Managing New Worlds: Narratives of Managers who had to Make a New World Function
Slovenia is today a relatively well-developed country that developed mostly under the peculiar Yugoslav system of workers' self management with neither state nor private ownership of productive capital. Slovenia took a very gradual approach to socio-economic transformation in the post-socialist era, so that much of the old system remains intact and has provided a stable framework throughout the transformation period. From Slovenia we can learn a great deal about how an alternate system was made to function (or not) from the narratives of the managers directly involved.
This workshop will analyse some of the interviews of the managers who were very influential in running the companies that developed under the unique Slovene/Yugoslav system of socialism. These interviews were collected and transcribed by the team of researchers in the project Habitus of the Slovene Entrepreneur from 1960 to 1990. The workshop will provide hands-on experience to the participants in biographic-narrative analysis, while the workshop organisers will benefit from the diverse insights of the participants. Such interpretive sessions are now becoming common at similar workshops (for instance the annual Interpretieren und Verstehen workshop co-organised by Jurij Fikfak at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia; see also Fikfak, 2004 and Chamberlayne et al., 2000).
The workshop will require approximately six to eight participants per interview analysis session, each of which (if more than one) will require about three hours. We suggest two non-overlapping sessions of two interviews each for a total of four interviews to be analysed. The format will follow a biographic-narrative-interpretive method such as that outlined in Wengraf (2001). Each interview will be presented by one of the research team of the Habitus project, and interview transcripts will be made available to participants in advance of the workshop to facilitate preliminary interpretive work. The proposed workshop sessions can (if necessary) be held in one or more of the lecture halls of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
References
Chamberlayne, P., J. Bornat in T. Wengraf (eds.) (2000) The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: Comparative Issues and Examples, London: Routlege.
Fikfak, Jurij, Frane Adam and Detlef Garz (eds.) (2004) Qualitative Research: Different Perspectives, Emerging Trends, Ljubljana Založba ZRC.
Wengraf, T. (2001) Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographic Narrative and Semi-Structured Methods, London: Sage.
Workshop organisers
Jeffrey David Turk, Jurij Fikfak, Tatiana Bajuk Senčar
Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts,
Novi trg 2, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Jože Prinčič
Institute of Contemporary History, Kongresni trg 1, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Contact
Jeffrey Turk: jeffrey.turk@zrc-sazu.si