Title: Slovene directors as searchers: tying the local socialist system to the outside world

Authors: Jeffrey David Turk

Addresses: Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Chemin des Deux Maisons 67/28, 1200 Brussels, Belgium

Abstract: We look at the role of some of the key Slovene directors during socialism in order to shed some light on how Slovenia developed comparatively well under socialism while elsewhere the results of the socialist experiment were mostly disappointing. The analysis presented here uses interviews from the research project Habitus of the Slovene Entrepreneur between 1960 and 1990. We make use of William Easterly|s (2006) distinction between |planners| and |searchers| in his book The White Man|s Burden (Penguin, New York), where he criticises the top-down implementation of Western-style markets and economic recipes in developing countries. Slovenia developed a unique system during the socialist experiment, but rather than focusing on how that system was supposed to work from a planner|s perspective, we look here at the role of key managers as searchers who had to find ways to drive the development their own parts of that system.

Keywords: green economics; biographical methods; Slovenia; economic development; Slovene directors; socialism; entrepreneurship; planners; searchers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGE.2011.042555

International Journal of Green Economics, 2011 Vol.5 No.2, pp.143 - 166

Published online: 16 Oct 2014 *

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