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Human Relations, Vol. 60, No. 10, 1551-1574 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0018726707083477

Transition and organizational dissonance in Serbia

Graham Hollinshead

International Human Resource Management at the University of Hertfordshire Business School, UK, g.hollinshead{at}herts.ac.uk

Mairi Maclean

School of Strategy and International Business, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, UK, mairi.maclean{at}uwe.ac.uk

This study reveals and analyses contradictory narrative voices within a local enterprise in the troubled Balkan region, recently acquired by a multinational enterprise. We employ case study research methods informed by semi-structured interviews with management and worker representatives to expose underlying and conflicting rationalities relating to the upgrading of technological and work systems, as a management-led response to growing market pressures. Recognition of the post-socialist enterprise as a site of political contestation and social fragmentation serves to frustrate broader aspirations of policy-makers towards early transitional closure, and limits the potential applicability of linear western conceptions of organizational change to transitional realities. The Serbian case presents an extreme variant of other, post-socialist contexts, institutionally volatile and politically charged. In an increasingly unbounded, indeterministic world, however, it emerges as potentially archetypal, thus enhancing our understanding of organizations and their management in the new global era.

Key Words: dissonance • micro-politics • modernization and anti-modernization • narrative • post-socialist transition • Serbia


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