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After the rapid and dramatic demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, 15 newly autonomous republics are restructuring their economies after decades of central Communist planning. The three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia had successful market‐oriented economies during more than two decades of independence between World Wars I and II and were comparatively strong performers within the USSR after being occupied in 1940. A case study of Latvia looks at the historic factors and political issues which are shaping the current reform process. A contrast of state‐run, collective and private enterprises is used to illustrate the rapid changes which now place Latvia at the forefront among post‐Soviet reformers. This analysis of the early progress and problems forms a foundation for considering the reform prospects across the former Soviet Union and leads to a suggestion that the results in Latvia will play a bell‐wether role.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the perspectives of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Belt and Road strategy. The challenge in terms of studying the New Silk Road concept comes from the fact of dramatic difference between the declared ambitions of the Chinese state and the elusive character of concrete Chinese involvement, in particular as far as the digital dimension of the strategy is concerned.

The goal will be achieved by comparing the Chinese expansion in the Post-Soviet Central Asia with nowadays declarations concerning the digital version of the New Silk Road. For China, the Post-Soviet Central Asia was the first frontier approached on the basis of genuinely own integration strategy: the New Silk Road Diplomacy, which later evolved into the New Silk Road concept. An overview of Chinese activity in the region tells a lot about its grand strategy of today.

To paraphrase T.S. Kuhn, what one sees depends on not only what one is looking at but also what one has learned to notice. The Post-Soviet Central Asia shows the way Beijing thinks about integration. PRC achieved the most by basing on the free rider effect: concentrating on economic expansion, while other Powers provided relative regional security and stability.

The comparison of the beginnings of the New Silk Diplomacy in the 1990s with the plans of the New Digital Road gives a unique angle to grasp the specific features of the Chinese approach to international integration.

As western businesses and governments participate in the overhaul of the former Soviet Union, the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania can play a potentially important role in bridging economic and cultural differences. An analogy is drawn to Hong Kong, which has achieved remarkable success by leveraging a favourable location, good infrastructure and industrious human resources to forge a mutually beneficial relationship with its huge neighbour (and future sovereign), the People′s Republic of China. The Asian territory is proposed as a role model for the future development of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As market‐oriented democracies, the three small Baltic republics will provide a gateway into Russia and serve as bell‐wethers for larger scale transformation across the former Soviet Union.

Since the collapse of the USSR, former Soviet republics have embarked on public service modernization, in most instances drawing on internationally dominant new public management (NPM) principles. Are post-Soviet republics ready for these administrative prescriptions? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper discusses Kazakhstan’s experience with the implementation of NPM through a qualitative case study of the country’s adoption of the European Bologna higher education reforms.

While implementation of the NPM-inspired Bologna program has produced significant achievements, there are also gaps and shortcomings. These are due to a remnant Soviet administrative practices including strong control by educational ministries, as well as incompatible organizational cultures and a tendency toward superficial formalism in the implementation process.

NPM tends to be introduced in a top-down fashion as a taken-for-granted component of state transformation, without sufficient attention to the capacities, cultures and systems required for effective and accountable performance-driven administrative reform.

Kazakhstan’s experience provides crucial insights into the governance structures, professional cultures and managerial capacities required for successful implementation of NPM in post-Soviet states.

The aim of the study is to determine the key development stages of small entrepreneurship in Belarus depending on the impact of reformative activity of authorities on socio-innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Also we seek to determine the projective behavioral strategies of entrepreneurs in the context of contradictory socio-economic processes in Belarus.

Historico-sociological approach to the development of small entrepreneurship in Belarus is based on the analysis of books, articles, official documents and official statistics available mostly in the Russian and Belarusian languages. Expert survey is used as the most effective method of survey to predict further development of small entrepreneurship. Within the framework of the activity-structure concept, (T. Zaslavskaya) combination of both approaches allows presenting quantitative and qualitative changes in business structures in order to coordinate socio-economic progress.

In Belarusian transition economy the reformative activity of the authorities is absolutely dependent on politico-administrative influence. That is why the behavioral strategies of entrepreneurs are formed as reaction-adaptive behavior under mounting pressure of state policy.

The results are primarily applicable for post-Soviet republics and countries with transition economy.

This paper implies that in post-Soviet economies like Belarus socio-economic integration of entrepreneurs is overly dependent on politico-administrative activity of the authorities.

This study includes two approaches: historico-sociological and expert survey as a forecasting method. This sociological approach gives the opportunity to characterise the continuity in behavioral strategies of entrepreneurs.

Over the past decades, Islamic finance has expanded its presence to many countries including Muslim-majority post-Soviet Central Asian and Transcaucasian region. Undoubtedly, this expansion has aroused keen interest among the representatives of a range of areas such as science, politics and business. The purpose of this paper is to describe the scope, the key players and the main investment strategies of the Islamic finance market based on the evidence obtained from Kyrgyzstan.

The main empirical corpus was formed from Bureau van Dijk’s databases (Zephyr and Orbis) and includes approximately 80 deals involving Shariah-compliant investments in Kyrgyzstan from 1991 to 2020. The initial corpus was then significantly expanded by means of content analysis of open media sources. Being still insufficient for deeper generalization, these data were further complemented by the analysis of an array of corporate information (press releases, presentations and financial reports) related to the identified deals. To ensure the credibility of the conclusions to be made on the nature of Islamic finance in Kyrgyzstan, the desk analysis was also complemented with field research using qualitative method of in-depth expert interviews.

This paper has shown that despite the yet modest market volumes represented by Islamic bank, Islamic windows, Islamic leasing company and microfinance companies, Islamic finance in Kyrgyz Republic has further growth prospects, which are associated with the arrival of large foreign Islamic banks that bring innovative financial products, the issuance of Islamic securities (sukuk) and launch of Islamic insurance (takaful). Being more open and consistent in the development of Islamic finance industry, the authorities of Kyrgyzstan understand the need for the initial development of the market by their own forces.

This paper is original and up-to-date, as it contains new and significant information. Suggesting a new approach to studying Islamic finance in post-Soviet area, this paper identifies the most active Islamic investors in Kyrgyzstan, classifies them, reveals their investment strategies and assesses the financial performance of Islamic investors as well as the total volume of Shariah-compliant capital in Kyrgyzstan. The findings of this paper can contribute to shaping policies toward Islamic finance in the post-Soviet region and, therefore, may be beneficial to the development of Islamic finance industry.

The overall purpose of this paper is to explore the limits of HRM in public sector organisations, within the context of international public management. The cultural basis of HRM, derived chiefly from North America and Western Europe continues to underpin public sector HR reforms, aided and abetted by the international institutions. The paper seeks to begin with an overview of the impact of wider public sector reform on HR practice by briefly exploring the limitations of orthodox HRM in a public service setting. However, the main argument of the paper aims to follow the conceptual position that an understanding of the institutional and cultural contexts is required before attempting HRM‐type reforms.

The author visited the Republic of Georgia in 2008 to work with the Public Service Commission on HRM reforms in central government. Thus, the paper presents the illustrative case of Georgia, which is both a transitional state and susceptible to Western ideas regarding public service reform. The case of Georgia is derived from observation, documentary analysis and correspondence from the Georgian Civil Service.

The paper found that, despite the acceptability of HRM and the desire by public officials to promote HRM‐based reforms, deep politicisation of the administrative system provided considerable implementation problems.

These took the form of lack of academic literature on Georgia, lack of resources to conduct further in‐depth interviews with key officials and difficulty of applying HR to the public sector in post‐Communist/transitory countries

The findings suggest that alternative approaches to HRM reform will be required in similar institutional contexts to that of the Republic of Georgia.

The paper challenges the popular notion of international convergence around “universally applicable” models of HRM in countries such as the Republic of Georgia, where the post‐Soviet legacy provides significant resistance to any reform momentum, HRM‐based or otherwise.

Higher education in the Republic of Georgia has experienced a massive isomorphic transformation since the Rose Revolution of 2003 and continues to transform with aspirations toward Euro-Atlantic integration, compliance with the Bologna Process and as a reflection of the Europeanization of its higher education sector.

This literature review documents and analyzes literature published between 1991 and 2019 on the development of higher education in the Republic of Georgia from 2003 to 2019.

The findings reflect the evolving political landscape and aspiration for Euro-Atlantic integration against the backdrop of one of the most impoverished education systems in the world, as measured by percentage of gross domestic product spending. More explicitly, what findings have been reported in the international literature on Georgian higher education from 2003 to 2019?

The choice to review only English publications was deliberate and done after consultation with a leading Georgian scholar, who noted that the Georgian language publishing market is small and of varied quality; leading Georgian scholars most often seek to publish in English journals and books, and all technical and policy reports produced by the Minister of Education, NGOs and large international organizations (e.g. World Bank) are available in English.

This literature review documents and analyzes literature on the development of higher education in the Republic of Georgia from 2003 to 2019 as a reflection of the evolving political landscape and aspiration for Euro-Atlantic integration against the backdrop of one of the most impoverished education systems in the world, as measured by percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spending. This unique political and economic history makes higher education in Georgia worthy of review.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the reasons behind a decade long contestations between the Georgian government and the petty traders over the access to the public space for commercial use.

The paper relies on the repeated ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tbilisi in 2012 and 2013. The ethnographic interviews with legally operating traders and illegal street vendors are supplemented by the in-depth interviews with the representatives of the city government and secondary literature on Georgia’s post-revolutionary transformation.

Bridging the critical literature on the politics of the public space with Polanyi’s theory on commodification of fictitious commodities as a precondition of establishment of a market economy, the author argues that for the Georgian government control of the public space was necessary to pursue neoliberal marketisation policies. These policies required removal of the petty traders from public spaces because the state needed to restrict access to public space and limit its commercial usage to delineate public and private property and allow commodification of the urban land and property. As the commodification intensified and the rent prices started growing and fluctuating, the access to the public space became even more valuable for the petty traders. Therefore, the traders developed subversive tactics undermining the division between public and private space and property.

The paper demonstrates the importance of enforcing the public-private divide in the process of establishing a market economy in transitional settings. Moreover, it illustrates little discussed social costs of establishing such a divide.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between collectivistic attitudes and organisational culture (OC) perception among Russian‐speaking employees in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and to explain the findings from the national identity perspective.

The study applies a survey method and uses the original scales developed at the University of Tartu. Collectivistic attitudes of individuals are grouped according to three levels of relationships, namely, relationships with family, peers (including co‐workers), or society. Collectivistic attitudes are measured on five‐point Likert‐type scale. Perceptions of OC are measured alongside the task and relationship orientations on ten‐point Likert‐type scale.

Collectivistic attitudes towards one's nation are found to be related to the perception of one's OC on both orientations. It was found that differences in the strength of these relationships in the Latvian sample are associated with the self‐reported nationality of the respondents and suggest similar tendencies in the Lithuanian sample. The authors propose that collectivistic attitudes of respondents basing the construction of their national identity on ethnic and linguistic grounds could have stronger positive connections with OC than those of respondents whose national identity formation was based on citizenship and assimilation.

Positive emotional connection with society and nation provides ground for supporting organisational tasks and relationships. National identity construction can further influence these relations. Limitations: the proposed relationships are hypothetical and are limited to the Latvian sample.

In organisations, human resource strategies should be formulated that support developing or retaining one's sense of national or within‐group identity, which will facilitate maintaining strong ties with the organisation.

This paper provides insight for managers, academics and students on the role of identity construction in revealing employee attachment to their organisation.