Ethnologia Balkanica 14 (2010)

Intercultural Experiences of Hauzmajstor

A Case Study on Repatriate Entrepreneurship in Serbia

Vesna Vuini-Nekovi, Belgrade

Abstract
This case study gives an account of the development of Hauzmajstor, a small real estate maintenance firm, founded by a Serbian repatriate in 2004. Beginning with its start up as the first
daughter firm of Komon sens, the consulting and project development firm, the study follows
its adaptation to the local business environment, concentrating on its organizational and business culture. The study also presents a detailed description and analysis of intercultural experiences of the Hauzmajstor insiders focussed on the perception of their first contacts and established relations with foreign (Western) clients. Conclusions deal with the mechanisms and
the processes of establishing intercultural communication.

1 Introduction1
This study is about a small start up firm founded by a Serbian repatriate2 who
returned to Belgrade in 2001.3 His professional experience had been profiled by
highly specialized training in the Western type of management, expatriate positions located in both the West and the East, and the cultural experience in the
countries of the former Eastern Block that were undergoing transition.4
This paper resulted from work on the FP6 project entitled Eastern Enlargement Western
Enlargement. Cultural Encounters in the European Economy and Society after the Accession, implemented in the 20042007 period. I would like to thank the project team members for various inputs in this paper, as well as the anonymous reviewer who stimulated
elaboration of some relevant theoretical concepts.
2
In this study the term repatriates will refer to professionals who return to their country of
birth, citizenship or allegiance on their own will, following favorable job opportunities.
This term is usually used in pair with the term expatriates, referring to those professionals who temporarily migrate to take up job opportunities outside their country of birth or
citizenship.
3
For a study of motives for return and various culture shock experiences of Serbian repatriates that belong to the same wave of return migration for better business opportunities, see
Vuini-Nekovi 2003.
4
Working for Phillip Morris, S.J. spent altogether nine years in Switzerland (working on
Central Europe Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, former Yugoslavia and Albania), Russia (Director for Northwest Russia in Petersburg; Regional director for mar1

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After working for large multinational companies both abroad and at home,
this man decided to leave the secure shelter of the Coca Cola representative office in Belgrade and start his own business. His entrepreneurial activities from
2004 onwards go in two parallel directions: one turns to the consultancy needs
of foreign and domestic companies interested in restructuring, investments and
other business activities in Serbia, and the other one to the very concrete local needs for a house maintenance service. The first activity is being realized
through 5 (Common Sense Group) and the second via its daughter
firm Hauzmajstor.
The study will concentrate on Hauzmajstor and investigate different themes
tied to its business culture. Intercultural encounters were to be studied within
the firm and towards the surrounding business environment, i.e., with foreign
clients. Thus, in the first part, we will start with the description of the ideas and
standards built into the initial (ideal) repatriate business model, and continue
with studying how this model has been implemented in the organizational and
business culture of the company. In the second part, experiences in communication and business relations with the foreign (Western) clients will be analyzed
from the insiders point of view. Hauzmajstors performance from the clients
point of view will also be considered.
It should be noted that the perceptions of each others business culture will
be followed in two phases, the phase of initial contacts, and that of established
relations, the logic of relational dynamics that was imposed by the interviewees themselves. Also, the perceived and real importance of contractual relations
will be examined taking into consideration the experiences of the Hauzmajstor
management (employees).
Not wanting to burden the empirical research with too many theoretical concepts, this study will start off with only two basic suppositions. First, on the
general level, the concept of culture implicitly applied in this study will incorporate values, standards, relations and practices of a social group.6 Second,
on the more specific level, two categories of socio-economic culture will be recognized, those being: (a)organizational culture,7 referring to the organizational
keting for Russia in Moscow) and Kazakhstan (Director of marketing for Central Asia in
Almaty). In 2001 he returned to Belgrade to become the Director of Coca Cola for Serbia,
Montenegro and Macedonia.
5
is pronounced as [komon sens].
6
Taking into consideration that the author of this text is an anthropologist, she took the freedom of moulding this working definition of culture assuming that it is the most appropriate
one for the needs of this study. Otherwise, Kroeber and Kluckhohn have noted 156 different definitions of the same concept (Kroeber, Kluckhohn 1952).
7
A very creative and layered definition of organizational culture may also be found in Alexandrov (2004: 151). Also, we can argue that anthropology has influenced contempo-

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values and practices within the company under scrutiny, and (b)business culture, referring to the values and practices implemented in a company as well as
those projected towards the surrounding business environment.8
While the overall research for the case study lasted one year, starting with
March 2005, the research activities in the field were undertaken in three phases.
The first phase went on from March to May, 2005, the second from August to
September, 2005, and the third from December 2005 to March 2006.
Initially, 15 interviews were planned, encompassing insiders on different
levels of the organizational hierarchy, as well as a few domestic and foreign clients. Owing to the new developments initiated by the appearance of a foreign
partner, the number of interviews increased to 24due to the need for repeated
interviews with the key actors. They were, indeed, implemented on all hierarchical levels, as planned, starting from the senior partner and junior partners in
Komon sens and Hauzmajstor, one being the president and the other the general
manager of Hauzmajstor, the financial and technical managers, the team leaders, and ending with the call center operators and servicemen. The interviews
began at the highest level, came down to the common employees and streamed
upwards again. Two interviews were carried out with the area manager of Rustler, the Austrian partner firm, and four with the clients, private and commercial, the second of which included mixed and foreign firms.
Research also included detailed observation of daily work activities in Hauzmajstor, starting from office and call center operations, use of the specialized
call center computer program and databases, as well as visiting intervention sites
with the servicemen. Written sources were used as well, starting from the texts
presented at the Komon sens and Hauzmajstor websites,9 articles published for
marketing purposes that appeared in the press, as well as the book10 and the interviews given by the founder of the company in the leading national newspapers and magazines.

rary theory of organizational culture, see: Louis et al. (1983), Allaire et al. (1984), Schein
(1988).
8
The concept of business culture thus encompasses the concept of organizational culture as
well.
9
The websites are: http://www.komonsens.com and http://www.hauzmajstor.co.yu.
10
S. J.: Azbuka biznisa [The Business Alphabet]. Belgrade: Politika i narodna knjiga 2005.

