Even before the end of the one-party system, both Hungary and Slovenia experienced systematic internal market reforms. After the abrupt political transition there has been a complete shift to a market economy. In Hungary, this had clear features of a neoliberal transformation; but in Slovenia an alternative path was taken, involving neo-corporatism with its Keynesian welfare correlates. Yet during the last decade, a new wave of radical neoliberal change has occurred in both countries. In this article, I compare the transformations in both countries, in order to identify the conditions underlying the neoliberal turn in each.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32731229
In the 1990s a regulative pattern that strongly mirrored the structure and basic functions of post-war European corporatism was formed and stabilised in Slovenia. The system enabled the country's relatively fast and smooth inclusion in the European monetary system. However, its former rise and recent tendency towards disorganisation clearly overlap with the qualitatively different phases of Europeanisation. At first glance, this overlap supports the thesis that there has been a decline of corporatist pacts in the post-EMU period, suggesting that the decline is caused by the more or less successful internalisation of EMU demands and pressures during the accommodation process. In the Slovenian case, this interpretation is basically misleading. It is true that the decline of corporatism in Slovenia was connected with EMU pressures, but the primary source of its disorganisation lay in its specific micro-foundations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 31346781
This paper raises fundamental questions about the meaning of reputation and its measurement. It also considers the context of the recent global economic crisis, which brought about the lowest levels of trust in corporations, and a serious erosion of reputational capital of the corporations previously regarded as highly reputable. It maps out the semantic content of corporate reputation in an attempt to capture the ideas that individuals associate with this concept and to contrast it with the established standard reputational measures of reputation. The empirical part is based on semantic network analysis, a special form of social network analysis, where connections are formed by the use of overlapping concepts. The results show that there are a few strong determinants of reputation. They mainly coincide with the established reputational measures; however, some strong determinates seem to be context-specific and reflect the current global economic and financial crisis. The findings of the study correspond to the proposition in the literature that reputation is socially constructed and deliver insights into the relevance of standard and universal reputational measures.
COBISS.SI-ID: 31455325
We apply Sen's capability approach to evaluate the capabilities of Slovenian parents to reconcile paid work and family in the context of the transition to a market economy. We examine how different levels of capabilities together affect the work-life balance (WLB) of employed parents. We combine both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches. The results of our quantitative and qualitative research show that increased precariousness of employment and intensification of work create gaps between the legal and normative possibilities for successful reconciliation strategies and actual use of such arrangements in Slovenia. The existing social policies and the acceptance of gender equality in the sphere of paid work enhance capabilities for reconciliation of paid work and parenthood, whereas the intensification of working lives, the dominance of paid work over other parts of life, and the acceptance of gender inequalities in parental and household responsibilities limit parents' capabilities to achieve WLB.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30465629
Although Slovenia is a small, relatively new nation-state, it has been justifiably called "neocorporatist" and a "coordinated market economy," making it unique among postcommunist societies, including ten new EU member states. The authors explore how it became so, and in the process shed light on the debate between varieties of capitalism (VoC) and power resources theories about how coordinated or neocorporatist economies emerge. Although several of the elements predicted by the varieties of capitalism perspective were present in Slovenia, others were not. The authors also find that a significant mobilization by organized labor at a crucial point played an essential role, and overall find that power resources theory has greater explanatory power in this case. However, in turning from explaining how the Slovenian model was formed to why it was so unique among postcommunist cases, they find that specific historical legacies were critical, particularly those from the distinct Yugoslav form of communism.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30330717