Tensions between plan and market in a political factory in socialist Kosovo

Pieter Troch

Business History, 2023, vol. 65, issue 7, 1158-1176

Abstract: This article provides a business history of the medium-sized wood processing enterprise Kosmet Šper, established for local development purposes in weakly-developed socialist Kosovo. It explores business reorganisations undertaken by local political elites and management aimed to align the enterprise’s continued operation with socialist Yugoslavia’s market-oriented economic reforms of the 1960s. The first part of the article scrutinises these interventions and argues that the locus of ultimate political decision-making shifted to the units of the federal state. The second part of the article looks at the increasing authority transferred to professional managers in return for keeping the underperforming enterprise running. This led to a paternalistic style of management, but the legitimacy of the management remained subject to overlapping challenges of function, ethnicity, and origin. Part three explores the labour force fluctuations caused by the shift of responsibility for the performance of the enterprise to internal production failures.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2020.1733981

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