Authors

Discussion

The Baťa company was the foremost industrial enterprise in interwar former Czechoslovakia, positioning itself as a pioneer of new inventions and a symbol of transformation and disruption of existing paradigms. Its activities not only established a successful business model but also an impactful cultural framework that sought to shape employee identity through corporate media and company-sponsored literature, wherein the notion of the "new industrial man" emerged as an ideal archetype. Since the late 1920s, the company has swiftly expanded globally, attempting to replicate the model developed in its home city of Zlín in its branch plants and company towns, while striving to balance the implementation of its corporate policy with the consideration of local specifics. The mediation of specific subjects through culture significantly contributed to this process.

The proposed paper aims to examine how the Czechoslovak shoe company employed literature and corporate media in alignment with its corporate policy during its global expansion. This presentation seeks also to contribute to the continuing debate concerning the existence and manifestations of colonial practices in Central Europe, where the dominant perception persists that colonialism is an insignificant subject for the region. Consequently, it may be claimed that the Central European geopolitical sphere was closer to the position of the colonised rather than the coloniser. Especially, in the example of Baťa's operations in India, the corporation can be perceived as a form of colonising empire, a viewpoint that also appears in artistic and cultural production.