Corporate behaviour – corporate environment

The story of research methodology

Abstract

In the years between the economic reform of 1968 and the collapse of the socialist system in 1989, a large number of case studies were produced on the  functioning of corporations, corporate divisions, groups of corporations, and sectors. Anyone who reads these writings today can become acquainted not only with the events and processes of a vanished world (companies that no longer exist, market conditions, management and management methods, regulations), but also with the social research method and approach that was prevalent in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. In the study, I try to find out why a part of the Hungarian scientific community chose this method, and why in this specific period. Why did we trust qualitative research, the systematization and measurability of anecdotal events? What caused its decline after the change of system? Or, to put it another way: why was this approach and method popular  during the years of restrictions on scientific freedom, and not during the years when these restrictions disappeared?