A joint event of the MSCA project WORK-AGE-JUST and the FWF-GAČR project Linking Arms
13 – 14 February 2025 at the IOG Seminarraum, Hof 3, Altes AKH, University of Vienna
State-owned enterprises were a cornerstone of socialist economies but also contributed greatly to the economies of the decolonized world and the capitalist West in the postwar era. This workshop seeks to examine state-owned enterprises as nexuses of solidarity and conflict from 1945 to the present, reorienting our understanding of Cold War economies and labour regimes away from a picture of division. We welcome contributions from across a variety of humanities and social sciences such as history, sociology or anthropology, mapping how cases of solidarity or conflict within state-owned enterprises related to national political, economic, and/or social policies.
Within the socialist world, a language of both friendly and “unfriendly” competition shaped official accounts of work at state-owned enterprises (with factory newspapers urging workers to vie, on the one hand, with neighbouring plants to meet plan quotas the fastest and, on the other hand, to “catch up with and overtake” the West). As the postwar welfare state developed and calls for social justice became louder in West European societies, infrastructures and tools for conflict resolution and the promotion of solidarities were implemented there—how specifically, we ask, in state-owned enterprises where regulations may have been easier to put into practice than in private businesses?
With state-owned enterprises sometimes operating within economies of shortage, papers might analyse how resources were fought over within these organizations and, more generally, whether shortages led to conflict—were there, in fact, ways in which they brokered solidarity as well? Frequently embedded within supply chains that spanned states (and sometimes even blocs), how did the position of state-owned enterprises within such chains foster identification and/or frustration with other interlinked actors? Can we identify rituals and strategies that workers developed that helped to maintain solidarity or eliminate conflict?
If state-owned enterprises are sometimes depicted as sites of “meaningless” work (whose workers “pretended to work” while their employers “pretended to pay them”), then this workshop—through an examination of solidarities and conflicts within such enterprises, East, West, and South—enriches business and labour histories with a picture of these entities as important sites of meaning-making. Examining which international, national, and local solidarities and rivalries were fostered within state-owned enterprises, papers will shed new light on how state-owned enterprises themselves become sites of solidarity and, on the other hand, the cause of conflict in the municipalities and states in which they were based. Such analyses will reveal changing forms of non-violent conflicts, socialist internationalism, workers’ solidarity (and indeed, while rare, solidarity between workers and managers) and, ultimately, workplace justice.
Dr. Alessandro Iandolo (University College London) delivered the keynote lecture of the workshop.
WORKSHOP PROGRAM (check out the workshop leaflet)
Location: IOG Seminarraum, Hof 3, Altes AKH, University of Vienna
Thursday, February 13
15.00 – 17.00 Panel 1: Transformations
Discussant: Alexandra Ghit (University of Vienna)
Zhao Jin (East China Normal U) & Tao Chen (Tongji U) New Enterprises and New Workers: Worker Participation in the Construction of Baosteel during the Early Reform and Opening Period in China (1977–1985)
Aleksandra Fila (University of Vienna) Gendered creativity in state-socialist and post-socialist Poland. A case of transformation of the working-class community in Oleśnica
Denis Laco (Comenius U) Silver Mines, Thermal Spring, Beer and Tanks: The Case of State-Owned Enterprises in Multifaceted Village of Vyhne in Central Slovakia
Lea Vucic (Belgrad U) From Swans to Silence: The Legacy of ‚Prvi maj’ as a Site of Socialist Work Culture and Post-Socialist Transformation
17.30 – 19.00 Keynote – Alessandro Iandolo (UCL) “Solidarity and the State in the Soviet Union and the Global South”
19.00 Dinner
Friday, February 14
9.30 – 10.00 Michael Hödl, Peter Eigner and Clemens Jobst (University of Vienna) Writing a new history of state-owned enterprises in post-1945 Austria – an outline
10.00 – 12.00 Panel 2: Theories and Practices of Work
Discussant: Agata Zysiak (University of Vienna)
James Nealy (NYU) The Shchekino Method: Flexible Production with Socialist Characteristics in the Soviet Union
Paweł Sasanka (Pilecki Institute) Polish-Yugoslav transnational meetings and the spread of idea of workers’ council, 1956
Rosamund Johnston (University of Vienna) Factory Chronicles and Articulating Work in Normalization Czechoslovakia
Mariia Romanova (University of Vienna) Discovering the Soviet Accounting: Data Manipulation for Socialist Economic Planning
12.00 Lunch
13.30 -15.00 Panel 3: Socialism – Its Promises, Threats and Realities
Discussant: Eva Maria Muschik (University of Vienna)
Anna Calori(Glasgow U)The frictions of solidarity: public enterprises in the non-aligned world
Leo Stauber (Charles U) Solidarity versus Job Security: Local Conflicts in Cold War Steyr
Radka Šustrová (University of Vienna) Tobacco Industry in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1940s and 1950s
15.00-15.30 Coffee Break
15.30 – 17.30 Panel 4: Uneasy Cohabitations
Discussant: Alessandro Iandolo (UCL)
Zsombor Body (ELTE Budapest)From a military plant to a state-owned enterprise. Groups and conflicts in a large Hungarian factory from the end of World War II to the 1960s.
Ivan Lavrentjev(U Tartu)Housing Policies of a Secret Plant in Soviet Estonia
Goran Musić & Immanuel R. Harisch (University of Vienna) Solidarity and Conflict among African workers and Yugoslav expats in the Zambian Parastatal Sector under One-Party Rule
Martin Gumiela (University of Vienna) Complicated relationships: State-owned companies and the growing private sector in People’s Poland since the late 1970s
