Böcker i Palgrave Debates in Business History-serien

It will serve as a gateway to comprehensive knowledge about China for students and academics with interests in Chinese employment relations, Chinese politics, labourist activist culture, and social movements.

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.¿

This book engages with Foucault¿s theoretical works to understand the (re-) making of the working-class in China. In so doing, the author applies Foucault¿s genealogical (historicalization) method to explore the ways the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) develop Chinese governmentality (or government of mentalities) among everyday workers in its thought management system. Through the investigation of the key events in Chinese history, she presents how Chinäs stable political party is sustained through the CCP¿s ability to retain, update and incorporate many Confucian discourses into its contemporary form of thought management system using social networks, such as families and schools, to continuously (re-) shape workers¿ consciousness into one that maintains their docility. This book will bring a new voice to the debate of Chinese working-class politics and labour movements. It will serve as a gateway to comprehensive knowledge about China for students andacademics with interests in Chinese employment relations, Chinese politics, labourist activist culture, and social movements.

This book argues that modern Western civilization is synonymous with business, and you cannot have one without the other-or, at least, not for very long. Without Western civilization, with its emphasis on inquiry, questioning, experimentation, reasoning, freedom of expression, a free press, equality of opportunity before the law-then the innovation and vitality that lies at the heart of Western business success, evaporates. Without business endeavor, all the ideas and inquiry are materially meaningless.The author postulates that only through business opportunity is the wealth created that allows a continuation of our society's intellectual endeavors. Further, the world of modern business-a unique creation of Western civilization, even if it has witnessed many regional and national adaptations-is also the actual place where inequalities are overcome and opportunities created. It is through the world of business and work that women have, for example, achieved something approaching equality with men, to a degree unprecedented in human history. This book will offer scholars a research-based argument that Western civilization owes its existence to business rather than Greco-Roman antiquity.