who both provided valuable assistance with transcription. St. Petersburg would not have been the same without conversations with Katia Stepanova, who not only taught me much about the Russian language but also helped to illuminate many other aspects of contemporary Russian life. Thanks too to Lena Rogashkova in Moscow, who helped to make my visit to the city immensely more productive and pleasant. Funding for this research was provided by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, and the University of Michigan‘s Center for Research on Women and Gender. Preliminary research was also supported by the International Institute and Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Language training grants were provided by the FLAS programs administered by the University of Michigan‘s Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies and the University of Pittsburg, the American Councils for International Education, and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Finally, I would like to thank Alex and Jonah. Alex has lived with this project as long as I have and has been an untiring interlocutor and source of support. Jonah is younger than the dissertation, but has greatly enriched the last year plus of writing it with his laughs and cries. I dedicate this dissertation to both of them. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii List of Figures ......................................................................................................................v Chapter 1: Introduction: Transitioning Communication Skills and the Russian Economy............1 PART I: GLOBAL EMPOWERMENT Chapter 2: Global Trajectories of Caring Communication............................................................60 Chapter 3: Communicating Agency between East and West ......................................................114 PART II: PARTNERSHIP OBSHCHENIE AND THE SOVIET STATE Chapter 4: Training for Socialist Democracy ..............................................................................176 PART III: MORALITIES OF MARKET INTERACTION Chapter 5: Mannered Markets: Cultivating Secretarial Imidzh ...................................................239 Chapter 6: Images, Connections, and Contracts in the Global Economy....................................300 Chapter 7: Conclusion: Global Dreams .......................................................................................361 Appendix ..........................................................................................................................372 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................375 iv List of Figures Figure 2.1: Razorsharp Competencies, Professional Staff ................................................92 Figure 3.1: Excerpt from Razorsharp Agenda .................................................................135 v 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Transitioning Communication Skills and the Russian Economy This dissertation describes how business leaders and educators have attempted to transform Russian office communication skills after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By examining the discourses, practices, and consequences of projects aiming to transform office communication, it examines the production of ―communication‖ in Post-Soviet Russia as a site of transnational ideological struggle. The dissertation argues that the ability to communicate at the office is not a neutral ―skill‖ that can be objectively trained and assessed, but instead represents an arena of intense ideological work shaped as much by transnational processes as by historically and culturally situated practice. Struggles over appropriate styles of communication in Russian offices, it suggests, are also moral debates about the ongoing transformations in Russian society and what it means to be a Post-Soviet office worker, and a Russian more generally, in a sometimes ―wild‖ market economy embroiled in a larger capitalist system of global economic connections. As such, this dissertation examines debates over communication in the St. Petersburg private sector as an entry point into questions of language and globalization. It critically examines prominent conceptions of all-encompassing neoliberal globalization and asks what else comes into view when global interactions are approached via the lens of language and the ideologies that shape it. How, it asks, do ideas about communication crafted in American business schools travel to Russia, and what happens to them once 2 they get there? How do these ideologies articulate with more historically sedimented ideologies and practices? And how are these processes shaped both by the political- economic transformations associated with neoliberal globalization and the fall of the Soviet Union and by people‘s sense of their own shifting positioning in global and local economic structures? One prominent paradigm that has been proposed for studying globalization involves following the thing (Appadurai 1986; Marcus 1995). This dissertation takes the route of following the ideology. 1 In particular, my analysis highlights the impact of transnationally circulating liberal ideologies of egalitarian communication that are prominent in contemporary American managerial approaches that stress employee empowerment and new, less hierarchical models of workplace organization. These ideologies, which have been heralded as signs of the ―new economy‖ or ―the new work order,‖ involve utopian visions of interpersonal communication in which one self interacts on an equal playing field with another self. In the dissertation I examine how these were mobilized, contested, and hybridized with other ideas about proper communication based upon status and gender in different work and training contexts throughout St. Petersburg in the time span ranging from the late socialist period through the Putin era. Ultimately, I aim to counter totalizing accounts of neoliberal globalization by exploring how the impact of these liberal ideologies of egalitarian communication varied widely among institutional sites within a single city. This dissertation is based on 20 months of fieldwork in St. Petersburg conducted over the course of 2003-2007. The research was multi-sited and conducted in both work settings and educational institutions. My field sites encompassed three private businesses 1 This is most akin to the approach that Marcus (1995:108) describes us ―follow the metaphor,‖ a.k.a. ―trying to trace the social correlates and groundings of associations that are most clearly alive in language use and print or visual media.‖ 3 established in the country in the post-Soviet era—a factory that was a subsidiary of an American consumer goods multinational, a Russian-owned insurance conglomerate founded with Scandinavian capital, and, to a lesser degree, a Russian-owned supplier of pipe parts2—as well as several Russian-owned private educational institutions for office professionals, including managerial training centers and a secretarial school. My research also encompassed analysis of late-socialist-era training texts and oral history interviews with Soviet
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