My health care administration and management
Master's Thesis (1990) dealt with SIZ
(Samoupravna Interesna Zajednica), a
social organization that was portrayed then as being unique to the
Yugoslav self-management socialism.A New SourceIn 2004, I happened to read the book 'The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea' which recounts the history of the joint-stock company, that pillar of corporate capitalism. To illustrate how German companies differ from their American counterparts, the authors point out that a German company is often called Interessen Gemeinschaft (IG) (as in the IG Farben of the Holocaust infamy). It turns out that IG roughly translates to community of interests in English and as interesna zajednica in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian.Bingo, I said. That's where Edvard Kardelj, the ideologue of self-management socialism, got the idea. (In this undated photo, he is seen to the right of Josip Broz Tito, then the president of Yugoslavia).He blatantly plagiarized the term and turned IG into SIZ by just adding an S (for samoupravna or self-managed) in front of interesna zajednica.EpilogueI thought, this would have been interesting to discuss in my thesis had I known about it at the time. But now all of it is irrelevant: Kardelj is dead so are the self-managed socialism and Yugoslavia. Such is the passing of life. |
