Making transition, remaking workers. Market and privatisation reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina: the case of Energoinvest (1988-2008)

This thesis focuses on the social transformations that accompanied market and privatisation reforms in the late- and post-Yugoslav space. It argues that in the historical shift from state socialism to the post-Yugoslav economic system, it was not only work relations that changed, but with them, the very meaning of work, productivity, and property; as workers’ role in the workplace was remade, so was workers’ identity. Focussing on the case of a prominent Yugoslav exporting company (Energoinvest) – which was embedded in global trade and a non-aligned economic world for much of the socialist period – it shows that a key intent of market and privatisation reforms from the late 1980s to the early 2000s was the (re)shaping of workers’ identity. The thesis uses the space of the industrial workplace – as imagined by experts, organised by companies, and experienced and remade by workers – to provide a grounded case study to show how the reformulation of workers’ identity has played out over subsequent economic transitions. Drawing upon oral history interviews, archival, and workplace material, the thesis claims that the three waves of privatisation and market reforms in Bosnia (in 1989, in 1997, and in 2002) - from the ‘socialist path’ to liberalisation, to ‘ethno-neoliberal’ privatisation - were not simply imposed from outside by hegemonic forces of western liberal markets, but were also shaped by indigenous economic thoughts and practices. These different modes of reform and privatisation represent different moments of contestations – over the meaning of ‘work’, ‘worker’, ‘productivity’, ‘ownership’, ‘belonging’ - between and within workers, managers, experts, local politicians, the global market and the international community. This co-existence of overlapping models of reform created hybrid post-socialist identities, which in turn contributed to shaping economic reforms and their implementations in workplaces. By exploring the interactions between economic reform and identity-making, the thesis contributes to the fields of the global history of socialism, transition studies in Central- and South-Eastern Europe, labour and identity studies in socialist and post-socialist Yugoslavia, as well as post-conflict studies