Making and Becoming "New (Wo)Men": Rationalisation, Subjectification, and Materiality in the Industrial Town of Zlín and the Baťa Company, 1920–1950

The project was carried out at the IEG from 2014 – 2024. Making and Becoming "New (Wo)Men" enquired into the history of social experiments in industrial capitalism. It studied private-industry planning, subjective appropriation and urban materiality in the Czechoslovak industrial town of Zlín and the shoe company Baťa. The project analysed the history of Zlín as a factory town from the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state after the First World War to early state socialism (1920–1950), i.e. it included the consecutive economic and political ruptures. With a focus on disciplinary action towards workers and clerks in the Baťa company the project raised the question, how the rationalisation of production was extended towards workers and how these workers should be made "new (wo)men". Furthermore, the project studied the working people as subjects and carved out, how these individuals have appropriated the social experiment, have expressed their Eigen-Sinn and have become "new (wo)men" or avoided any appropriation. Finally, the project analysed the material and social infrastructure of Zlín that has become both a product and a tool of social planning and fostered the dynamics of discipline and appropriation. The analysis of a private-industry experiment in social engineering introduced Czechoslovakia to a broader European history of industrial and radical social planning in the first half of the twentieth century.
The project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2020 to 2024.