The growth in size of the Polish industrial enterprise, and the acquisition of characteristics resembling Western corporations by some levels in the industrial bureaucracy, was chosen as the subject of this work because the author considers that this posed considerable problems for control by a Marxist–Leninist party: the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). What would be the implications for PZPR control over management recruitment into these ‘socialist corporations’, and how does the size of these units affect the legitimacy of the PZPR in the eyes of the Polish industrial working class? More broadly this raises the question of what particular forces in the Polish industrialisation process have led to these quasicorporate structures: what are the political consequences of the pursuit of economic growth and in what manner has state bureaucratic power increased; is there an inevitable logic underlying the unfolding of the division of labour; are the ‘forces of production’ ideologically neutral? While conventional theoretical examinations of Communist polities are seen as inadequate to the task of answering these questions, the author feels that the more ‘glamorous’ theories of convergence and industrial/post-industrial society do not fit the bill much better. Rather, in the course of this chapter such ‘grand’ theory will be eschewed in favour of a more eclectic cluster of points, raised in the work of West European industrial sociologists and East European dissident intellectuals, which seem more germane to the major themes of this book.