This work began with a concern to examine the political consequences of and barriers to economic growth and technical innovation in a state-socialist society, and now concludes with the observation that in the Polish context, particularly since 1970, the PZPR has displayed an awareness of the need for change in its organisational structure, its methods of operation and its recruitment strategy, but that these changes misfired. The background against which this was demonstrated was a policy of industrial integration and concentration begun in the late 1950s and which by the 1970s had assumed the force of a dominant trend in the economy.

The political economy of state-socialist societies tends to focus conventionally upon the role of the industrial enterprise as the basic unit of economic activity. To do so, however, is to ignore developments since the late 1950s that have tended towards the integration of plant into ever bigger production units whose form can vary, but which can be said to possess a closer resemblance to Western corporate structures than to the ideal-typical industrial enterprise prescribed by Polish economic law. This development is by no means unique to the Polish experience. Just as the transformation of industrial structure in Poland after 1945 drew heavily upon the forms that emerged in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, the process of industrial integration and concentration that took place in Poland during the 1960s and the 1970s was largely inspired by changes that had taken place elsewhere in Eastern Europe.