Taylorizmus és szocializmus. A Škoda gépkocsigyártás esete (1945-1963)

Valentina Fava's Taylorism and Socialism. Czechoslovakian Automobile Manufacturing (1945–1963) explores the post-war efforts of the Czechoslovak automobile industry to reconcile two seemingly contradictory models of industrial organization: American Taylorism and Soviet-style socialism. In the aftermath of World War II, Czechoslovakia faced the urgent need to modernize its manufacturing system. While American mass production offered principles of efficiency, standardization, and rationalization, the Soviet model imposed ideological and structural constraints that often clashed with these methods. The result was a hybrid system that combined opportunities for innovation with inherent organizational limitations. By employing the methodology of business history, the study moves beyond the mainstream narrative of Eastern Europe, which has frequently been colored by political judgment rather than grounded analysis. Instead, the article examines the concrete mechanisms through which socialist enterprises were transformed, focusing on the automobile sector as a revealing case study. This approach highlights how industrial modernization under socialism was far from linear; it emerged through negotiations, tensions, and compromises between competing cultural, economic, and political logics. In doing so, Fava’s contribution enriches our understanding of state socialism, demonstrating how the automobile industry served as a laboratory for both the adaptation and resistance of socialist production to global models of mass manufacturing.