The Socialist Global Promise: Non-Alignment and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company

Engineering Global Socialism chronicles the journey of the Bosnian global corporation Energoinvest and its workers from its Yugoslav socialist ideals through decades of dissolution, reconstruction, and post-socialist transformation.

Author Anna Calori provides a company-centric window into the business history of socialist globalization during periods of national development, destruction, and rebuilding. Contrary to popular perceptions of ＂centralized＂ socialist states, Energoinvest actively shaped trade relations with the Global South, driven by a socialist corporate culture that encouraged competition as well as collective decision-making. Even after Yugoslavia’s disintegration in 1992 ended its dreams of a socialist path to globalization, these core characteristics shaped Energoinvest’s adaptation to capitalist transformations and made it a key player in the struggle for Bosnia’s post-war economic reconstruction. Through oral histories and archival research, Calori reveals how Energoinvest’s workers paired the promise of a new model of global integration with their own visions of a working world in which they set the rules of engagement--and how, upon its sale to mostly foreign owners, the marginalization and ethnic homogenization of employee shareholders mirrored changes around citizenship in Bosnia. Now, in the twenty-first century, Energoinvest offers new promises of a post-industrial future, but its often hazy parameters leave workers to rely on the memory of ＂what could have been＂ to make sense of change.

Tracing the long trajectory of a Yugoslav enterprise through decades of large-scale social change, Engineering Global Socialism presents a historical and sociological moment in which workers’ ideas about social and corporate enterprise offered the possibility of a more democratic path to globalization.

Anna Calori is Lecturer in Contemporary Economic History at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow.