Business practice in socialist Hungary. Volume 1, Creating the theft economy, 1945-1957 / Philip Scranton.
Scranton, Philip.
2022
HD30.36.H8
Available Online

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Title Business practice in socialist Hungary. Volume 1, Creating the theft economy, 1945-1957 / Philip Scranton.
Author Scranton, Philip.
ISBN 9783030891848 (electronic bk.)
3030891844 (electronic bk.)
3030891836
9783030891831
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89184-8
Imprint Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Language English
Description 1 online resource
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1007/978-3-030-89184-8 doi
Call Number HD30.36.H8
Dewey Decimal Classification 330.9439052
Summary 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 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 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, how political 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. 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.
Note Includes index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Online resource; title from PDF title page (SpringerLink, viewed February 8, 2022).
Series Palgrave debates in business history, 2662-4370
Available in Other Form Print version: 9783030891831
Linked Resources Online Access
Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
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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.

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