Business Practice in Socialist Hungary, Volume 2

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.