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The Polish-Austrian joint project "A Breach in the System. The 'Polonia firms' 1976-1994" aims to study late-socialist Poland’s nascent market society, mass recruitment into private entrepreneurship and the resulting socioeconomic upward mobility through the lens of the so-called “Polonia firms”. This type of foreign-owned companies based on capital investments by diaspora Poles and gained far-reaching operational autonomy in the national economy, constituting an exceptional case of transnational, non-state economic activity in the Comecon bloc.

As a phenomenon that straddled the Iron Curtain and challenged socialist practices of task allocation in production and distribution, the “Polonia firms” offer ample opportunity to rethink issues of agency, chronology and transnational dynamics in Poland’s “long transformation” from the 1970s into the 1990s.

The research project "A Breach in the System. The 'Polonia Firms' 1976 - 1994" is funded by: