Slovenian report 2000

By Metka Stare

Table des matières

1 - Methodology
2 - COMMENTS ON THE LITERATURE DEALING WITH INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF SERVICES IN SLOVENIA IN THE PERIOD 1996-2000
7 - References

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METHODOLOGY
The survey took account of articles, books and informal literature written by Slovenian authors and published in Slovenia or elsewhere in the period 1996-2000._ To identify the units of research as broad as possible we applied the combination of the following descriptions : services and culture, services and institutions, business culture and entrepreneurship, services and business culture, regulation and services, private and public services. This mix of descriptions requiring explicit use of the term service as one of the descriptions failed to provide larger number of units. In the second stage, we used only two separate descriptions : institutions; culture. In that way we obtained much broader basis of potential units which were carefully scrutinised to enable the identification of those which fit under the umbrella of institutional and/or cultural dimensions of services. After a lengthy and tiresome process we arrived at 22 bibliographic units in total. It needs to be emphasised however that the discretion of the author of the survey may have produced greater selectivity and bias towards units which explicitly conform to the proposed theme. In that way institutional dimension of services might have been set aside.

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COMMENTS ON THE LITERATURE DEALING WITH INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF SERVICES IN SLOVENIA IN THE PERIOD 1996-2000
The results of the survey suggest that institutional and cultural dimensions of services were not a matter of high importance in service research in Slovenia so far. This comes as no surprise taking into account the overview of published literature on service issues in Slovenia in 1998. The latter established that service issues are continuously being underestimated in strategic policy orientation of the Slovenian government, and to a certain extent also in the research sphere, which is however financed predominantly from the budget. Given the fact that research sphere has not said much on the economic dimension of services in Slovenia either it is understandable to a certain extent that institutional and cultural dimensions of services are only beginning to appear in the research. This is confirmed by the fact that out of 22 identified units, 9 were published in 1999 and that the majority of units (12) is classified under informally published literature (diploma theses dominate). On the other hand, there is as yet no book dealing with those aspects of service research. Other publications are articles and conference papers. The articles are mainly short texts with no serious analytical or empirical background.
Overall, the evidence on institutional and cultural dimensions of services in research literature in Slovenia reveals that no systematic or comprehensive research is being undertaken. The analysis of broader institutional aspects of services development is neglected in particular. The evidence confirms fragmented character of published literature and partial approach in the discussion of institutional or cultural dimensions of services. Most often publications deal with business culture or with tourism-culture interlinkages.
The research of business (organisational) culture is approached from the point of view of identifying its main elements, of how it affects management of firms and its success, quality of services provided and customer satisfaction, how are international perspectives of entrepreneurship and culture reflected in Slovenia. Business culture is understood as a social cement of a firm and as a way of managing business changes in a firm. It is argued that development of business culture is easier when firms open up to external cultural institutions to a largerextent. The support to professional culture is suggested as a means to lop also internal business culture.
On a sectoral level, institutional and cultural dimensions of services are most frequently explored in tourism, revealing the importance of tourism industry for Slovenian economy and foreign trade. The discussion concentrates on the marketing of cultural ìgoodsî as a generator of faster development of tourist services at the country level (Slovenia), as well as at the local level (towns).
Specific aspects of discussion refer to innovation and information culture, to social and legal aspects of quality guaranteeing, to links between culture and economy at the local level.

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References


Bezeljak, Tadeja (1999
fakulteta, Maribor.
Glas, Miroslav (1997), Podjetniötvo in kultura: mednarodne perspektive:
primer Slovenije (Entrepreneurship and culture: an international
perspective: case of Slovenia), Working papers no. 43, Ekonomska fakulteta,
Ljubljana.
Ivanuöa-Bezjak, Mirjana (1999), Organizacijska kultura ali kultura v
podjetju (Organisational culture or culture in an enterprise), Podjetnik,
vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 62-67.
no. 2, Ljubljana,
pp. 121-127.
Petelin, Vojko (1998), Model managementa v Upravi za informatiko in
telekomunikacije MNZ RS (The model of management in the Bureau of
informatics and telecommunications of Slovenian Ministry of Internal
Affairs), master's degree thesis, Ekonomsko-poslovna fakulteta, Maribor.
Rebernik
Although first four months of the year 2000 were also investigated, no
publication related to the topic could be identified.