intercultural experiences of hauzmajstor - a case study of repatriate entrepreneurship in serbia

Ethnologia Balkanica 14 (2010)

Intercultural Experiences of HauzmajstorA Case Study on Repatriate Entrepreneurship in Serbia

Vesna Vučinić-Nešković, Belgrade

Abstract

This case study gives an account of the development of Hauzmajstor, a small real estate main-tenance 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 busi-ness culture. The study also presents a detailed description and analysis of intercultural expe-riences of the Hauzmajstor insiders focussed on the perception of their first contacts and es-tablished 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 posi-tions 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

1 This paper resulted from work on the FP6 project entitled “Eastern Enlargement – Western Enlargement. Cultural Encounters in the European Economy and Society after the Acces-sion”, implemented in the 2004–2007 period. I would like to thank the project team mem-bers 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 profession-als 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 repatri-ates that belong to the same wave of return migration for better business opportunities, see Vučinić-Nešković 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 Al-bania), Russia (Director for Northwest Russia in Petersburg; Regional director for mar-

266 Vesna Vučinić-Nešković

After working for large multinational companies both abroad and at home, this man decided to leave the secure shelter of the Coca Cola representative of-fice 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 lo-cal needs for a house maintenance service. The first activity is being realized through Комон сенс5 (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 communi-cation and business relations with the foreign (Western) clients will be analyzed from the insiders’ point of view. Hauzmajstor’s 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 interview-ees 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 con-cepts, 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 in-corporate values, standards, relations and practices of a social group.6 Second, on the more specific level, two categories of socio-economic culture will be rec-ognized, 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 Комон сенс is pronounced as [komon sens].6 Taking into consideration that the author of this text is an anthropologist, she took the free-

dom 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 differ-ent definitions of the same concept (Kroeber, Kluckhohn 1952).

7 A very creative and layered definition of organizational culture may also be found in Al-exandrov (2004: 151). Also, we can argue that anthropology has influenced contempo-

267Intercultural Experiences of Hauzmajstor

values and practices within the company under scrutiny, and (b) business cul-ture, 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 cli-ents. Owing to the new developments initiated by the appearance of a foreign partner, the number of interviews increased to 24 due to the need for repeated interviews with the key actors. They were, indeed, implemented on all hierar-chical 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 lead-ers, 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 Rus-tler, the Austrian partner firm, and four with the clients, private and commer-cial, the second of which included mixed and foreign firms.

Research also included detailed observation of daily work activities in Hauz-majstor, 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 in-terviews given by the founder of the company in the leading national newspa-pers 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.


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 1990sIn 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 com-pany in 2004, a few flashbacks should be made to the economic situation of Ser-bia 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 (1991–1995), the UN economic sanctions imposed on Serbia, the devas-tating 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 wors-ening of all basic macroeconomic indicators:

“The gross domestic product (GDP) from almost 3 000 US$ per capita in 1990 fell to 1 640 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 hyperin-flation, and the monetary stability was never established for a lengthier period. The citizens’ savings were nonexistent, the foreign trade and pay-roll 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 ham-lets 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 seek-ing “additional jobs”), the appearance of new forms of unemployment (employ-ees put on “paid leave”), as well as the high emigration rate and “brain drain” of young professionals and their families (Cvejić 2002, Milošević 2002, Bolčić 2002a).


Most international analysts did not consider Serbia as a “transitional coun-try” 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 (af-ter 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 (Lazić 2000: 11; Lazić, Cvejić 2004: 42 f.; Arandarenko 2000). Nevertheless, there are obvious indi-cators that a certain kind of post-socialist transformation, although partial and slow, did take place in this decade (Bolčić 2002). Of course, depending on the domain in focus, it varied in kind and degree. Here, we will primarily concen-trate 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 out-side investors was implemented.11 Privatization also took place through addi-tional capitalization and sale (Arandarenko 2000: 353). Such waves of privati-zation 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 privatiza-tion 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, hold-ing small companies (of up to 5 employees) predominated. Even though the real economic influence of the entrepreneurs was quite low, since their firms con-trolled only 5 % of the overall capital in Serbia (in 1996), their presence, num-bering 250 000–300 000 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 (Bolčić 2002).

