CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Guga, Ștefan |
|---|---|
| Title | Low-cost Fordism? The Antinomies of Class in the Romanian Automobile Industry, 1989 - (2016) |
| Summary | This dissertation is a historical ethnography of class and industrial labor centered in and around the Dacia automobile plant in Romania, from the early postrevolutionary days of the 1990s to the mid-2010s, thus spanning both the tumultuous years of “transition” and the seemingly more settled era of dependent development arriving in the first years of the new millennium. The dissertation is based on 18 months of fieldwork and an extensive analysis of various historical documents of the post-89 era. While firmly grounded in the sociological, anthropological, and political economic literatures on class and industrial labor in post-89 Central and Eastern Europe, it recasts some of the major questions of this broad field of study and, with the benefit of both depth and hindsight, offers more nuanced answers and interpretations. Against various capital-logic or victimhood accounts of labor in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, the dissertation uncovers a complex, multifaceted and convoluted hidden history of industrial work and workers—one out of many possible. Both individual laborers and organized labor hence appear as active makers of their own history, albeit never quite to the extent and in the manner they pleased. More specifically, they appear as initiators, supporters, or adversaries of a series of hegemonic projects meant to anticipate, foster, or respond to an ever-changing political economy, with the ostensible goal of affirming and establishing the material and symbolic value of industrial labor despite the hostility and ill omens of the times. Regardless of the setting of these hegemonic struggles—inside the factory, in the labor market, or in the neighborhood&#x 2014;ambiguitie s, contradictions, and dead ends abounded, resulting from endless frictions between misaligned political and moral economies of industrial labor. Based on a highly selective, primarily export-driven reindustrialization of the former state socialist countries of CEE, the maturing of dependent development in the 2000s fostered uneven development and labor fragmentation to an unprecedented extent. It thus offered a genuine possibility of success in asserting the value of labor, although only at the cost of hegemonic projects embracing and struggling for, not against, inequality and exclusion. If the cultivation of exclusionary solidarity eventually proved a recipe for success in mounting an organized offensive against capital, in rising to the apex of the labor market, and in achieving an ideal of urban modernity thought long lost, it also engendered increasingly obvious vulnerabilities and potential for failure. On the side of both the included and the excluded, exclusionary solidarity has resulted in deep personal anxieties, apparently insurmountable problems of social reproduction, and diminishing capacity of collective struggle. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Don; Bodnár, Judit |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/guga_stefan.pdf |
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