Business Collaboration in Post–World War II Capitalist and Socialist Economies

This panel offers three perspectives on enterprise collaboration during the Cold War era: one focusing on cross-border projects involving a Western capitalist firm and the original communist state (the USSR), a second exploring interfirm and enterprise-state relationships within a European socialist republic (Hungary), and a third centered on business-state collaboration inside a South American militarist regime (Peru). Taken together the research findings here presented will suggest the diversity of forms and settings for inter-organizational collaboration, which we find especially robust in projects, whether tightly focused, as in capital construction, or more extended in time and space, as with mechanizing industry and agriculture. (In our view, situated collaborations, when routinized, are reconfigured into stable cooperation.) In these papers, Cold War contests between capitalist and communist regimes are not background scenery, but rather stand front and center in actors’ planning, negotiating, and implementing joint efforts.