Socialist Entrepreneurs? Business Histories of the GDR and Yugoslavia

This book breaks new ground, taking business history where it has only reluctantly gone in the past. The volume makes a plea for the utility of studying the Global East to business history and the utility of business history to the study of the Global East.

Autorentext

Vladimir Unkovski-Korica is Senior Lecturer based in Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. His first book The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito's Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment was published by I.B. Tauris in 2016.

Saa Vejzagi earned a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute in Florence in 2021. He is interested in economic, business, and social history of the 20th century in Yugoslavia. Currently he is a research associate at the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Inhalt

Introduction: Business history goes East 1. Persistent centralisation of decision-making in the age of industrial atomisation and self-management on the case of construction company Industrogradnja Zagreb (1966-1980) 2. Tensions between plan and market in a political factory in socialist Kosovo 3. Management of technological innovation: High tech R&D in the GDR 4. Workers against technocrats: The failed economic reform and the rise of consumer socialism in the German Democratic Republic 5. Entrepreneurs as saviours of socialism? The complicated relationship between East German state socialism and entrepreneurship 6. Losing the global: (Re)building a Bosnian enterprise across transition 7. Varieties of capitalism or variegated state capitalism? East Germany and Yugoslavia in comparative perspective