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2 The post-socialist transformation in Serbia: inheritances from the 1990s

and developments of the early 2000s
2.1 The partial and slow transformation of the 1990s
In order to provide a better understanding of what the founder and the partners
in Komon sens and Hauzmajstor were facing at the time of creating their company in 2004, a few flashbacks should be made to the economic situation of Serbia in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.
When summarizing the situation in the end of the 1990s, one can say that it
was quite grim. The disintegration of former Yugoslavia accompanied with the
civil war (19911995), the UN economic sanctions imposed on Serbia, the devastating military intervention of NATO, and the authoritarian rule of one man and
one party, were probably the major causes of this state of affairs (Arandarenko
2000: 351). According to some authors, in the end of the 1980s the Serbian
economy could have been described as a socialist economy in deep crisis, but
also as a transitional economy with great comparative advantages. Calling the
1990s the lost decade, this is how Arandarenko describes the dramatic worsening of all basic macroeconomic indicators:
The gross domestic product (GDP) from almost 3000 US$ per capita
in 1990 fell to 1640 US$ in 1998. In the same period the unemployment
rate rose from 20% to 26%, and the hidden unemployment rose even
more drastically. The country has passed through a trauma of hyperinflation, and the monetary stability was never established for a lengthier
period. The citizens savings were nonexistent, the foreign trade and payroll deficit are huge, and foreign currency reserves almost depleted. The
budget deficit continuously rises the same as the participation of public
expenditures in the GDP. Even so the pensions and social support arrive
to recipients increasingly late, the health and educational systems are
completely exhausted, and poverty spreads unstoppably from rural hamlets and Roma slums towards the multistory housing complexes of the
working class settlements (Arandarenko 2000: 364).
For this study, it is important to accentuate three domains in which the Serbian
society of the 1990s showed negative and mutually interconnected trends, and
those are: the burgeoning of the informal economic sector (comprising both
the officially unemployed and the officially employed in state firms, but seeking additional jobs), the appearance of new forms of unemployment (employees put on paid leave), as well as the high emigration rate and brain drain
of young professionals and their families (Cveji 2002, Miloevi 2002, Boli
2002a).

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Most international analysts did not consider Serbia as a transitional country during the 1990s due to the absence of a radical political turnover such
as the one that brought down socialism in the former East Block countries (after the Berlin Wall events in 1989). Most Serbian sociologists, however, held
that even though the transformation had been initiated in the beginning of the
1990s, it was blocked or frozen very early on (Lazi 2000: 11; Lazi,
Cveji 2004: 42f.; Arandarenko 2000). Nevertheless, there are obvious indicators that a certain kind of post-socialist transformation, although partial and
slow, did take place in this decade (Boli 2002). Of course, depending on the
domain in focus, it varied in kind and degree. Here, we will primarily concentrate on the transformation of ownership in the sectors of social/state companies
and housing.
Looking at the state companies, the model of internal privatization, in which
employees became shareholders, along with a simultaneous openness to outside investors was implemented.11 Privatization also took place through additional capitalization and sale (Arandarenko 2000: 353). Such waves of privatization took place in 1991, 1994, and after 1997.12 While the Serbian economic
sector was not privatized to the full extent and according to the model of the
leading transitional European economies (which mainly applied the voucher
privatization)13, it may be noted that a certain degree of autonomous privatization took place, thus new small companies were rising in great number. Their
increase in the decade was 300% (considering only the active ones), while the
increase of small workshops was only 30%. Thus, a class of new entrepreneurs
was created, in which younger men (under 40), with secondary education, holding small companies (of up to 5 employees) predominated. Even though the real
economic influence of the entrepreneurs was quite low, since their firms controlled only 5% of the overall capital in Serbia (in 1996), their presence, numbering 250000300000 individuals, represented a promising potential. Most
of the new private firms were involved in trade activities, while 22.5% were
engaged in artisanship and individual services, wherein house maintenance
services would fall as well (Boli 2002).

This model was also used in Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia.

The first legal act regulating privatization was the Law on conditions and procedure of
transformation of social property into other forms of property, Slubeni Glasnik RS 48/91.
From 1994 on, whith the Law on changes and additions to the Law under the same name,
Slubeni Glasnik RS 51/94, the privatization process was almost nonexistent, after which
it was activated again in 1997, when the Law on property/ownership transformation was
promulgated (Slubeni Glasnik SRJ 29/97).
13
This model of privatization was implemented in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Russia,
and partially in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Armenia, etc.
11

12

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The privatization of housing was implemented to the extreme, thus the majority of the socially-owned apartments (built and owned by the state, city, municipality, military or other companies and institutions) were bought off by their
legal residents. As the census of 2003 shows, by the early 2000s, 83% of Serbian citizens living in apartments resided in privately owned ones.14 This process
had been initiated by the Law on Housing Relations, proclaimed in 1990, and
the Law on Housing of 1992.15
This reform of the housing sector created three kinds of space within the
apartment buildings, one that was private, and which comprised only the inner apartment space, the other, which was collective and included the common
spaces within the building (hallways, staircases, elevators, roofs, electric, heating, water, sewage infrastructure), while the third was public, encompassing the
open space with the accompanying infrastructure surrounding the apartment
building. In this new situation, the apartment owners had to take care and pay
for repairs in their apartments themselves. They could no longer call a janitor
(domar or nastojnik) who lived in the same or the neighboring building and was
an employee of a state firm that took care of the infrastructure maintenance on
a regular basis. On the other hand, the residents assemblies, constituted of representatives of each apartment in a building, were to make contracts with the
Public Company for Housing Services, founded also in 1990. The Regulation on
Maintenance of Apartment Buildings and Apartments (of 1993) and later legal
acts defined all the regular and emergency maintenance services that this public
company could perform if contracted. However, the new thing was that private
companies in the same industry could be contracted instead. Thus, the maintenance of collective and public property inside and around the apartment building became liberated, and the choice could be made either for a state or a private
firm. Moreover, the public company could subcontract other (private) companies to perform the services they themselves were not able to cover.
As the Serbian citizens in this period already developed distrust in anything
that had to do with the state services, this attitude began to be applied to the
Public Company for Housing Services as well. Even though each household pays
According to the 2003 census, 83.0% of the citizens of Serbia lived in a privately owned
apartment, 1.7% lived in a socially/state owned apartment (with residents rights), 5.8%
were living in an apartment owned by a relative or a friend, and 4.3% rented their apartment (Petrovi 2004).
15
Details on the modalities of changing ownership and the maintenance of the apartment
buildings and apartments may be seen in detail in the following legal documents: Law
on housing relations (Sluzbeni Glasnik RS 12/90), Law on housing (Sluzbeni Glasnik RS
50/92), Regulation on maintenance of apartment buildings and apartments (Slubeni Glasnik RS 43/93), and Law on maintenance of apartment buildings and apartments (Slubeni
Glasnik RS 44/95, 46/98, 1/2001).
14

