My initial interest in Poland was stimulated by the events that took place on the Baltic Coast during December 1970. At that time the fruits of several research projects on East European politics were just coming into print. As the discipline of Comparative Communist Politics was of relatively recent origin and begged for empirical investigations, these studies helped to fill the gap and draw attention to the very different identities of East European states and the contrasts between them and the USSR.

It was my own concern for that twilight area between political and economic science that led to the subject of a Ph.D. thesis on which this book was initially based. I felt that the analysis of the process of economic reform in state-socialist societies is never satisfactorily treated by either discipline alone. On the one hand the economist, while able to elicit the goals of economic policy and their achievement, makes a trite distinction between economic policy and reform and dismisses as exogenous to his analysis the recruitment of management and workforce and the articulation of their interests through a Marxist–Leninist party. On the other hand, the political scientist, while mindful of the interaction between industrial management, the working class and the Party, tends to reduce economic policy and reform to the simplistic dimensions of centralisation versus decentralisation, plan versus market and production versus consumption.