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

Thu, November 20, 3:00 to 4:45pm EST (3:00 to 4:45pm EST), -

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In the second half of the twentieth century, socialist governance embraced the notion that political, economic, and social lives could be governed as closed systems. With the integration of the “scientific and technological revolution” into communist ideology, knowledge accumulation became central to state socialist regimes. From the 1960s onward, the engagement of socialist social sciences with human existence in modern society spurred the development of management studies and theories of socialist post-industrialism. This panel explores the intersection of governance, management, and expertise in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, highlighting the role of knowledge in shaping socialist states. It examines how Soviet area studies functioned as an object of state management, shaped by Cold War competition and decolonization, as institutions sought to regulate knowledge production and navigate global scholarly networks. In Soviet Estonia, the global transfer of ideas contributed to the incorporation of Western management theories, fostering market-socialist experiments that shaped economic reform movements in the late 1980s. Around the same time, in late socialist Yugoslavia, science and technology were simultaneously seen as a source of crisis and a potential solution – exposing tensions between technocrats and proponents of self-management. Finally, the panel traces the trajectory of technocratic governance in Czechoslovakia, examining how economic crisis, democratization, and the transition to capitalism reshaped managerial structures and power relations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The panel highlights how expertise functioned as both a tool of state legitimacy and a site of contestation, particularly in moments of crisis and systemic transformation.

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