Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

The article objective is to identify practices of incentive social-labor communication (SLC) in the public space of Novosibirsk and reaction of defense industry workers to this process in the late 1941 - early 1942. The research methodological basis of the research includes SLC concept and typology. SLC is viewed as a process of transferring information from some participants of production relations to others. There are two types of communication strategies in the framework of SLC, that trigger moral factors of labor motivation - prompting and coercion. The institutional form of motivation in the Soviet rear was the epic Stakhanov epos (prometheism) used to create the heroic era of the Great Patriotic War. In this context, the paper shows the process of deploying a propaganda campaign to glorify the foremost workers who performed production tasks by at least 200 %, which was carried out through a combination of channels of verbal and figurative symbolic propaganda providing information exchange between local authorities and factory staff, as well as within the staff. The author concludes that an integral part of such exchange was the theme of labor heroism identified with producing two or several norms. In general, the official propaganda created conditions for strengthening the motivation of Novosibirsk and migrant population, which led to increase of the number of “two hundred” workers (dvukhsotniks) in existing military factories. However, due to many organizational and technical costs associated with establishing defense production, this category of Stakhanovists remained a thin layer in the total mass of workers. At the same time, their motivation to over-fulfill the state defense order, including the influence of the epic cult of two-hundred workers created positive prospects for the further development of social competition as one of the communicative strategies to force social labor relations at the initial period of War with Nazi Germany.