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a monthly fee for different kinds of infrastructure maintenance (in one invoice
issued by Infostan, a public firm that coordinates the maintenance activities and
collects all the payments), they as well as the residents assemblies often decide
to call alternative private firms for performing urgent or more demanding repair
services. Out of distrust in the quality of service, and often even due to insufficient information about the scope of services offered by the public companies,
they end up in fact paying a double fee. Instead of calling a contracted company
paid in advance, they call a private one that they have to pay on an ad hoc basis.
2.2 The new start and the promises of the early 2000s
The authors that saw Serbias overall economic situation in the 1990s as that
of blocked transformation, characterized the period after the political changes of October 2000 as the one of unblocked, or postponed transformation
(Lazi, Cveji 2004: 39f.). Lazi explains how the changes of the political regime speeded up the process of transformation in Serbia. The arbitrational role
of the state in the economy, which had been established instead of the command
role during the 1990s, was now substituted by a regulative role (Lazi, Cveji
2004: 44).
In the period after the political changes of 2000, a certain degree of stabilization and improvement of the overall economic situation was visible.
The establishing of macroeconomic stability and the introduction of the
basic structural reforms during 2001/2002 had a double effect. On one
hand, the gross national product (GNP) rose 5.5% in 2001 and 4% in
2002, and the rise of poverty was halted. On the other hand, Serbia in
this period still had one of the lowest domestic products (GDP) per capita
in the region (1945.7 US$ in 2002), and a large percentage of households
was just above the poverty limit. The foreign trade deficit rose speedily,
and material inequalities continued to grow (Lazi, Cveji 2004: 53).
In the opinion of the same author, the speeding up of privatization, macroeconomic stabilization (above all, bringing inflation to below 10% in 2003 and the
revitalization of the banking sector), as well as the launching of the legal system
reform were the most important factors that led to moderate enlivening of the
economy and further growth of the private sector. But, at the same time, these
factors also led to an increase of the already huge unemployment rate, or more
precisely, made the hidden unemployment clearly visible.
The privatization of state firms was speeded up in this period; in fact the
whole economic activity of Serbia was turned into one big privatization project.
The newly founded state Privatization Agency was the heart of this operation
run by the Minister of Economy and Privatization. Since the promulgation of

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the new Law on Privatization in 2001, until the end of 2003, 1080 state firms
were sold for about 1.3billion Euros. Some of the largest multinational companies invested in Serbia, among them Titan, Lukoil, British American Tobacco,
Galaxy, Hellenic Sugar Industry, Holcim, Philip Morris, Henkel and Lafarge.16
In this process, the major state investment banks were closed (so as to free the
state firms put up for sale of their debts to them), while the doors were opened
for foreign banks. Foreign financial aid started to arrive and more of it was
promised, debts to the international monetary institutions were partially restructured, new credits were agreed upon, and representative offices of multinational
companies were increasingly opening (esp. in pharmaceutical, IT, and consumer industries). Incentives were given to entrepreneurs willing to enter the free
market competition.17
Even though at this point it was too early to assess the outcome of the reforms implemented by the new government, the belief in a better, more democratic and prosperous future was spreading around, and this fact definitely
changed the overall perception of the economic potentials of the country. A
certain potential was clearly visible, esp. by those who believed liberal capitalism was the solution to all of Serbias problems. It was also visible to those expatriates who had experience with working in capitalist or transitional systems
elsewhere, because they knew what the transitional path could mean for them
personally. Among other things, it opened up opportunities for fast individual
business careers and a pleasant life back home.
This new positive feeling brought back a number of younger highly educated
Serbian professionals from abroad (Vuini-Nekovi 2003). Among them was
the founder of Hauzmajstor, who returned with his family. Trusting the new political leadership that promised radical economic reforms and liberalization that
would lead to a comfortable entrepreneurial environment, willing to invest his
personal savings as a start-up capital, and trying out a new idea by reconnecting with a group of school friends of diverse professional profiles and work experience in Serbia (as the junior partners), our repatriate started the Hauzmajstor adventure.

This information can be found in the report posted on the site of the Government of the
Republic of Serbia: Privatizacijom do uspenog privatnog sektora [With privatization to
the successful private sector], December 4, 2003, URL: http://www.arhiva.srbija.sr.gov.
yu/vesti/2003-12/04/341950.html.
17
For a study of the rates of entrepreneurial activity in the former Soviet republics and other
East European nations, see Ovaska, Sobel (2009). Also see: Pickles, Jenkins (2008). For
what privatization of a state owned firm in Eastern Central Europe by an American firm
means from an anthropological point of view, see Dunn (2004).
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After a decade of living and working abroad, he had to readapt to his motherland culture and learn about the concrete possibilities for investment. He collected ideas from his closest surroundings, thus accepting the suggestion of a
friend about the need for a well organized, professional, transparent repair service company. Out there, he was told, there were lots of households of middle
and higher social strata and well-standing firms of this new Serbia as well
as the foreign residents and firms, awaiting such services. All these citizens of
Belgrade did not want to deal any more with unreliable repairmen, working informally or in small workshops, who could not guarantee quality performance.
Hauzmajstor thus opted for a well defined and assertive strategy of brand
making and marketing by exploiting two open fields. First, they decided to exploit the still wide open space in the sector of repairs and maintenance of apartments and offices created by the laws of the early 1990s. The repair services,
generally conceived as marginal and filthy, were to be raised on the pedestal of indispensable and clean. Second, they used the Occidentalizing18
strategy that played upon the positive idealized images of the West among the
urban population of Belgrade, based on the generally highly regarded Western
businesses standards, and more specifically, the well known German precision. These images of the West were combined with the positive traditions and
memories of the Serbian socialist domar and the pre-WW2 hauzmajstor.
The next chapter will describe how these images were ingrained into the Hauzmajstor brand and its work performance.
3 Dynamics of firm development
3.1 Establishing Komon Sens and Hauzmajstor
Komon sens was founded as a share holding company aimed at business consulting and business development. At the time it started operations, in May 2004,
the core of the company consisted of the founder and majority shareholder with
the position of the president and senior partner, three junior partners (minority share holders), a consultant and an office manager. The office was set up in
a classy old apartment in the old central part of Belgrade. The founder of the
company chose Komon sens as the name of the company, which is the Serbian
phonetic transcription of the English word common sense.
Occidentalism generally refers to both positive and negative idealized images of the West,
and is here taken in its very basic meaning (without further ideological suppositions), as defined by James Carrier in the introduction to the volume he edited on the same topic (Carrier 1995). For the later designations and discussions of the concept, see Buruma, Margalit
(2004).

