Documents Yugoslavia 24 results

"This book presents a major longitudinal comparative analysis of decision-making in seven organizations in three countries: the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia and the Netherlands.

Although studies of decision-making and power relations within organizations are not new, Decisions in Organizations breaks new ground in two respects. First, it develops methods for tracing and measuring changes in the longitudinal decision-making process over the whole cycle of events relating to tactical and strategic issues. Second, it uses an original combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to allow meaningful interpretation of the statistical results. The outcome is a theoretical model which throws fresh light on the complexities of organizational events and helps to explain the main ingredients of power, and the role and limitation of participative decision-making.

A number of the authors' findings question or extend the conclusions of previous research. For example, the under-utilization of employees' skills and competence, which is widespread, emerges as a very significant outcome of excessively centralized power. Contrary to previous research, conflicts are shown to play a useful role in decision-making and to be to some extent a natural consequence of employee involvement. The implementation phase of decisions, hitherto ignored, is seen as important, and both theoretically and empirically distinct from earlier phases. These and other findings have practical, policy-relevant implications for design and practice."

"The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator' of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history."

"This article reviews the experience of the dissolution of Yugoslavia from the perspective of trade union organisations and actors, both in Yugoslavia itself and the international confederations. The author played a leading role in many of the meetings arranged as a means of keeping dialogue alive between worker representatives, and offers a personal view of the conclusions and achievements. Trade union organisations might have been hostages to the forces that drove the war but the indefatigable efforts of the international confederations to establish a succession of forums, seminars and other platforms at which integration and co-operation might take place in an atmosphere of respect have greatly assisted a subsequent coming together among people who realised that they had not been at war with each other but among whom substantial suspicions and tensions remained. Solidarnost, a platform for trade union organisation, is a tribute to the strategy of the ETUC, and offers scope for a regional reconnection as well as the hope that trade unions might be part of the answer to the continuing problems caused by the war."

"This contribution neither reviews civil society's development in former Yugoslavia before, during and after the recent wars (but refers to it in an explicit way), nor delivers a new theory about civil society (in the Balkans); it proposes instead a framework facilitating the discussion of some crucial questions centred on the state-civil society relationship in the context of a war-to-peace transition process. Combining a political economy and anthropological approach, this article aims to explore – against the background of some conceptual clarifications – the current global architecture of the civil society-state nexus. The text focuses on the consequences of the emergence of a neo-liberal governance-beyond-the-state, on new social and political transnational practices and on the necessity to rethink the question of multi-level governance and, thus, of space and scale. The last section examines the tricky question of whether there is a way out of the dead end. "