Experts in Power: How Technomanagers Shaped—and Challenged—Yugoslav Socialism

Visegrad Lecture Series

Experts in Power: How Technomanagers Shaped—and Challenged—Yugoslav Socialism

by Dr. Tijana Rupčić, Assistant Professor, The Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland

This presentation offers a new perspective on technocracy by examining its distinctive development in socialist Yugoslavia. While technocracy is broadly understood as governance by engineers, scientists, and technical experts, its form and function have differed widely across political systems, from the innovation-driven, efficiency-oriented technocracy of the United States to the centrally planned, industrialization-focused model of the Soviet Union. After the Tito–Stalin split, Yugoslavia forged its own hybrid approach, integrating technocratic expertise into the structures of self-management and market socialism. At the center of this system were the technomanagers: a professional group whose blend of technical knowledge, managerial authority, and socialist ideological formation made them key actors in the modernization efforts of the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, the presentation will also address the state-funded technomanagers of the 1980s. Operating with more autonomy than their Soviet counterparts and within a different ideological landscape than Western technocrats, Yugoslav technomanagers occupied a uniquely influential and precarious position. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, tensions between federal authorities, emerging liberal currents among the educated youth, and the growing power of technomanagers led to political conflict. Technomanagers were increasingly portrayed as threats to socialist equality and federal control, culminating in waves of political repression. Finally, there will be a brief mention of state-funded and supported technomanagers of the 1980s.

This talk situates Yugoslav technocracy within broader scholarly debates and highlights the technomanagers as its central carriers. It argues that Yugoslavia’s experiment with technocratic governance, initially a driver of modernization, ultimately succumbed to ideological rigidity and the reassertion of political authority, revealing the enduring challenges of balancing expertise and power in socialist systems.

The presentation may followed online on Zoom:

https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91299097034?pwd=GuYK1oqUT8ZZRLA3amgQNQQ1KLmeE9.1

Meeting ID: 912 9909 7034

Passcode: 315067