CfP –Balkanologie, Vol. 17, n°2 (2022) – Economic Mutations in South-Eastern Europe in Contemporary Times: Entrepreneurs and Places
Deadline for submission of papers: September 1st, 2021
This issue suggests a multidisciplinary study of economic dynamics in South-Eastern Europe from the 18th century onwards, at a time when the Balkan peninsula became increasingly included in the “industrial civilization” that was spreading beyond Western Europe (Stoianovich, 1971). This period is namely marked by the emergence of a new social division of labour, in which economic elites increasingly based their search for profits on the organisation of a formally free workforce in factories, before entrusting the rulers with the political obligation to promote industrial development. Consolidating state apparatuses thus acquired the power to regulate increasingly wider spheres of economic activity, including the organisation of agricultural production and food distribution during the world wars and the promotion of land reform plans in the 1920s. In the meantime, in the interwar period, Eastern European diplomacy continued to mobilise to create spaces for trade cooperation. Going from the growth of cross-border trade between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian territories of the peninsula (Gavrilović, 1969), to the alteration of financial and commercial networks that accompanied the abandonment of planned economy models established in the socialist period, the timeframe shows a gradual lifting of barriers in the circulation of land ownership and in the movement of goods and workers.
Through the study of individual cases, this issue aims to show how entrepreneurs contributed, through initiatives of a spatial scale that we intend to reconstruct precisely, to extending industrial civilisation to the Balkans. Taken from the geography of trade (Desse and Lestrade, 2016), the notion of “mutation” supports our attempt to trace minor evolutions over short periods of time and to detect the causes of the continuous extension and temporary contractions of markets, through the examination of their diachronic accumulation. Our approach, which embraces different fields of social science, aims to avoid the temporal and causal monisms of “transitology”. To this macro-sociological conception, we oppose a bottom-up perspective, which will lead us to grasp economic transformations from their relational character (Grendi, 2009).
This perspective leads us to investigate how socio-economic structures and individual initiatives of entrepreneurs relate. Their combined action causes in particular a process of “creative destruction” which, as Schumpeter’s analysis suggests, constantly alters the general composition of a capital in search of the means to ensure its accumulation (Schumpeter, 1942). The distinguishing feature of entrepreneurs has been repeatedly identified as to be able to adapt to international trade and to state economic policies. When looking closely to the case of enterprises of the Ottoman merchant-compradors (Vitalis, 1997) or Yugoslav privatnici (Žikić, 2007), however, they demonstrate much more than an eagerness to take advantage of the integration of a peripheral economy at the end of the 19th century or of the privatisations of the 1990s. These two examples show that the impulses that run individual businesses do not necessarily share the concepts that inspire state policies nor their evaluation criteria. We consider it therefore essential to take into account the empirical arrangements of the ideal types of rational action in purpose and rational action in value (Weber, 1892). Operating within networks of reciprocal dependence, entrepreneurs can present themselves as bearers of ethical values. Engaged in conflicts for the acquisition of market power or control of the workplace, these social actors develop new cultural and cognitive frameworks, as well as varying sales techniques rooted in traditions of family capitalism (Davidova, 2017). By focusing on these elements, we will observe how cumulative economic and social capitals diversify to generate new ideal-types, from traders who become entrepreneurs in the 19th century to contemporary micro-entrepreneurs. It is by considering these turning points in the long term that it will be possible to focus on long periods in order to identify continuities in entrepreneurial and economic practices, beyond political ruptures.
The mutations we can observe through the figure of the entrepreneur also have an impact on the places in which they operate. To study economic changes in their spatiality means to look at the practices carried out by specific actors in specific places. We understand them as spaces where these mutations are revealed, but also as spaces that instigate and drive them. Thus, the new initiatives of a trading house in an Ottoman or Habsburg port, the transformation of a factory during the 1930s, the fate of a Jewish shop during the Second World War, but also the introduction of a “modern” supermarket in the socialist era, or the development projects financed by Middle Eastern, Asian or European actors in the region during the last thirty years are all spaces in which mutations can be located. Moreover, this issue examines the way in which public spaces or the environment are affected or recomposed through economic mutations and how the study of particular places allows us to better understand these mutations and thus how they concentrate, impel, or are transformed by, economic mutations.
From a micro-sociological analysis perspective, we intend to question the individual and family trajectories of entrepreneurs and examine how they can be inserted or rearranged within economic mutations. Other topics that we intend to explore include the role of ethics or local roots among economic actors or beyond the economic capital of these actors, their social capital. Social capital can be explored by working on the entrepreneur’s corporate cultures, on the way in which they shape their environment or provoke debate and controversy in society, on the setting up of charity networks, or on the role they can play in the dissemination of national, religious or social ideologies.
This issue will bring together articles based on original research on the economic mutations that the Balkan Peninsula has undergone since the end of the 19th century. The data may be based on fieldwork, archival research or alternative methods, which the authors will be asked to explain. We would also like to suggest ways of thinking about the methods that may have been used in social science research during the current health crisis, where fieldwork has proven difficult to undertake. Finally, a more open section will include methodological reflections on our research areas (actors and places of economic change), collected during interviews reviewing consolidated methods in the literature on the region, as well as field reports from researchers.
Proposal submission
Proposals for articles, redacted in either French or English, have to be sent by e-mail to the editors of the issue: Andrea Umberto Gritti (au.gritti@gmail.com), Milana Čergić (milana.cergic@gmail.com), Mehdi Belasri (m.belasri2020@gmail.com) on the 1st September 2021 at the latest. They will include the title, an abstract (up to 500 words), five key-words, a bio-bibliographic note and the authors’ contact information. The authors will be informed by the editors about the selection of proposals in October 2021. Those whose proposals will be retained have to present a first version of their papers before 15th December 2021. The articles will be submitted to a reviewing, and in a month the authors will be supposed to modify their papers according to the remarks, critics and suggestions received. The issue should finally be published in December 2022.
Bibliography
Davidova, Evguenia, 2012, Balkan Transitions to Modernity and Nation-States: Through the Eyes of Three Generations of Merchants (1780s–1890s), Leiden and Boston, Brill.
Desse, René-Paul et Sophie Lestrade, 2016, Mutations de l’espace marchand, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Gavrilović, Slavko, 1969, Prilog istoriji trgovine i migracije Balkan-Podunavlje XVIII i XIX stoleća, Beograd, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti.
Grendi, Edoardo, 2009, « Micro-analyse et histoire sociale », Écrire l’histoire 3: 67-80.
Guiheux Gilles et Alina Surubaru, 2014, « Entrepreneurs des transitions », dans Pierre-Marie Chauvin éd., Dictionnaire sociologique de l’entrepreneuriat. Paris, Presses de Sciences Po: 216-227.
Schumpeter, Joseph, 2000 [1942], Capitalism, socialism and democracy, London and New York, Routledge.
Stoianovich, Traian, 1971, “Material Foundations of Preindustrial Civilization in the Balkans”, Journal of Social History 4 (3): 205-262.
Vitalis, Robert, 1990, “On the Theory and Practice of Compradors: The Role of Abbud Pasha in the Egyptian Political Economy”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 22 (3): 291-315.
Weber, Max, 1892, Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland, Leipzig, Duncker und Humblot.
Žikić, Bojan, 2007, “Ljudi (koji nisu sasvim) kao mi. Kulturna konceptualizacija pojma privatnik u Srbiji”, Srpski genealoški centar: 52-74.
https://journals.openedition.org/balkanologie/2668