CommonWealth Magazine - Summer/Fall 2005
Profile: Linda Randall '94 Ph.D.
Linda Randall '94 Ph.D.
“In recent months, Putin has been throwing some of Russia’s greedier capitalists in jail. At the same time, he’s been consolidating the government’s control over the media and expanding its control over the oil industry. Is Putin trying to get rid of Russia’s robber barons to promote a stronger free market or is he just further centralizing his own power? At this stage, it's hard to tell,” observes Linda Randall ’94 Ph.D., a department of management graduate and a management professor and long-time student of economic and organizational change in Russia and other nations with transitional economies. In March, Professor Randall became the University of Baltimore’s associate provost of academic affairs. “I’ve been working on a lot of special projects including state reaccreditation of our academic programs and expansion of our undergraduate curriculum. I’m also the university’s chief academic representative on Maryland’s higher education commission," she says.
During the 1990s, Randall made frequent research visits to Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine which yielded numerous academic papers and the influential 2001 book, Reluctant Capitalists: Russia’s Journey Through Market Transition (Routledge). The journey, she notes, has revealed Russia’s extreme reluctance to embrace a truly western style–economy. “There’s a tradition of centralization and suspicion toward open markets that goes back centuries, well before the communist era. During the brief period of wild west capitalism in the 1990s, the Russian speculators and oligarchs who made the most of privatization almost always did so through side deals with the government.” When Jack Welch visited the Isenberg School in April, one of his themes emphasized that the creative energy of Eastern European capitalism would eventually rub off on stagnant economies in Western Europe. “Russia and Eastern Europe have very different economic traditions,” Randall continues. “Eastern Europe has more of a history of merchants and trade; they are undoubtedly very happy to go back to their roots.”
After earning her Ph.D. from the Isenberg School, Randall was a professor at the University of Rhode Island for nearly a decade. At URI, she was also associate director of the Institute of International Business for four years. After URI, Randall joined the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Professional Studies in Business and Education, where she was chair of its management department and director of its Organization Development and Strategic Human Resources program. Professor Randall, who earned an MBA degree from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree at Swarthmore College, has also been a research scholar at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C.