Cooperatives, Cooperative Elites, and Politics in Central Europe in the Second Half of the 19th Century and the First Half of the 20th Century

The international scientific symposium is organized by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the National Museum of Agriculture in Prague.

Programme

The proposed symposium focuses on cooperatives as a whole because their economic and social roles cannot be studied separately without understanding their cultural, national, political, and other roles. A very important factor is research in a field of elites (local, regional, and national) and their roles in founding and leading of cooperatives. Therefore, cooperatives are seen as interest groups that are crossing their original economic borders. By joining a broader field of a social and cultural environment, cooperatives get into interactions with a public administration and find themselves in the gravitational field(s) of politics. The spectrum of mutual relations between cooperatives and political subjects is very diverse. It includes the phenomena of lobbying and merging of cooperative and political elites etc. The cooperatives also join (or are drawn) into the mechanism of satellite organizations of political parties (together with labor, youth, women, and other unions, etc.). Besides the goal of deepening our knowledge about the cooperative movement’s development, the symposium also focuses on the importance of the social and economic roles of cooperatives. Finally, we hope to contribute to the more objective understanding of the cooperative movement, which is still much biased following the infamous legacy of the state-socialism era and the unsuccessful transformation of cooperatives in the 1990s.

Call for Abstracts_EN

Please send an abstract of up to 300 words to Jan Slavíček (slavicek@hiu.cas.cz) by 8. 11. 2021 at the latest.

Symposium languages:
Czech, English