Management and Planning for Development: A Transregional Perspective (1950-1990)

• Applicant: Dr. Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546569648

The Emmy Noether-Group analyzes management knowledge in economic development projects in socialist Europe and in countries of the Global South from the 1950s to the 1980s. It will show how management knowledge was produced, used and interpreted in socialist command economies and in developing economies – and thus beyond the common focus on the capitalist North. The group comprises three studies, which analyze development projects in the GDR, China, Poland and Nigeria. They allow for studying managerial practices and discourses on the micro level and they will uncover new relations between management and planning. Management and planning have long been treated as opposing poles along the dividing line of market and state. Instead, by choosing a transregional and a history of knowledge approach the group will study management and planning in an entangled perspective. It will thus contribute to understanding the emergence of our contemporary liberal economic world order as a heterogeneous, contested and multipolar process.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups