PROBLEME GLOBALE, RĂSPUNSURI ROMÂNEȘTI: COOPERAREA ROMÂNIEI CU NAȚIUNILE UNITE PRIVIND REGLEMENTĂRILE MUNCII INDUSTRIALE ÎN ANII 1970

Abstract:

By the late 1960s, the UN started several programs that aimed to transfer technical expertise from the Western countries to the Socialist bloc. For example, in 1967, there was established in Bucharest The Center for the Improvement of Industrial Managers (CEPECA), a training facility heavily funded under the UNDP frameworks. The paper questions the means behind the process of making industrial management into a strategic priority of the socialist state, documenting, thus, the specific forms that scientific knowledge had acquired in Romania and what such models tell us about the developmental agenda of the state. It further advocates for reading such transfers both convert knowledge into organizational structures and actions and articulate decision- making hierarchies at various levels of the state’s leadership. Thus, the paper pursues two purposes. First, to highlight the emergence of an area of expertise on industrial management and its uses, and thus to stress how local actors, practices, and processes have become involved in the creation, dissemination, and transformation of a transnational body of knowledge. Second, to flesh out the professional implications of these transfers in socialist Romania by looking at how such knowledge has increased the experts’ visibility in decision-making processes.

Keywords:

Romania; development; socialism; trans-national; economic reforms; the 1970s.