Dear list members:

Anthropologist, assistant professor of Sociology at the Universidade do
Algarve (Portugal), I'm researching on Company - sometimes called
Corporate, or Enterprise, or even Factory - Museums. I'm particulary
interested in the «Trudovoi Slavy» of many large companies in former
socialist countries.

It seems to me that the development and role of Company Museums in Eastern
European countries, as in Russia and earlier in the Soviet Union, is a
phenomenon that should definitely be considered seriously in a research,
now that many company museums established in the Soviet-era have been
closed or transformed.

In contrast to Western, or capitalist, enterprises which sometimes set up
such museums as "public relations, marketing and/or personal relations
vehicle, focused on the history and/or development of the product in which
they specialize" (definition of Corporate Museums by Prof. Victor J.
Danilov), company museums in those countries and times - and indeed it
seems there still are many of them - served a Party ideological,
propaganda, and/or didactic purpose - as well as in a C.P. context, a
serious and, I would venture to suggest, a competitive "public relations"
purpose of promoting the best interests of a particular factory and the
extent to which its
workers exemplified and carried out C.P. directives.  
 
Museum displays in older factories that are carry-overs from the
prerevolutionary period specialized in presentation of displays
demonstrating the extent to which their worker participated in the
revolutionary movement, which often revealing documentation-pictures,
posters, handbills, and the like from their often well-kept factory
archives. Many of them retain a significant volume of original
documentation and/or copies of documents transferred to state archives.

Later, factories started preparing films and/or other audiovisual materials
about their history, exemplifying their positive and contributory role in
the "workers's" state.  Some of their museums even include auditoriums for
the presentation of films to school and other excursion groups.

Today, a few company museums have tried to adapt to the Western tourist
trade - since the old style Intourist insistence including factories in
tourist itineraries is a bit passe - to gain admission fees from tourist
groups. They have tried to revamp their museums so as to attract tourist
dollars - such as chocolate factories included on Western tourist
itineraries.

That of course, is a new, post-1991 departure!

If you have informations, references, contacts, impressions,... about this
kind of museums - before or after 1991, please, (E)mail it all to me. I'll
be very grateful - my research will only be possible with your information.
Hope to hear from you soon.

Antonio Eduardo Mendonca  
(special acknowledgements: Mrs. Patricia K. Grimsted)
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