Industrial Management and the Crisis of Managerial Expertise in Economic Transformation: A Case Study of the Czech Footwear Industry1

Abstract

This article examines how Czechoslovak managers coped with the collapse of the centrally planned economy and the rise of capitalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The aim of this text is to analyze how the rapid change in political and economic conditions transformed a specific expert culture that was distinctly technocratic in nature. As a case study the article uses the shoe company Svit Gottwaldov (after 1989 Svit Zlín). The objective of this article is to apply the conclusions of previous research on the managerial class and technocracy in late socialism and post-socialism to the analysis of events within a specific industrial sector. The analytical perspective proposed here serves to complement existing knowledge with research on experience grounded in a specific regional and industrial expert milieu. This article shows that the activities of managers in the era of economic transformation, their long-term plans and their momentary decisions were the result of a complex and ambivalent interaction of continuities and discontinuities in managerial practice and thinking.