Transition in East Germany : a British view

The article reviews the process whereby two British academics (with prior knowledge and experience of both the FRG and GDR) developed in 1990 a research project to investigate how an East German company made the transition from communism to privatisation. The project soon developed from a longitudinal study of one company to encompass a range of companies differentiated by location, industry, privatisation stage and mode, and owner origins. The analysis of the interview data permitted the identification of patterns and commonalties of the emergence of corporate strategy. The authors portray the main characteristics of different phases of that process and indicate that not every company had progressed through all phases of the process.