Workplace Justice

CfP: The State-Owned Enterprise as Site of Solidarity and Conflict (workshop)

13 – 14 February 2025, Vienna 

The workshop aims to bring together scholars interested in international, national, and local histories, seeking to reorient our understanding of Cold War economies and labour regimes away from a picture of division. The application deadline is November 15, 2024.

The State-Owned Enterprise as Site of Solidarity and Conflict

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) will deliver the workshop‘s keynote lecture. Confirmed participants also include Profs. Philipp Ther (University of Vienna) and Tao Chen (Tongji University).

To apply for the workshop, please send an abstract of 300 words and a short bio to both rosamund.johnston(at)univie.ac.at and radka.kopecek.sustrova(at)univie.ac.at.

The application deadline is November 15, 2024.