18

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Simultaneously with Komon sens, its daughter firm Hauzmajstor was created
as the first business development project born out of the mother firm, aimed at
offering small home maintenance. Based on the same principle of share holding ownership, its major shareholder was Komon sens and a few minor individual shareholders on the side. The latter were not on the payroll, but were investing their work in building up the value of the firm. In April 2005 the firm had
25employees, out of whom 14 were servicemen and support staff dealing with
finances, accounting, warehouse, call center and management. The founder explained: We have two levels of management, the first one consisting of the general manager (or project manager in the Komon sens terminology), technical and
financial managers, and the second one comprising two team leaders. Initially,
the office space was shared with Komon sens, but primarily due to absence of
parking space for the car fleet, the office was moved into Belgrade Harbor. With
a two level office space and a large parking place, the new setting was conveniently just a five-minute ride from Komon sens headquarters.
According to the founder of Hauzmajstor, the intention was not to make a
commodity, but to create a brand. The idea was:
You have repairmen in Belgrade, but you dont have a firm that specializes in repairs and maintenance, so lets design it and build it up as an organized service. And in the semantic sense, the name Hauzmajstor creates two fine contexts. The first context is that it is one of these forgotten
things that were positive, so it ties you in to a good old tradition of every
apartment house in prewar Belgrade having a skilled repairman. It is not
domar. Domar associates with socialism, and Hauzmajstor with artisanship. And the second is that it has this Germanic technical root that associates with precision and discipline, and in the end, it is a Serbian derivative of the German word Hausmeister19. And this name looks better in
the Latin alphabet. We just could not find a Cyrillic font that looks technical enough. And this way, they look at you as to a foreign firm; they
are not certain whether it is a local firm or not.

3.2 Recruitment, training and marketing

A somewhat humorous version of how the first team was built was recollected
by the Hauzmajstor general manager.

19

The German word Hausmeister means caretaker (of a house), but the word Meister
also implies craftsmanship.

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Our operatives were recruited according to such criteria as, he is a nice

guy, I trust him, and he is good with his hands. So it was something
like, you have a buddy, a boyfriend, a husband who look at him, he does
something around the house all the time. We wanted to avoid the professional with JNA (Yugoslav National Army) tattoo and the attitude of
look at me, do you know how much I am worth. Instead, our brand development approach led us to the start up team that included a man who
is a sculptor,20 a man who got his engineering degree in Japan and was
married to a Japanese, or to individuals who spoke Russian or Hungarian, and then we slowly glued onto these people professionals willing to
accept working up to our standards.
The training included learning procedures of technical nature, but also ones related to establishing a relationship with the client. One procedure includes precise written instructions on how the call center operator should behave. It also
includes how a serviceman should introduce himself when he comes to the client. The procedure also prescribes what, and in which order, has to be done
when the serviceman faces a problem. The implementation of the procedures
was subject to control either by one of the team leaders or sometimes even by
the general manager himself.
In parallel with the appearance of Hauzmajstor on the Belgrade market of
maintenance services, the company presence was announced in public by a
number of short articles in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, such as
Blic, Ekspres, Glas, Danas, Vreme, Evropa, Lisa, Moj Dom, Moj Stan, Caf&
Bar. The articles entitled All repairmen in one place, There is no more maj
store, how about a rakija (brandy)?, One call fixes all, For a cultivated
home, Repairman for 70 types of repairs; all of them promoted the business
values and professional standards built into the Hauzmajstor image.
Much attention is paid to the observation of high professional standards concerning the means of production (branded vehicles, tools and spare parts) and
the unified appearance of the servicemen. The behavior of servicemen is highly
standardized as well; for example, they do not stay longer than necessary, they
do not drink rakija or smoke, they clean after themselves, leave a detailed bill,
do not take baksheesh, and they give a guarantee on their services. They are
highly skilled and some of them have had work experience in highly developed
countries. Most of them speak foreign languages; thus they are recommended
for work on maintenance of residential and business objects of foreign citizens.
With the diploma of the School of Applied Arts of the University of Belgrade, who previously worked as a conservation specialist in the Museum of Kraljevo, and afterwards
worked on the capitals of the columns in the St. Sava Cathedral in Belgrade.

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In the end, the company expresses a strong concern about the degree of clients
satisfaction with the quality of service, which is checked by means of a telephone survey following the intervention.
It is obvious that the marketing image created by Hauzmajstor is based on an
interplay of symbols which is, as always, based on opposite associations such as:
foreign our own, stolen from the West drawn from our past, that which we
lack that which we deserve, intimate distanced, feelings memories, physical work intellectual work, filthy job clean job, standardized custom made,
basic urgent, high quality moderate price, appropriate for local citizens appropriate for foreigners.21
3.3 First year developments
Hauzmajstor started off in May 2004 by offering only small home maintenance
services. After a one-month training period, the hauzmajstors were out in the
streets. Each serviceman specialized in the most frequent repair problems
covered the territory of two optinas (townships). There were eight of them,
working from 9:00am to 5:00pm. A call center operator coordinated their activities. When a larger problem occurred, a specialist would be sent off to assist.
The first two weeks, everyone used their private cars with the firm covering the
gasoline expenditures, after which they got eight new yellow cars with the emblem of Hauzmajstor painted on them.
By August 2006, when the second phase of research was under way, the development and changes in the first year of the companys functioning could be
summarized. At that point, one of the team leaders stated: What the firm looks
like now is far from what we started from. In the beginning, S. (the owner) was
with us all the time. We needed to learn from scratch what, how, who and
we had to be involved in everything that was going on.
The start-up call center operator provided many details of what changed in
the everyday life of the firm. She remembers, for example, that from April to
September 2004, she did everything herself the call center, the administration,
the spare parts and warehouse, the subcontractors. She also mentioned that she
refused to use the computer program waiting for her at her employment because
it was completely dysfunctional. Instead, she made a handwritten database and
worked for months on a framework for a new program which would satisfy the
needs of the call center. By December 2004, the computer specialist completed
the new program and they tested it for a whole month, while at the same time

21

Similar approaches in marketing new products were used by other companies in Serbia
(e.g. the slogan of MB Pils Beer Svetsko a nae).

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the data on some 3000 clients (out of which 30% were subscribers), was fed
into it. Later on, the same young lady initiated the introduction of conference
calls, mostly used for direct communication between the client and the repairman (via call center) in cases where they needed to go into details of the problem that had occurred.
What they accomplished in one year in organization and business activities is
summed up by the mentioned team leader in the following way:
One of the greatest things we did was that we strengthened the specialized services. We initially had only the small home maintenance with
water, electricity and other repairs. Then, we didnt have the storage,
now we have it. In the meantime, the administrative structure has been
strengthened. We also enlarged the network of subcontractors. From not
having them at all, we now have a widely branched network of subcontractors with which we cover anything that may happen in a business
space or in a residential object. Professionalism and work culture constitute the true spirit of Hauzmajstor.
Another positive result of Hauzmajstors development worth mentioning is the
fact that the original core team has been preserved, which means that five out of
nine people involved in operations are still in the company. All core team members that were interviewed during this study stressed that they were proud of
being able to pull through all the difficulties of the start-up phase. In my opinion, one of the team leaders said, this is a very good core. We all grew up together. And we have this great relationship. At the same time, the new people
who came later also accommodated very well because they had no other choice,
they could only accept this same model of behavior. People simply feel good
about this extremely correct relationship B. (the general manager) has towards
us, and it is then passed on to everyone else.
3.4 Hierarchy relations and perceptions
During my research, except when explicitly asked about their hierarchical positions in the firm, seldom would any interviewee mention his/her own formal position. All positions were primarily described through specific responsibilities,
while the managerial positions were mainly identified as coordination. This is
what the general manager said about his approach to hierarchy and management:
In management, you need to be soft, and here I am thinking of the soul, not
of other things. It means you literally have to know the individual. So that generally the theme of human resources is not a question of numbers any more.
The technical manager expressed a similar view:

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I try to have the attitude that we are all buddies between ourselves up
to a point. This means if there is a problem at home, the repairman better solve it there than at work. I think that we are functioning literally as
a team, in fact, as some kind of a tribe, in which everyone knows who
the chief is and who the others are, but at times of war, everyone is in it
together. So, when we have a problem, everyone is there. And this is the
only way the people can be kept together. If in command, you have to be
in the front line, you have to protect him, but also give advise, and when
needed, you even have to scold. I also think that generally, our transition
to this European or Western system has to go in this way.22
Hierarchy is generally an ever-changing structure which transforms to accommodate the changing market. Decisions are made on different levels strategic,
managerial, operative and daily. While the strategic decisions are made on the
top level, the other problems are being solved in one of the two kinds of meetings. The whole firm gathers at monthly meetings where the results are analyzed
or new problems discussed. On the other hand, smaller, operative meetings are
organized on a weekly basis with the mandatory presence of the general manager, and the optional presence of the two team leaders, the call center operator
and someone from finances. In the end, a number of ad hoc informal meetings
about routine problems take place during the office hours in any of the two common spaces or at coffee time in the garden.
3.5 Partnership with an Austrian firm
In the spring of 2005 the owner and the general manager of Hauzmajstor learned
from their client, a large Austrian bank located in Belgrade, about the interest
of an Austrian real estate management firm to invest into Hauzmajstor. Rustler,
a family firm founded 70years earlier, had developed a property management
business in Austria, while in recent years it had created a network of six firms
in Austria and East Central Europe called Rustler Group.23 At the time Hauzmajstor was approached, this network consisted of four firms seated in Austria
and two in other countries, namely, in the Czech Republic and Hungary, with a
plan to make the next acquisition in Serbia and Montenegro. After about half a
year of communication and exchange of information, the process of negotiations
between Hauzmajstor and Rustler ended on October15, 2005 with a partnership
contract which defined the Austrian firm as the majority owner (with 51% of
Mirjana Vasovi and Borislav Kuzmanovi have also pointed out the importance of participation and involvement in organizations (Vasovi, Kuzmanovi 2001; Kuzmanovi 1997).
23
More about Rustler Group can be found on their website: http://www.rustler.cc.
22

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shares), with the perspective of becoming the sole owner after a five year period.
The contract assumed keeping the local management and operations intact, but
also developing the firm as a profit center that would in the near future become
involved in real estate brokerage and property management activities.
4. Intercultural experience of Hauzmajstor with foreign clients
4.1 Perception of the first contacts
The perceptions of the foreign clients are highly influenced by the professional
role of the interviewees and can thus be divided into experiences on the managerial and operational levels, but also according to the phases of contact, i.e.,
first contact or established relationship. The first contacts are characterized by
the perceptions of the foreigners as having prejudices about the low level of Serbian culture in general and of maintenance services in particular24 as well as establishing contacts with Serbian firms with distrust, arrogance and fear (of Iron
Curtain bug-planting, for example). They also expected special treatment, various privileges and discounts, making business arrangement promises easily and
treating them lightly (simply, not keeping word), and mixing the talk of making
partnership in private side-line business and the actual main negotiations during the informal part of the business meeting (e.g. business lunch). Finally, they
preferred to negotiate the full payment after job completion even in cases where
the preparations are time-consuming and materials are costly.
This is how the technical manager describes the initial reaction of the foreign
clients and the positive change in their attitude:
I think it is very hard to make a difference between our own and foreign
individual clients. However, it is true that foreigners are harder to deal
with for one simple reason, which is that they bring in arrogance into the
first contact with us, because they do not believe that such a firm as ours
exists. Also, they enter the relationship with a great fear because someone is entering their house. What is the problem? The problem is in the
act of entering itself. They still look at you as someone who has been behind the Iron Curtain, in the Eastern Block, and they expect that we will
install microphones, which is completely out of mind. So, to me their fear
is completely understandable. If the client is a normal person and if he is
satisfied with your services, you can gain his trust. By saying good afternoon, speaking the language, cleaning up after yourself, fixing things
Interestingly enough, counter perceptions exist about foreign businessmen in Serbia as being low quality managerial staff and with a low level of culture in general.

24

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so that they do not break again right after you leave, you can break that
barrier with a few interventions. So we have a bunch of clients who used
to be very difficult and are fantastic now. Their first calls were: when
are you coming, how come you can come at two and not at four oclock?
whereas when they call now, they ask: when can you come? This is
a big enough step on the road of gaining trust. At last, a great thing is
that our vehicles are visible. Noone believes that we have this number of
them; everyone thinks that we have double as many because their mobility has risen, and with color and design they catch your eye. These same
foreigners walk this city and see those vehicles, and they know that we
have loads of work, and they absolutely understand.
In a somewhat different manner, the general manager also described the process
of gaining the trust of foreign clients:
As far as foreign clients are concerned, they were really surprised in
the beginning, not because we primarily impressed them as a company,
but because they have prejudices about Serbia, they think that everything
here is crazy. You can imagine how they feel when they call a plumber
and think that someone is going to attack her or hang on the chandelier,
and they are frightened. Then they make inquiries in Dipos25 and ask for
a recommendation, and slowly they start to trust us. Then, a young man
who speaks their language appears after only two hours. There was a
wife of an important executive in a foreign bank who told us: You know,
in New York I wait for a plumber for 18 days. And here it all happened
very quickly. They get the service promptly; they get a bill, and some
kind of security, especially since women are our biggest clients. If her
husband got a job here she is tied to the house, and vice versa, if the husband is a housewife, he is active in this domain as well, it is completely
natural. They delegate the maintenance problem, so that we already started to get the house keys. On the other hand, all the larger embassies have
their own manager who takes care of maintenance because they want an
insider. In the S. embassy, for example, our women who work on cleaning have a full time job there. And the embassy management wants to become familiar with us so that they can feel secure about particular individuals and the tasks they perform for them. I think we had no problems
with them whatsoever.
25

Dipos is a company initially set up by the state to deal with the state owned real estate
and the accompanying maintenance management rented out to the corps diplomatique in
former Yugoslavia. The company was restructured in 1998 and now operates in the same
domain under the name of Dipos d.o.o. (Dipos Ltd.).

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In this first contact phase, when inquiries about specialized services also take
place, the operative staff perceived the potential foreign clients as: spoiled,
picky, detailed and taking the firms investment of time and resources lightly
and irresponsibly. In other words, they often take advantage of acquiring information on all possible variants in which the service can be performed, not even
making an effort to respond to the offer sent to them.
This is how an architect in the specialized services staff described her experience while preparing an offer for a Western embassy:
In the case of this embassy, there was a man, local staff, who went into
smallest details. They asked for a detailed description of the paint job in
the ambassadors residence. He called, sent two papers, half in English,
half in Serbian, where he demanded the full description of work in every
room how many layers, how much of this, how much of that. So I sent
our serviceman off to make an offer, and I wrote up the measurements
and all the specifications for every room, e.g. blue room, to be painted
in two layers with such and such colors. He calls the call center and nags
them, then I take over and he complains that we omitted to specify the
period needed for the painting and the guarantee period. I said that for
the first point I will ask the repairman and as for the guarantee, we cant
give it out. Why not? It just isnt possible because we do not know the
quality of the wall underneath, I said. The colleagues look at me and ask
me why am I so spiky with him. But, I just do not have the strength to be
patient any more. The point is that he cannot demand something he does
not know anything about. His signature does not reveal that he is either a
construction engineer or at least a technician. In the end, everyone here
was astonished when we heard that they accepted our offer.
There is a continuation to this story, and it concerns the negotiation about advanced payment. The Hauzmajstor policy is to charge 70% advance payment
and 30% to be paid after the work is finished. The same person from the embassy made an issue over that and said that they cannot make the payment. The
architect continued the story:
At that time I was about to leave for the summer vacation, and I told my
colleagues before the contract is signed and the advance payment made,
the work cannot start. They were already 14days late with responding
to our offer, and yet they wanted us to start with the job three days after
they accepted the offer. Our servicemen are also not on the coat hanger.
After I came back to work I found out that they did everything we demanded of them and they were very satisfied with how we did the job.

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4.2 Perception of the established relationships

The established relationships with foreign clients, as perceived by the management, are characterized by them as: clients having respect for the self-assured
stance of the other party during negotiations, gaining complete trust after a few
orders only seeing that we say good afternoon, perform quickly, clean up after ourselves, send a bill, and come again if needed and also recommending
the company to other foreign institutions (banks, embassies) on high managerial
levels. The management also noted their clients developing a need for facility
management services, having problems with making contracts for annual subscription due to the lack of institutional annual budgets for these purposes and
the mandatory clearance from the highest organizational level, keeping a verbal
promise as a substitute for a written contract, and being prompt in payments, but
also more demanding when it comes to procedures and paper work.
Beside these observations of the Other, the management of Hauzmajstor
also talked about processes that are bringing the two sides closer to each other
in business. For example, the financial manager noted that she had no experience of misunderstanding with foreign clients, but that simply collaboration
is created through continual communication. The technical manager observed
a positive collaboration through learning from each other. This is what the
general manager said about signed contract vs. verbal promise relationship with
foreign clients:
Initially I insisted that we follow our business plan, which assumed
signing contracts for maintenance with large firms on a longer term basis, primarily with foreign banks and embassies. However, owing to the
fact that most of them still do not have a regular budget for such expenditures, I realized that this was nonsense. On the other hand, if I depend
on calls only, I cannot manage automobiles, workers and everything else.
Thus, some kind of interactivity, some kind of verbal motivation in place
of a contract should be there. If they only say I really will, trust me,
engage your firm for this year, this is enough for me to know what to
count with. And this contract has to be light, so unimposing that you can
break it whenever you want, if you are not satisfied with the quality of
my service. And it came very fast. They started asking for a larger variety of services. They keep asking, do you do this, do you do that? and
you say, yes, we do this and we do that but actually you cannot afford
to keep all these people on the balance. So, it is completely logical that
we engage a subcontractor that will take over the specific activities that
are in demand. We have just engaged in business with some banks using
subcontractors.

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At the everyday operational level, the established foreign clients are perceived
in a positive way. The repairmen speak of them as normal and tolerant, not distrustful, simple, well organized with a prepared list of things to be done (read
out at the call center and later on to the repairman), less interested in the concrete problem that occurred and more in how it is going to be solved and how
much it is going to cost, trying out the fixed mechanism in the repairmans presence, almost never offering baksheesh, comfortable with making a complaint,
and satisfied by the firms quality of performance. Occasionally, in the contact
with the call center they appeared intolerant, this being the case when not understanding that they have a larger infrastructure problem and not a minor one
that the firm could solve at one call. It should be noted that the observations of
the foreigners behavior in everyday contacts at the operational level were more
or less explained by the opposition to the individual traits of local clients.
Here is an interesting illustration of the differences between the foreigners
and the Serbian approach to treating a serviceman with baksheesh (a tip), told by
one of the team leaders from his own experience as a serviceman:
I never was offered baksheesh by foreigners. The first and basic reason is that usually their firms pay for our services, and the second is that
maybe it is because of a specific attitude that there is no need for baksheesh. This is of course in line with the policy of our firm. However, I
am also the first to think that a waiter should not be tipped no matter that
this is a worldwide practice. I do not understand why a waiter should receive a tip and not the one who cleans the streets, or the one who empties the containers, generally why not the one who may deserve it more
than the waiter. A waiters job is to wait on you. I see it the same way
in my job. I have a certain price and you should pay me for what I did
to satisfy your needs. Baksheesh does not interest me. My rule is that in
principle baksheesh should not be taken. It should be taken only in case
you do not want to insult someone. Because there are many of our people who become offended to the point that they do not want to call you
any more, or to call Hauzmajstor in general. You find yourself in a situation that the man holds the door and does not want to let you out of the
house. When you face such a conflict, then it is better to take it as some
kind of compromise.
The main tensions that appear in the relationship with the foreign clients as felt
by the Hauzmajstor staff can again be noticed on the managerial and operative level. At the managerial level, the following can be pointed out: the foreign
firms initial distrust in the truthfulness and quality of the services performed,
their initial rejection of making the prepayment for the specialized services that
involve advanced investment of know-how, labor and materials; their lack of

