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Slovenia: neo-corporatism under the neo-liberal turn

Miroslav Stanojevic (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Employee Relations

ISSN: 0142-5455

Article publication date: 16 May 2018

Issue publication date: 8 June 2018

392

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the formation and development of Slovenia’s neo-corporatist industrial relations system in the 1990s, and its change which overlaps with Slovenia’s accession to the EU and the eurozone.

Design/methodology/approach

The approach is based on the presumption that the transitional processes engaged in by the societies of “real socialism” were merely part of a larger and deeper transition – the great recommodification of the post-war decommodified societies of European democratic capitalism.

Findings

Already by the mid-1990s, the Slovenian industrial relations system contained all key features of the neo-corporatist regimes emerging after the Second World War in the European systems of democratic capitalism. Like those systems, in the 1990s Slovenia also saw a system being formed of political exchanges based on wage restraint policy. The combination of this wage policy and appropriate national monetary policy facilitated the Slovenian economy’s competitiveness and above-average growth. Slovenia was a success story.

Originality/value

The Slovenian system started to change in the middle of the last decade. The trigger of this change was Slovenia’s entry to the eurozone. Since then, Slovenian neo-corporatism has been subject to systematic deregulation. Despite this, the analysis suggests the Slovenian industrial relations system still contains a coordinating mechanism that distinguishes it from other “post-communist”, and, generally speaking, liberal market economies.

Keywords

Citation

Stanojevic, M. (2018), "Slovenia: neo-corporatism under the neo-liberal turn", Employee Relations, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 709-724. https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-01-2017-0008

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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