Business Practice in Socialist Hungary, Volume 2: From Chaos to Contradiction, 1957-1972

ISBN-13: 9783031239311 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Philip Scranton

Opis

This book aims to reconstruct the activities of enterprises and individuals over two decades in one developing country (Hungary), within and across four politico-economic domains (agriculture, infrastructure/construction, commerce, and manufacturing), from the initial Stalinist obsession with heavy industry through later reforms paying greater attention to profitable farming and the provision of abundant consumer goods.  It provides hundreds of grounded, granular stories for reflection, as reported by actors and direct observers, ranging from innovation and improvisation to obstruction, failure, and fraud. Further, it offers an otherwise-unobtainable close encounter with another world, familiar in some respects while amazingly peculiar in others.The social history of enterprise and work in postwar Central European nations “building socialism” has long been underdeveloped. Through extensive macro-level research on planning and policy in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Bloc countries, a grand narrative has been framed:  reconstruction and breakneck industrialization under Soviet tutelage; then eventual mismanagement, stagnation and crisis, leading to collapse. This book seeks to explore what socialism actually looked like to those sustaining (or enduring} it as they faced forward into an unknowable future, to assess how and where it did (or didn’t) work, and to recount how ordinary people responded to its opportunities and constraints.This study will appeal to readers interested in a understanding how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how novice managers and technicians emerged during rapid industrialization, how peasants learned to farm cooperatively, how organizations improvised and adapted, how political purity and practical expertise contended for control, and how the controversies and convulsions of the postwar decades shaped a deeply flawed project to “build socialism.”

Spis treści

Preface: The Terrible Twelve: Core Tasks for Socialist and Capitalist Enterprises.-Introduction:  Hungary as Site and Process: Geography, History, and Society to 1945.- Chapter 1: Postwar Reconstruction and Forced Industrialization, 1946-56.- Chapter 2: Socializing Agriculture, 1957-66.- Chapter 3: Construction: The Infrastructure Dilemma, 1957-1966.- Chapter 4: Commerce: Transactions Without and With Markets, 1957-1966.- Chapter 5: Manufacturing: Concretizing A Great Illusion, 1957-1966.- Chapter 6: The New Economic Mechanism and Bureaucratic Resistance: 1966-1972.- Conclusion: Never Quite Socialist?.- A Note on Sources.

O autorze

Philip Scranton is University Board of Governors Professor Emeritus, History of Industry and Technology, at Rutgers University, USA. He also directed the Hagley Museum & Library's research arm, the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society, 1992-2012, with responsibility for a seminar series, twice-yearly conferences, grants-in-aid and annual fellowships in support of dissertation research and writing. His publications include fourteen books and seventy scholarly articles, multiple contributions to exhibit catalogs, and numerous reviews of books and conferences.

Blurb

This book aims to reconstruct the activities of enterprises and individuals in one developing country (Hungary), within and across four politico-economic domains (agriculture, construction, commerce, and manufacturing), from the aftermath of the 1956 revolt through extensive reforms emphasizing profits more than ideology so as to provide abundant consumer goods.  It provides hundreds of grounded, granular stories for reflection, as reported by actors and direct observers, ranging from innovation and improvisation to obstruction, failure, and fraud. Further, it offers an otherwise-unobtainable close encounter with another world, familiar in some respects while amazingly peculiar in others. The social history of enterprise and work in postwar Central European nations “building socialism” has long been underdeveloped. Through extensive macro-level research on planning and policy in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Bloc countries, a grand narrative has been framed:  reconstruction and breakneck industrialization under Soviet tutelage; then eventual mismanagement, stagnation and crisis, leading to collapse. This successor volume to an earlier study of the 1945–57 period seeks to explore what socialism actually looked like to those sustaining (or enduring} it as they faced forward into an unknowable future, to assess how and where it did (or didn’t) work, and to recount how ordinary people responded to its opportunities and constraints. 

This study will appeal to readers interested in a understanding how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how  managers and technicians learned by doing, how peasants  began to farm cooperatively, how organizations improvised and adapted, how political purity and practical expertise contended for control, and how controversies and contradiction shaped a deeply flawed project to “build socialism.”

Philip Scranton is University Board of Governors Professor Emeritus, History of Industry and Technology, at Rutgers University, USA.. His publications include nineteen books and 80+ scholarly articles, multiple contributions to exhibition catalogs, and numerous reviews of books and conferences.