Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

ALEKSANDRA JANOVSKAIA
and we agree on a common position about what
government activities we need. We need to
convince the government to cooperate on that. We
are developing a pilot project that should advance
Slovakia (Interview March 2007).
Thus, company stakeholders see company
affairs and general interest of national industrial
capabilities as closely interlinked.
Across the board, representatives of employer
federations, trade unions and national
chambers of commerce and industry referred to
the importance of strong local manufacturing
traditions as relevant for society as a whole
rather than only as an enterprise relevant
issue. The embeddedness of engineering
and manufacturing capabilities in the local
history and economy is explicitly stated by
practitioners. Thus, in Hungary, the legacies
of state socialist industrial development are
evoked as crucial despite the fact that it did
not have automotive final producers after the
World War II. Yet it is argued that it had strong
manufacturing capabilities in bus production,
engines and other components (Interview July
2008). Similarly in Slovakia, the representative
of the chamber of commerce said:
You cannot create industrial history on this
table. You cannot do that. Either it exists or not.
Czechoslovakia in the past had a tradition of
machinery industry […]. It is not possible just
to say: ‘it is good to make electronics, let’s start
producing electronics now’ (Interview March
2007).
The importance of historical heritage of
machine tools production in the emergence of
a strong automotive industry today has been
evoked by the stakeholders. It has been pointed
out that Audi Györ is located in the area of the
traditional Hungarian engine producer Raba.
In Slovakia, the region of Martin has been
a stronghold of arms production (Interview
March 2008).
The destiny of enterprises and industry is
closely linked to broader societal changes.
Industrial modernisation of enterprises and
country modernisation are often seen as
interdependent. Thus, the representative of the
Slovak chamber of commerce stated:
[After Slovakia’s independence], we did not have
a big choice –we were happy if anyone came to us.
There was not much choice – it was a new country,
new Slovakia, new currency, new government,
and new problems. You know how it is: political
ups and downs. This is like when you go to eat:
when you are hungry, you eat anything, but once
you are half full, you will choose the better things
– it is normal. And it is also like this in business
(Interview March 2007).
Making business is also associated with a longterm
sustainability rather than with short-term
windfall gains. Stakeholders differentiated
between good and bad investment. ‘Bad’
investments are associated with speculation,
while ‘good’ investments are associated with
‘productive investment’ that would develop the
company’s capabilities:
The entrepreneurs of the first wave, they
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are the so called ‘gold diggers’. Everybody
wanted to own a company, but they were not
ready to spend their own lives in it. Neither to
wake up at 6 am, nor to take care of hundreds of
employees, not to take care of the sub-suppliers,