BB: Between Labour and Capital: A Social History of 'Privatnici'

In this Brownbag seminar, Mladen Zobec presents his new project PRIVAT-YU, carried out as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at IOS Regensburg. The project explores the everyday lives of private sector workers (privatnici) in socialist Yugoslavia.

The privatnici – self-employed workers and small business owners – occupied an ambiguous position between labour and capital. They were condemned as “speculators with their own labour”, yet also regarded as a potential solution to economic difficulties. PRIVAT-YU looks at the role of private work in Yugoslavia’s economic and social development and at how it connected to broader household livelihood strategies. Drawing on labour and business history and on debates about regional and social inequalities in socialist Yugoslavia, the project moves beyond the usual focus on the social sector and introduces privatnici as a new research subject, offering a comprehensive analysis of their lived experiences.

Mladen Zobec is a sociologist (BA and MA, University of Ljubljana) with a PhD from the Center for Southeast European Studies (University of Graz). He specialises in the Balkans, with a focus on the social and economic history of Yugoslavia, labour migration, ethnic migrant entrepreneurship, and socialist modernity. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg.