This collection of studies investigates the political economy of international relations between the Soviet bloc (the "East") and the developing world (the "South"), spanning the entire post-Stalin era while focusing on the 1970s and 1980s. The works examine East-South relations from the standpoints of international trade patterns, financial transfers, military relations including their economic angle, interactions within the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the international legal framework for trade embedded in the "socialist offensive in international law." The chapters provide extensive bibliographies making this volume a handbook of great interest not only to researchers, but also to university students and the general public.

The disintegration of the USSR was one of the greatest management failures of the twentieth century, but is never considered from that standpoint. This monograph uniquely does so, using insights from complexity theory to elucidate the problems Gorbachev faced as "CEO of the Soviet Union" and why he was unable to solve them. In particular, it addresses the question of Soviet organizational learning and draws lessons for questions faced by contemporary complex organizations, including business corporations, such as merger, acquisition, spinning off, and the relative autonomy of subordinate managers. Analyzing changes over time in the Soviet foreign policy making Establishment, this monograph specifies how an actor's interpretation of the environment (in terms of decisional time horizon and experienced stress) evokes differentiated mechanisms that themselves constrain the types of decisions that the actor is able to take in such an environment. It exemplifies those mechanisms with concrete instances of communicational and organizational constraints and freedoms that draw on empirical case studies. From this, it draws lessons for the management, corporate culture, and design of twenty-first century organizations, including business firms of any size.