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readiness to become permanent users of maintenance services, which would

bring them into a contractual relationship with Hauzmajstor. At the operational
level, there seem to be no tensions, with one exception mentioned by the call
center operator, when the firm was accused of being incompetent to solve what
proved to be an inbuilt infrastructure problem, after which the relationship with
the client was reestablished.
4.3 Business encounters with our people as foreigners
The communication with foreign firms and institutions is characterized by contacts on different hierarchical levels (managerial and operative), but also with
persons of different ethnic/national backgrounds and professional profiles. The
first contacts by the foreign firms are initiated by the middle management level, by persons holding a position of maintenance, technical or office manager.
They usually inquire about the scope of Hauzmajstor activities or have a concrete request for a service. The first contact by the embassies, though, is sometimes made from a higher level, particularly by the attach in charge of technical
affairs, especially when it is made after a collegial recommendation of another
embassy. After the green light is given at the top level, either as a verbal approval of collaboration or after an annual subscription agreement is signed (which is
still very rare), the everyday operative matters are again solved with the middle
or lower management, usually technical managers and secretaries.
The communication between the two parties, the Hauzmajstor and the foreign institutions and firms takes place between people of different ethnic/national backgrounds. The foreign citizens (expatriates) always occupy the top
levels, while the repatriates, expatriates born in mixed marriages (with Serbian
citizens) or locals acquainted with Western type work places occupy the middle or lower management positions. Communication with private foreign clients
usually starts with a call from the office secretary, the client him/herself or a
friend, the choice usually determined by the knowledge of the Serbian language.
Later on, servicemen are awaited either by local babysitters and housekeepers,
but not infrequently by residents themselves. The technical manager of Hauzmajstor gave one example of successful collaboration with a repatriate (a Serbian
employee of a foreign firm) on matters of maintenance of a large office building.
Atrium Consulting, a large multinational firm, is managing the office
rental and maintenance of this new building in New Belgrade, and by
pure chance our man is the manager who I collaborate with. He was in
Hungary, Vietnam, he went with the company as it moved along, a man
who worked for foreigners and went to all these places. And he really
knows his job. We have a fantastic collaboration with him because we

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satisfied some of his needs, and I started to explain to him that I am also
ignorant of some things, but that he can ask me anything he needs, and I
will also ask him about certain things. We have found common interests
because to him our assistance is highly valuable. The building is in the
process of being moved in and people ask for different things, starting
from Volksbank, Wiener Stdtische, Avon, General Motors, and British
American Tobacco to Direktna trgovina (Direct Trade). Very different
people, different educational backgrounds, different habits, but they are
all looking for space, they are conquering space. And you can imagine
what all comes to their minds. So, we swim in all this together.

4.4 Foreign clients views on the Hauzmajstor business culture

The inclusion of clients into the research of Hauzmajstor business culture aimed
at analyzing what outside business actors noted as surprises in their encounters with the repatriate based concept of real estate maintenance, in other words,
what makes the difference when you compare Hauzmajstor to their competitors in the state and private sector.
The original research design was to include both private and commercial
foreign clients. However, the selection of clients to be interviewed was to be in
accordance with the daily operations scheduled by the Hauzmajstor call center,
which, at the time, happened to include only commercial foreign clients. Even
though we hoped for interviews with authentic foreigners, we ended up talking
to Serbian employees of foreign or mixed firms or projects. Our interviewees
were: the office manager of a foreign project registered as a NGO, the professional advisor in a small, private, mixed capital import/export company, and the
technical support manager in a multinational IT company. The office manager
of a foreign project was pleasantly surprised to find out that a firm like Hauzmajstor existed:
It is the only one I know of. The good thing is that someone has thought
of an idea to gather repairmen of all trades in one place to work for
24hours. There are others you can find in ads that work non-stop, but
you dont know who they are or what they do. This is an institutionalized
firm so you have a kind of security because, if I have to send someone to
a home of a foreigner at 8:00oclock in the evening, I have to know whom
I am sending. And they are really professional. You spot that in the first
instance because when you call them, you either hear a taped message or
someone picks up the phone right away. This is what is new, and it is the
only such try out I know of here.

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The employee of the small mixed capital firm explained that after the initial contact established on the basis of personal acquaintance between the two firms
owners, they keep continuously engaging Hauzmajstor because they see that
the firm is well organized, not expensive, that they come on time, are efficient
at work, and their service is of high quality. He thought that they were better
than the freelance repairmen they called in previously because they are more
professional, better organized and even cheaper. A special surprise for our interviewee was the mode of communication Hauzmajstor establishes with the clients, which is through the call center operator. The way this person responds is
very cultivated and also very professional because she takes down all the necessary details so that the repairman knows what the problem is and what he needs
to bring along in order to solve it. The name of the company also brings to him
positive associations from the building he lived in.
It was the first skyscraper in that part of town, and it had a small apartment on the first floor in which our hauzmajstor lived. He took care of
the whole building, he went from one apartment to the other and made
all the small water and electricity repairs, and we all called him hauzmajstor. So, to me, this company name evokes very warm memories, it is a
kind of a homely term for those repairmen who do all those little repairs
arround the house.
Generally, he thinks that the level of service Hauzmajstor offers is above what is
needed here. But it is a good start. It is better to put the standards higher and
let the clients adapt to them. We are now in the process of adapting to higher
standards of services in general. In my opinion, the perspective of this country
is in agriculture and in services, that is our future.
The technical support manager in a multinational IT company confirms the
above-mentioned perceptions of Hauzmajstor business culture, especially concerning the communication skills, competence and perseverance.
The communication of Hauzmajstor is above what is existent on the domestic market of maintenance services. Their competence is certainly on
a higher level than what is usual here, although they are not always able
to immediately solve a particular problem ideally. However, they never
give up, they always find a way to solve it in due time. Thus, all our experiences are very positive, there are no negative ones. Sometimes it may
happen that they cannot come the same day, but generally if we tell them
that we have a big problem, then they come the same day. This is their
relationship to us whether they treat us as an important client or potentially important, I am not sure, but this approach is positive.

