Industrial Technocracy between Socialism and Capitalism: The Case Study of the Czechoslovak Footwear Industry

• In Event: The Dynamics of Socialist Technocracy: Governance, Management, and Expertise in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, 1960s–1990s

Abstract

This paper examines how late socialist technocracy in Czechoslovakia addressed the challenges of perestroika and the Velvet Revolution. It uses a case study of the footwear industry in Eastern Moravia to analyze the transformation of power dynamics in Czechoslovak industry in response to the economic crisis of the 1980s, the political and economic changes brought about by perestroika, the democratic challenges of 1989, and the emergence of capitalism in the early 1990s. The paper aims to illustrate how continuities and discontinuities between two distinct political and economic orders, state socialism and post-socialist capitalism, characterized by specific practices and concepts of technocratic economic management, evolved at local and regional levels within a particular industrial context. The presentation will focus mainly on the relationship between management and workers in an industrial company. At the end of the 1980s, the technocratic regime of socialist managerialism was subjected to changes that were supposed to democratize power relations in factories, either in reality or in form – introduction of the workers' self-management in the perestroika period and the end of the communist rule during the democratic revolution of November 1989. Another major test of the resilience of the technocratic regime was the end of central planning and the emergence of the market economy in the early 1990s. The paper examines how technocratic power structures responded to these changes and what the balance of power between management and labor was in the course and after the upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Author

• Vitezslav Sommer, Inst of Contemporary History CAS (Czech Republic)