From the beginning, the purpose of this study has been to find out and to demonstrate rather than to prove. Often in reading about socialism and revolution, I had come upon references to ‘the Yugoslav way’ and the political institutions — workers' councils and communes — associated with it. Theoretically, the institutions of what the Yugoslavs called ‘self-management’ were based on the concept of participatory democracy; in practice, Yugoslavs and foreigners agreed that they worked. Some foreign observers went so far as to advocate the spread of the Yugoslav system to their own countries, indicating that only this kind of participation could eradicate the alienation and loss of social purpose that have afflicted the highly industrialized societies.

Saturated but not satisfied with these general statements, I started to question what ‘self-management’ really meant to people's lives. Perhaps I was reacting with the American distrust of (another country's) political slogans, or with my generation's disillusionment with established priorities, but I wondered how far institutionalized self-management had reached into the lives of ordinary citizens. If the concept is to be applied to very different societies, then we should know whether citizens living under the Yugoslav system come to feel that they are indeed managing their ‘selves’ and their problems.