Business Practice in Socialist Hungary, Volume 1

Creating the Theft Economy, 1945-1957
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-030-89186-2
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 306 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 431 g

Reihe: Palgrave Debates in Business History

This study 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 (Volume 1: Creating the Theft Economy, 1945-1957) through later reforms paying greater attention to profitable farming and the provision of abundant consumer goods (Volume 2: From Chaos to Contradiction, 1957-1972, forthcoming 2023). 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 longbeen 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 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, howpolitical 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.”

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scranton, Philip

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Management Unternehmensführung
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Angewandte Ethik & Soziale Verantwortung Wirtschaftsethik, Unternehmensethik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Unternehmensorganisation, Corporate Responsibility Unternehmensethik
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Wirtschaftssysteme, Wirtschaftsstrukturen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface.- Chapter 1 – Introduction: Hungary: Geography, History and Society to 1945.- Chapter 2– The Theft Economy: Occupation and Forced Industrialization.- Chapter 3 – Agriculture from Stalinism to the Revolt.- Chapter 4 – An Unfinished Project: Constructing Socialist Construction.- Chapter 5 – Socialist Commerce: Provisioning, Coping,  Maneuvering and Trading.- Chapter 6 – Hungary’s Socialist Industrialization: A Snare and a Delusion.- Chapter 7 –  The Revolt: Spontaneity,  Repression and Reaction.- Chapter 8 – Afterword.

Über Autor(innen)

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