Organization: Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen (University of Vienna), Lukas Becht (University of Vienna), Florian Peters (Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Berlin), Vítězslav Sommer (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
Confirmed keynote speaker: Eglė Rindzevičiūtė

The workshop therefore aims at shedding light on the knowledge of management in both capitalist and state-socialist economies in the Northern and Southern global hemispheres. We understand management knowledge to comprise discourses and practices produced and sustained by scientific management, practitioners, workers as well as by material and medial environments.

By focusing on the knowledge of management we want to bridge the gap between a history of management ideas and stories of individual workplace management. We aim at bringing together studies about (scientific and public) management discourses, management knowledge production, management practices, materialities and media in a global circulatory perspective. Individual papers may address regionally specific case studies, which the workshop can help to place in a global context.

Topics and questions of special interest include:

• Management knowledge from the ‘peripheries’ of the second half of the 20th century:

Whereas scientific management discourses and (to a lesser degree) practices produced in the Western hemisphere have received scholarly attention, the knowledge of organizing work flow in Eastern Europe and the Global South still remains largely unknown. We encourage contributions to go beyond a history of management ideas and look at the socio-technical networks of managerial knowledge production and at
the ways this knowledge was put into practice. We are also interested in the analysis of scientific management discourses in these regions.

• Management in the Global South:

Management knowledge in the Global South deserves further attention in other respects. The postcolonial world was not easily split between the two blocks. Rather, the newly independent states chose (more or less successfully) individual ways for organizing their economies and whom to ask for financial assistance. How then did they employ management and planning knowledge? Was the Global South a space in which socialist and capitalist practices of management came together, an important hub, maybe site of experimentation, in the global circulation of management knowledge? How did management knowledge from the Global North merge with local knowledge of organizing work? How did management knowledge influence discourses of development in and about the Global South?

• Circulation of management knowledge:

In order to grasp the entanglement of management practices and discourses in different local, economic and political settings, the study of circulating management knowledge is important. If we conceptualize the production of management knowledge as being in circulation from the very start, stemming not only from the United States but having multiple origins and itineraries, what stories about Taylorism, Operations Research or cybernetics9 can we tell?

• Planning and management:

Analyzing socialist and capitalist economic practices as entangled, the workshop also asks for the relationship of management towards planning. The two fields are closely intertwined. Both aim to cope with the uncertainty and complexity of the socio-economic world through actively anticipating and shaping an uncertain future. We encourage papers to specify the multi-facetted relationships between planning and management by focusing on the practices, which united or separated the two fields. We also find it promising to look at what happens in the 1970s when “planning” optimism faded, yet the uncertain future remained to be tackled by economic as well as public actors.

• Representations of management:

How is management represented and what roles are attributed to managers and
management in scientific, political, economic or public discourse in different times
and spaces? Is management portrayed as a responsible way of bringing economy and
society forward or as a ruthless activity stemming from economic greed? Is
management male or female? Is a manager constantly overworked and therefore a
neurasthenic/sick from manager’s disease? Such questions about the representations of
management are important in themselves, but can also be valuable for understanding
management knowledge and economic practice.

• Management in Transformation:

After 1989 capitalist modes of organizing economies and of imagining social and
economic rationality reached unquestioned hegemony worldwide. What role did
managers and management knowledge play in the transformation from state-socialist
countries to capitalist market economies? How did managerial skills and popular
discourses about them influence ideas and practices of building capitalism in the
former Eastern bloc? Considering that management knowledge had been part of statesocialist
economies, how did the existing managerial culture contribute to shape the
‘spirit of capitalism’ in the transformation period? Which concepts and policies of the
neoliberal intellectual tradition were relevant for management knowledge in this time
period when state economic planning (socialist as well as Keynesian) declined?

We welcome contributions dealing with any of these topics or related research questions from
multiple disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. history, cultural studies, media studies, sociology,
economics). Papers will be presented in thematic panels and commented on by a discussant.
Selected papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed collected volume.
Please send your abstract of max. 300 words and a short CV to katharina.kreudersonnen@
univie.ac.at until 15 April 2020. We will notify you about the selection of papers by
15 May.
We will be applying for third-party funding in order to reimburse travel costs. A relevant
budget has already been secured to support junior researchers or long distance travelers.