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Comparing Hauzmajstor to the state maintenance companies such as Infostan

or Army Maintenance Company, the interviewee thinks that they are on a completely different level.
The latter have contracts with the residents assemblies and their efficiency of response and the quality of service is quite low. This is because
the payments are guaranteed, and thus everything you deserve to get as a
client is maximally reduced. And, with Hauzmajstor, you have a reversed
principle because the order of things is reversed first they do the job
and only afterwards they get paid. It is set up differently.
Generally, the client thinks that international companies present in Serbia are
changing business relations and in a way are educating the people with whom
they cooperate. This also means that the economy is slowly moving from the
sphere of selling material goods to the sphere of selling services.
Hauzmajstor has also started to understand the quality of services we
need. This means that the most important thing to us is not that ten repairmen can perform their work at the same time, but that they can come
when it suits us, which means that they need to come in the afternoon
so that the employees are not disturbed by the noise produced, that they
need to clean up after themselves, that they need to leave everything secured from danger. So, the intervention itself remains the same, but the
way it is done and the whole milieu created around it is what makes a
high quality service.
This last sentence may be taken as the highlight and an important message as
to what the domestic service companies should strive for. In brief, they should
follow closely the general business trends in Serbia and try to accommodate the
high standards and challenges put forth by the demanding international and domestic clients.
5 Conclusions
The presented material gives opportunity for a discussion of the nature of contacts and mutual perceptions between the Hauzmajstor employees and their
Western clients. I will try to draw some conclusions on the themes brought up
by this study.
First, it can be noted that the concept of culture is very much implicitly
present in the creation and development of the Hauzmajstor company. Actually, one can say that the whole process is about creating cultural identity in
two ways inwardly by creating the sense of a community, and outwardly

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through brand development. In this process, the principle of Occidentalism is

implemented in both directions. The image of a modern, highly equipped, efficient, and, most of all, reliable maintenance firm is internalized by the employees through training, but also imposed on the clients via marketing and real performance. Experiences and perceptions of relations within and outside the firm
also suggest a distinction between managerial culture and operative culture.
Further, the most fundamental experience is determined by the professional position of each employee, this being the reason for contextualizing experiences
of interviewees along this line of logic. Thus, experiences with foreign clients,
sometimes with one and the same foreign client, were very much influenced by
whether the respondent was a technical or a financial manager, or a call center
operator, a specialist services staff or a repairman. The concept of a foreigner
is seen through perceptual oppositions, such as: authentic foreigner vs. our
foreigner (repatriate), foreign employee of a foreign firm vs. local employee
of a foreign firm.
The concept of the cultural mediator is well recognized, the mediator being a representative of top management who facilitates the transfer of Western
culture one-way, from the top down, but who also, in the end, has to hear the
voices coming from below. Hauzmajstors cultural mediators are the president
and the general manager of the firm, the one being a repatriate and the other
being a professional with local business experience. In foreign firms and institutions, cultural mediators are acknowledged among the foreign top management.
Beside the cultural mediators who conceptualize and impose the Western model from above, there are people who work on the implementation of the model
downwards, but also facilitate the flow of local knowledge from the bottom up,
and they could be called cultural transmitters. The middle management in foreign organizations, mostly represented by locals, proves to be this specific social group with an important role of being the transmitters of the two business
cultures both ways, and thus can be treated as the business culture translators.
In communication with foreign clients more often than not our people working for foreigners appear in positions to receive the Hauzmajstor repairmen,
both in the private (residential) and the public (office) domain. In the residential
domain it is the baby sitters or housekeepers, and in public, it is office managers or secretaries. In embassies, though, only the initial contact will be made by
foreigners, i.e., the attach in charge of technical affairs, while all the operational activities are done in contact with our people. Thus, it should be noted
that the business communication consists of a complex mix of interpersonal relations between people of different ethnic or national backgrounds and professional experiences.
In the process of intercultural communication, two distinct phases appear,
first the phase of initial contact, and then the phase of established relations. The

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keywords for the first one were insecurity and distrust, while for the second the
opposite was true, namely, self-assurance and trust. It is also evident that the
negative stereotypes about the other, as manifestations of Occidentalism, were
incorporated into the phase of first contacts, while longer collaboration and established relations brought their annihilation, after which the same actors began perceiving each other as normal people.26 Also, it should be said that the
initial misunderstandings were more pertinent in the first contacts on the management level, at times when first deals were to be struck (over the phone), and
when the fear of the unknown other was the greatest, than in the face to face
contact at the workplace.
A noticeable element of Occidentalism that imposed stereotypes on the minds
of the Hauzmajstor management was the perceived necessity of written contract,
as a guarantee of long term business relations. On the other hand, the foreign
clients managers in charge of maintenance, often of Serbian citizenship or origin, were caught in a trap of self-Occidentalism. They tried to avoid contracts
(using the local strategies) despite Hauzmajstors insistence on signing them.
Even though coming from the same ethnic/national background as the Hauzmaj
stor managers, they internalized the stereotypical fear of the negative aspects of
the Serbian business culture (just as the Westerners they worked for did). The
established relationship with the foreign clients made the Hauzmajstor general
manager aware of the fact that the long-term contract, for the time being, could
indeed be substituted by a verbal motivation.27
Literature
Alexandrov, Haralan 2004: Transformation of Organizational Cultures in Bulgaria. In: Petya Kabakchieva, Roumen Avramov (eds.), East West
About the importance of perceiving the foreign potential partner with trust and as normal people by the Hauzmajstor insiders, see Vuini-Nekovi 2010.
27
I would like to mention a classic study by Stewart Macaulay (1963) on the importance of
(non)contractual relations in business. Basing his analysis on the examination of numerous
business relations and court cases, Macaulay argued for a relatively low importance of contracts in the American business world. He also argued that contracts were often functional
within the firm itself in defining the limits of responsibilities and securing the longevity of
the business relations. The Hauzmajstor study is in line with this argumentation, but also
adds to it the importance of two phases of the relationship, which Macaulays study did not
take into consideration. I am sure that if this (temporal) independent variable were taken
into account, a significantly larger number of non-contractual relationships would have
appeared connected to the initial phase of doing business than in the phase of established
relationships.
26

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Cultural Encounters: Entrepreneurship, Governance, Economic Knowledge.

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Arandarenko, Mihail 2000: Ekonomska stvarnost Srbije [Economic reality
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Vinji, 335372.
Allaire, Yvan, Mihaela E. Firsirotu 1984: Theories of Organizational Culture.
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Boli, Silvano 2002: Rast privatnog sektora i preduzetnistva u Srbiji tokom
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