11 This model was also used in Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia.12 The first legal act regulating privatization was the Law on conditions and procedure of

transformation of social property into other forms of property, Službeni Glasnik RS 48/91. From 1994 on, whith the Law on changes and additions to the Law under the same name, Službeni 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 (Službeni 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.


The privatization of housing was implemented to the extreme, thus the ma-jority of the socially-owned apartments (built and owned by the state, city, mu-nicipality, 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 Ser-bian 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 in-ner apartment space, the other, which was collective and included the common spaces within the building (hallways, staircases, elevators, roofs, electric, heat-ing, 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 rep-resentatives 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 mainte-nance of collective and public property inside and around the apartment build-ing became liberated, and the choice could be made either for a state or a private firm. Moreover, the public company could subcontract other (private) compa-nies 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

14 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 resident’s rights), 5.8 % were living in an apartment owned by a relative or a friend, and 4.3 % rented their apart-ment (Petrović 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 (Službeni Glas-nik RS 43/93), and Law on maintenance of apartment buildings and apartments (Službeni Glasnik RS 44/95, 46/98, 1/2001).


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 insuf-ficient 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 2000sThe authors that saw Serbia’s overall economic situation in the 1990s as that of “blocked transformation”, characterized the period after the political chang-es of October 2000 as the one of “unblocked”, or “postponed transformation” (Lazić, Cvejić 2004: 39 f.). Lazić explains how the changes of the political re-gime 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 (Lazić, Cvejić 2004: 44).

In the period after the political changes of 2000, a certain degree of stabili-zation 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” (Lazić, Cvejić 2004: 53).

In the opinion of the same author, the speeding up of privatization, macroeco-nomic 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


the new Law on Privatization in 2001, until the end of 2003, 1 080 state firms were sold for about 1.3 billion Euros. Some of the largest multinational compa-nies 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 restruc-tured, new credits were agreed upon, and representative offices of multinational companies were increasingly opening (esp. in pharmaceutical, IT, and consum-er 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 re-forms implemented by the new government, the belief in a better, more dem-ocratic 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 capital-ism was the solution to all of Serbia’s problems. It was also visible to those ex-patriates 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 (Vučinić-Nešković 2003). Among them was the founder of Hauzmajstor, who returned with his family. Trusting the new po-litical 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 reconnect-ing with a group of school friends of diverse professional profiles and work ex-perience in Serbia (as the junior partners), our repatriate started the Hauzmajs-tor adventure.

16 This information can be found in the report posted on the site of the Government of the Republic of Serbia: Privatizacijom do uspešnog 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).


After a decade of living and working abroad, he had to readapt to his moth-erland culture and learn about the concrete possibilities for investment. He col-lected ideas from his closest surroundings, thus accepting the suggestion of a friend about the need for a well organized, professional, transparent repair serv-ice 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 in-formally 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 ex-ploit the still wide open space in the sector of repairs and maintenance of apart-ments 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 ped-estal 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 preci-sion”. 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 Hauz-majstor brand and its work performance.

3 Dynamics of firm development

3.1 Establishing Komon Sens and HauzmajstorKomon sens was founded as a share holding company aimed at business consult-ing 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 (minor-ity 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”.

18 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 de-fined by James Carrier in the introduction to the volume he edited on the same topic (Car-rier 1995). For the later designations and discussions of the concept, see Buruma, Margalit (2004).


