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Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Archer, Rory, Musić, Goran
Format: Online Article Text
Language:English
Published: Routledge 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5278921/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28190894
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2017.1244331
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author Archer, Rory
Musić, Goran
author_facet Archer, Rory
Musić, Goran
author_sort Archer, Rory
collection PubMed
description The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.
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spelling pubmed-52789212017-02-08 Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia Archer, Rory Musić, Goran Labor Hist Articles The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history. Routledge 2017-01-01 2016-10-18 /pmc/articles/PMC5278921/ /pubmed/28190894 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2017.1244331 Text en © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Articles
Archer, Rory
Musić, Goran
Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia
title Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia
title_full Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia
title_fullStr Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia
title_full_unstemmed Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia
title_short Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia
title_sort approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) yugoslavia
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5278921/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28190894
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2017.1244331
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