This book 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 through later reforms paying greater attention to profitable farming and the provision of abundant consumer goods. 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 a 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.”
Author(s): Philip Scranton
Series: Palgrave Debates in Business History
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 416
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgements
Praise for Business Practice in Socialist Hungary, Volume 2
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Reassembling the State and the Economy, 1957–1967
Priorities
Continuities
Changes/Transitions
Useful Bits on Money, Prices, and Growth
Notes
2 The Essential Illusion: Collectivizing Agriculture, 1957–1963
Recovery, 1957–Early 1959
Mobilization, 1958–1961
Nothing Fails like Success
Notes
3 Making TSZs Work, 1961–1966
Dreadful Weather Assists Consolidation, 1961–1963
Stabilization and Reassessment, 1964–1966
Intensifying Agricultural Production
Trying to Cope with Nature
Conclusion
Notes
4 Construction—Badly Planned and Oddly Organized, 1957–1967
Housing
Diversified Enterprises: State-Managed Construction
Construction Materials, Old and New, and Their Problems, Old and New
A Quasi-Conclusion
Notes
5 Commerce—Supply Struggling with Growing Demand, 1957–1967
The Web of Purchasing: Bringing Farm Products to Users
Retailing: State Stores, Public Markets, and Illicit Entrepreneurship
Services: The Neglected Commercial Domain
Foreign Trade, Briefly
Conclusion
Notes
6 Fabricating the Future—Manufacturing from the Top Down, 1957–1967
Legacy Issues from the Rákosi Era, 1957–1961
First Responses: Mergers and Structural Reorganizations, 1962–1964
Second/Parallel Response: Shifting Sectoral Priorities
The Export Magnet
Conclusion
Notes
7 Production Practices—Manufacturing from the Inside Out, 1957–1967
Continuities from the Rákosi Years
Missing Plan Targets
Disjointed Planning
Management Failures
Industrial Positives: Getting Some Things Right
Innovation
Technical Upgrades
Diversified and Flexible Production
Training
Conclusion
Notes
8 Reform and Contradictions, 1968–1972
Paradoxes, Not Solutions
The NEM and Agriculture: The Risks of Being Business-Like
The NEM and Construction: Continuity vs. Creativity
The NEM and Commerce: Making Markets Count
The NEM and Manufacturing: Diverging Paths
Conclusion: Orthodoxy Buoyant, Reform Deflating
Notes
9 Afterword
Notes
Note on Sources
Index
