Renegotiating ‘Crisis’ and Power in a Bulgarian Factory

‘Everything is New, but Everything is the Same’: Renegotiating ‘Crisis’ and Power in a Post-socialist Bulgarian Factory

I talk here about workers’ discourses on continuous transformations of production politics. This factory, with its ongoing changes of ownership, managerial practices and machinery, provides ethnographic views on employees’ coping strategies, formation of various temporalisations and re-evaluations of past and present power relationships emerging after privatisation.
Through investigating responses to ‘crises’, this paper aims to unfold relations, continuities and discontinuities to employees’ understandings of neoliberal and socialist politics of production and labour in an attempt to explore what contributes to the often heard complaint - mostly at the lower levels of the factory’s hierarchy - that ‘everything is new, but everything is the same’.