Miroslav Stanojević

Varieties of Capitalism, Power Resources, and Historical Legacies: Explaining the Slovenian Exception

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.

The Complexity of Relocation and the Diversity of Trade Union Responses: Efficiency-oriented Foreign Direct Investment in Central Europe

Relocations within an enlarged Europe are often portrayed as an unavoidable destiny or irresistible threat for workers. The article outlines a number of contingent factors which determine how serious are the threats and how feasible is an effective union response. Such factors are then tested through in-depth case studies of 12 plants in the automotive components sector (where cross-border competition is particularly strong), showing how varied can be the scenarios for industrial relations in multinational companies.

The impact of socio-economic shocks on social dialogue in Slovenia

This article first outlines the main features of social dialogue and collective bargaining in Slovenia during the 1990s. It then identifies the main changes affecting actors and processes that emerged in the 2000s and during the recent economic crisis. The highly coordinated Slovenian system of the 1990s has been exposed to strong socio-economic shocks in the 2000s. Under pressure from these shocks the system’s capacity for coordination has been weakened. Nevertheless, all attempts to replace social dialogue structures by unilaterally imposed government policies have been basically unsuccessful.

Conditions for a neoliberal turn: The cases of Hungary and Slovenia

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.

The Rise and Decline of Slovenian Corporatism: Local and European Factors

Abstract 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 countrys 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.

Slovenia: neo-corporatism under the neo-liberal turn

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reveal the formation and development of Slovenia’s neo-corporatist industrial relations system in the 1990s, and its change which overlaps with Slovenia’s accession to the EU and the eurozone. Design/methodology/approach The approach is based on the presumption that the transitional processes engaged in by the societies of “real socialism” were merely part of a larger and deeper transition – the great recommodification of the post-war decommodified societies of European democratic capitalism. Findings Already by the mid-1990s, the Slovenian industrial relations system contained all key features of the neo-corporatist regimes emerging after the Second World War in the European systems of democratic capitalism. Like those systems, in the 1990s Slovenia also saw a system being formed of political exchanges based on wage restraint policy. The combination of this wage policy and appropriate national monetary policy facilitated the Slovenian economy’s competitiveness and above-average growth. Slovenia was a success story. Originality/value The Slovenian system started to change in the middle of the last decade. The trigger of this change was Slovenia’s entry to the eurozone. Since then, Slovenian neo-corporatism has been subject to systematic deregulation. Despite this, the analysis suggests the Slovenian industrial relations system still contains a coordinating mechanism that distinguishes it from other “post-communist”, and, generally speaking, liberal market economies.

Slovenia at the crossroads: Increasing dependence on supranational institutions and the weakening of social dialogue:

Since the world crisis hit Slovenia, the reconfiguration of the industrial relations system has mainly been exogenously determined. Public debt and the related dependence on supranational institutions and financial (bond) markets have been strongly correlated with the unilateral imposition of these institutions’ demands and pressures. Despite the mounting pressures, the formal structure of industrial relations has not undergone major changes, but within this structure there are clear signs of major changes in power relations and in the logic and quality of the industrial relations system.

Class Concepts and Stratification Research in Slovenia

This article deals with the concept of class and class analysis in sociological research in the last few decades in Slovenia. It reveals the specific reasons for the relatively marginal role of this sort of analysis before and especially after 1990. First, it lists a selection of the key class and stratification studies during the communist era. Second, it describes the class and stratification studies that occurred before and around the regime change (1980–1991). Third, it describes a number of stratification research studies after 1991 (to the present), with many international components. The research efforts of a few influential research groups in Slovenia that have engaged in class and stratification studies, following special approaches, are presented and commented on: the Marxist tradition, a Bourdieuian approach focusing on symbolic discourse, and a structurally based labor process approach. In the conclusion, both a substantive and methodological account of relative achievements in the field are offered.