Criticism, management, business: social research and sociology as instruments of governance in Czechoslovakia after 1969
2019
Abstract
The study examines the role of sociology and social research in Czechoslovakia as part of authoritarian governance in the post-1968 consolidation regime, using the example of the central legitimization doctrine of that period, ie the theory of the scientific technological revolution and its offshoots, namely social planning and social forecasting. However, on the example of sociology of the so-called socialist way of life, it also shows how a heterodox paradigm of participatory forecasting was born right in the center of official Marxist-Leninist sociology, and how it anticipated democratization and the notion of "civil society" relatively long before 1989.
The last part of the chapter is devoted to the transformation of social