805 © Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i., Praha 2017 Discourses of Thrift and Consumer Reasonability in Czech State-Socialist Society* MARTIN HÁJEK and TOMÁŠ SAMEC** Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague Abstract: The article examines how notions of thrift, saving, and frugality were present and active in the state-socialist discourses of economic behav- iour and what meaning these notions carried. The research is based on three kinds of data: the offcial state-socialist public discourse of economic behav- iour as presented in transcripts of parliamentary speeches, household guides and manuals, and eyewitness accounts of the state-socialist era recollected in oral history interviews. Such a multi-faceted corpus of discourse data made it possible to examine factual and normative aspects of thrift in state-socialist discourses and compare them with the accounts of everyday practices and tactics that may well contradict the offcial discourse. The analysis reveals that (a) notions of thrift and saving were strongly present throughout the period in all discourses examined, (b) both terms underwent a semantic shift from a productive to a restrictive meaning over time, and (c) both notions were even- tually publicly sidelined by the emphasis on raising revenue. Despite fading from public discourse in the late 1980s, the notion of thrift had by then become instilled in the subjective understanding of the ‘reasonable consumer’, a con- cept that can therefore be considered a precursor of the contemporary concept of consumer responsibilisation. Keywords: thrift, saving, discourse analysis, socialism, consumers, consumer responsibilisation Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2017, Vol. 53, No. 6: 805–831 https://doi.org/10.13060/00380288.2017.53.6.376 * Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (grant number 15-04863S). We thank two anonymous referees for their many suggestions, which helped us to substantially improve the paper. We are also grateful to Markéta Fuchs for help with the English. ** Direct all correspondence to: Martin Hájek, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles Univer- sity, U Kříže 8, 158 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic, e-mail: martin.hajek@fsv.cuni.cz; Tomáš Samec, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic, e-mail: tomas.samec@fsv.cuni.cz.