29 research outputs found
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
Audience history as a history of ideas: Towards a transnational history
This article was published in the serial,
European Journal of Communication [Sage Publications / © The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267323114555825One of the possible ways of approaching audience history is by focusing on the history of ideas
about audiences. This article examines the benefits and shortcomings of such an approach and
develops a set of methodological propositions, drawing on the principles and methods of the
German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts). To demonstrate the usefulness of
these propositions, the article briefly examines the ideas about audiences in socialist Yugoslavia,
focusing on the surge of ideas about politically engaged audiences in the late 1960s. The concluding
part of the article situates this historical episode in the wider geographical context and outlines
possible avenues for a broader, transnational investigation of the history of ideas about audiences