Making and Becoming "New (Wo)Men: Rationalisation, Subjectification, and Materiality in the Industrial of Zlín and the Baťa Company, 1920-1950
Final Report Abstract
After the First World War, the Czechoslovak shoe company Baťa established a highly dynamic, authoritarian project of social engineering at its headquarters in Zlín. Within 15 years, the company transformed the insignificant provincial town into a modernist, functionally differentiated and globally recognised company town. With its factories, vocational schools and company housing, Zlín turned into a highly developed, company-centred social environment in which the company intervened massively in the lives of its employees and their families and shaped these people. Fundamental to this attempt at social reform was the transfer of rationalisation as a concept developed in industrial production to personnel management. Using scientific methods and standardised procedures, the company evaluated its employees, differentiated them according to performance, loyalty and conformity and offered its own sense of belonging, which at least in part superseded other forms of belonging to nation or class. In fact, Baťaprovided those workers and employees who worked for the company over a longer period of time and adhered to its values the chance of a conspicuous upward social mobility. On the other hand, the company forced deviant employees or other unwanted persons out of the city. The project reached its peak on the eve of the Second World War and continued to exist throughout the war, political regime changes and German occupation. Baťa's control over Zlín ended in 1945, but the company's social reforms sustained to have an impact afterwards. The history of Baťa's people in Zlín stands for a remarkable private-sector attempt at social engineering and illustrates the proximity and interconnectedness of radical social planning in the first half of the 20th century.
Publications
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Zlín, in Ortstermine. Umgang mit Differenz in Europa
Feindt, Gregor
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Making the »new man«. Baťa, Batism and the Ideologies of Social Engineering in Interwar Czechoslovakia. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz Beihefte, 159-190. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Feindt, Gregor
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Leistung im Vergleich. Objektivierungen trotz Differenzierungskontingenz. Humandifferenzierung im Vergleich, 236-266. Velbrück Wissenschaft.
Banerjee, Mita; Feindt, Gregor; Kalthoff, Herbert & Wihstutz, Benjamin
