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 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

The poverty business; landlords, illicit practices and reproduction of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Czechia

This paper is guided by the question: How do illicit practices of organized groups contribute to the formation and reproduction of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Czechia? By asking this question we depart from the dominant understanding of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the study of organized crime. Instead of seeing them as “breeding grounds of organized crime”, it is explored how regular neighbourhoods can decline as a result of illicit practices carried out by certain organized groups. The context of the paper is the so-called “poverty business”, which refers to the renting of overpriced, substandard housing, financed considerably using housing benefits and thus exploiting the housing need of vulnerable social groups, namely Roma. Using the literature on Roma marginalization and illicit housing practices, an analytical framework that consists of the concepts of speculation, exploitation and liquidation is created and applied to two cases of disadvantaged neighbourhoods: “the Hostel” in Brno and “the Neighbourhood” in Litvínov. In conclusion, the adequacy of the organized crime perspective is critically discussed and the need for further research articulated