Goran Musić is a social historian of labor in East-Central and Southeast Europe, approaching the field from a broader disciplinary background in Global History, Nationalism Studies and Political Economy. After earning a PhD degree in History and Civilization from the European University Institute, he held positions at the University of Graz, Central European University and the University of Vienna, where he researched, published and taught on theoretical and methodological aspects of Global Labor History, 20th Century Revolutions, Social Transformations in (Post)Socialism, Workplace Democracy, Global Value Chains and East-South exchanges during the Cold War.

He is the author of Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class: A Story of Two Self-Managed Factories (CEU Press) which tells the story of industrial labor in socialist Yugoslavia, looking into the altering ways in which the blue-collar workers understood the recurring cycles of crisis and reforms of workers’ self-management, the changing nature of the relationship between different occupational groups inside the factories, as well as the interplay between class and national identities. Full CV.

 

Current Research Project

Sewing the Periphery Together: European Textile Production Subcontracting and the Transformation of Labor in the Balkans and Maghreb deals with the origins of outward processing production schemes in the textile industries, asking how have transformations of production processes in Western Europe influenced development polices, labor relations and gender roles among workers on its Eastern and Southern periphery.

 

Research Interests

•  Labor in (post)socialism
•  East-South exchanges during Cold War
•  Workplace democracy
•  Nationalism and Development

 

Selected Publications

• Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class: A Story of Two Self-Managed Factories (Budapest: CEU Press, 2021)
•  “Chains of Labor: Connecting Global Labor History and the Commodity Chain Paradigm”, in Andrea Komlosy and Goran Musić (eds.), Global Commodity Chains and Labor Relations (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 1–26. (with Andrea Komlosy)
•  “Outward Processing Production and the Yugoslav Self-Managed Textile Industry in the 1980s”, in Andrea Komlosy and Goran Musić (eds.), Global Commodity Chains and Labor Relations (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 251–273
•  “New Perspectives on East European Labor History: An Introduction”, in Labor: Studies in Working Class History, vol. 17, no. 3, 2020, pp. 19‒29 (with Rory Archer)
•  “Approaching the Socialist Factory and its Workforce: Considerations from Fieldwork”, in (former) Yugoslavia, in Labor History, vol. 58, no. 1, 2017, pp. 44‒66, (with Rory Archer)
•  “Diesel Power: Serbian Hip Hop from the Pleasure of the Privileged to Mass Youth Culture”, in Milosz Miszczynski (ed.), Hip-Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency and Social Change, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2017). (together with Predrag Vukčević).
•  “Yugoslavia: Workers’ Self-Management as State Paradigm”, in Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (eds.), Ours to Master and to Own: Workers control from the commune to the present (Chicago: Haymarket books, 2011), pp. 172‒191.