This paper examines the history of everyday life in Yugoslav self-managed enterprises embedded in a global web of economic and technical cooperation. Based on a close reading of company journals and oral history interviews, it will reflect on the multiple ways in which global socialism was translated, negotiated, and experienced ...
(Show more)This paper examines the history of everyday life in Yugoslav self-managed enterprises embedded in a global web of economic and technical cooperation. Based on a close reading of company journals and oral history interviews, it will reflect on the multiple ways in which global socialism was translated, negotiated, and experienced within the late socialist enterprise.
Yugoslav engineering, petrochemical, and construction companies were amongst the country’s largest exporters. Thanks to the country’s central position within the Non-Aligned Movement, they benefitted from a wide array of business opportunities with partner countries, across the Iron Curtain and especially in the Global South.
Employees of these companies would be exposed to the socialist global project in manifold ways: through periods of work abroad, visits of foreign delegations, and everyday micro-exchanges embedded in global supply chains.
As this paper argues, these exchanges brought “the global” into the everyday lives of Yugoslav workers, thus shaping their notions, visions, and understandings of globalization.
This, the paper posits, would go on to shape workers’ expectations of globalization as the socialist system embarked on its reformist project in the late 1980s. Further, they would mould the ways in which workers made sense of the major socio-economic transformations that followed the collapse of state socialism.
By interrogating working-class memories of socialist globalization and its intervention in the everyday life of late socialist and post-socialist communities, the paper will offer a theoretical reflection on the value of expectations as an analytical category for the study of lived experiences of transformation in the (post)socialist context.
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