Preliminary Programme

Anyone who studies individual experiences of "ordinary people" knows full well that biographical time and historical time are not necessarily synchronized. I would like to show such a-synchronicity by zooming in on the biographical narratives of Polish shipyard workers. Specifically, the workers of the Gdynia Shipyard, which survived the changes of 1989, but did not survive the effects of Poland's accession to the European Union. However, before it went bankrupt in 2009, for many of its employees it was a kind of buffer against the turbulences of transformation, sustaining a certain professional ethos, lifestyle, sense of value and meaning of shipbuilding work. And all that in the framework of globalizing and thus transforming shipbuilding industry – what adds another interpretative context, both to local histories and individual biographies.
The paper will be based on 30 interviews with shipyard workers recorded as part of the research project "Transformations from Below. Shipyards and Labor Relations in the Uljanik (Croatia) and Gdynia (Poland) Shipyards since the 1980s" carried out by the University of Vienna and The Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (Leibniz-Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung – IOS) in the years 2016-2021. (Show less)

Severe troubles with the Polish national economy in the late 1970s encouraged the development of a new form of economic activity, which combined foreign (from the Polish diaspora) capital and know-how with Polish manufacturers. It soon turned out that so called Polonia Firms began to attract not only promising and energetic entrepreneurs, but also became a shelter for prominent members of the socialist party and the state apparatus. In the 1980s, thanks to numerous privileges and relationships with the party apparatus, they were able to increase their assets and later, in post-socialist Poland, they formed a group of prominent entrepreneurs who sometimes became millionaires. Of course, not everyone took advantage of this opportunity. In this paper I will discuss the individual career paths of a dozen or so Polish agents of Polonia Firms and how they took advantage of favorable circumstances to survive the difficult period of transformation, which for many of them became a platform for professional success. (Show less)

Since the so-called Polonia firms enabled a broader but still limited form of private entrepreneurship in late state-socialist Poland, they are understood by scholars as a kind of „concessionary capitalism“ or as an „incubator“ of entrepreneurship for polish business elites after transformation. That is why entrepreneurs of such companies should be distinguished as important agents of the transition period, especially in its long term dimension.
Since only members of the Polish diaspora in the capitalist West were allowed to found such companies in People’s Poland, it is important to underline the significant role of transnational familial bonds in the individual biographies of some „Polonia“ entrepreneurs.
In particular, the presentation will scrutinize the biographical aspects and life stories of the founders of two Polonia firms „Sofal“ and „Interbau“. While „Sofal“ was co-founded by a woman, who was born in 1923 and migrated to Austria in 1971, the company „Interbau“ was founded by her daughter, who migrated to Austria in the late 1970s, after finishing her architectural studies in Cracow. Thus, a crucial question will be, how those familial bonds affected the individual life stories of those women in terms of migration, entrepreneurship and the persistence of their companies in the period of systemic transformation. (Show less)

In 2021 a report about how Leszek Balcerowicz's think tank published successful transition in Lodz - that is by the father of transition economic reform in Poland. The picture coming out of the report was not only misleading but deeply unfair. For someone gathering narrative interviews with former industrial workers for over a decade, the comparison was striking. The testimonies of entrepreneurs and politicians quoted in the report and the workers' stories painted a completely different reality of the 1990s. And all of them were true.
In the paper, I summarise findings from my recent co-authored book on the collapse of industry in Lodz (Zysiak et.al. 2020) and the decade mentioned above of gathering workers' stories in the context of the hegemonic national discourse about the transition and working class.
However, I am particularly interested in the question of structural blindness of the biographical material and the resulting possibilities of our insight into social reality. The question of truth lags behind the question of representativeness but also non-hegemonic representation.

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