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 hold-ing ownership, its major shareholder was Komon sens and a few minor individ-ual shareholders on the side. The latter were not on the payroll, but were invest-ing their work in building up the value of the firm. In April 2005 the firm had 25 employees, out of whom 14 were servicemen and support staff dealing with finances, accounting, warehouse, call center and management. The founder ex-plained: “We have two levels of management, the first one consisting of the gen-eral 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 conven-iently 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 don’t have a firm that special-izes in repairs and maintenance, so let’s design it and build it up as an or-ganized service. And in the semantic sense, the name ‘Hauzmajstor’ cre-ates 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 artisan-ship. And the second is that it has this Germanic technical root that asso-ciates with precision and discipline, and in the end, it is a Serbian deriva-tive of the German word ‘Hausmeister’19. And this name looks better in the Latin alphabet. We just could not find a Cyrillic font that looks tech-nical 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 marketingA 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.


“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 ‘pro-fessional’ with ‘JNA’ (Yugoslav National Army) tattoo and the attitude of ‘look at me, do you know how much I am worth.’ Instead, our ‘brand de-velopment’ 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 Hungar-ian, 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 re-lated to establishing a relationship with the client. One procedure includes pre-cise written instructions on how the call center operator should behave. It also includes how a serviceman should introduce himself when he comes to the cli-ent. 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, Café & 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 con-cerning 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.

20 With the diploma of the School of Applied Arts of the University of Belgrade, who pre-viously 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.


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 tele-phone 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, physi-cal work – intellectual work, filthy job – clean job, standardized – custom made, basic – urgent, high quality – moderate price, appropriate for local citizens – ap-propriate for foreigners.21

3.3 First year developmentsHauzmajstor 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 opštinas (townships). There were eight of them, working from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. A call center operator coordinated their ac-tivities. 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 em-blem of Hauzmajstor painted on them.

By August 2006, when the second phase of research was under way, the de-velopment and changes in the first year of the company’s 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 naše”).


the data on some 3 000 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 repair-man (via call center) in cases where they needed to go into details of the prob-lem 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 special-ized services. We initially had only the small home maintenance with water, electricity and other repairs. Then, we didn’t 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 subcon-tractors with which we cover anything that may happen in a business space or in a residential object. Professionalism and work culture consti-tute the true spirit of Hauzmajstor.”

Another positive result of Hauzmajstor’s 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 mem-bers 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 opin-ion”, one of the team leaders said, “this is a very good core. We all grew up to-gether. 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 perceptionsDuring my research, except when explicitly asked about their hierarchical posi-tions in the firm, seldom would any interviewee mention his/her own formal po-sition. 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 gen-erally the theme of ‘human resources’ is not a question of numbers any more.” The technical manager expressed a similar view:


“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 bet-ter 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 accom-modate 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 meet-ings. 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 man-ager, 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 com-mon spaces or at coffee time in the “garden”.

3.5 Partnership with an Austrian firmIn 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 70 years 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 Hauz-majstor 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 October 15, 2005 with a partnership contract which defined the Austrian firm as the majority owner (with 51 % of

22 Mirjana Vasović and Borislav Kuzmanović have also pointed out the importance of partici-pation and involvement in organizations (Vasović, Kuzmanović 2001; Kuzmanović 1997).

23 More about Rustler Group can be found on their website: http://www.rustler.cc.


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 contactsThe perceptions of the foreign clients are highly influenced by the professional role of the interviewees and can thus be divided into experiences on the mana-gerial 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 Ser-bian culture in general and of maintenance services in particular24 as well as es-tablishing contacts with Serbian firms with distrust, arrogance and fear (of Iron Curtain bug-planting, for example). They also expected special treatment, vari-ous 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 dur-ing 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 some-one 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 be-hind 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 af-ternoon’, speaking the language, cleaning up after yourself, fixing things

24 Interestingly enough, counter perceptions exist about foreign businessmen in Serbia as be-ing low quality managerial staff and with a low level of culture in general.


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 o’clock?’ 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 mobil-ity 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 hus-band is a housewife, he is active in this domain as well, it is completely natural. They delegate the maintenance problem, so that we already start-ed 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 clean-ing have a full time job there. And the embassy management wants to be-come familiar with us so that they can feel secure about particular indi-viduals 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.).


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 firm’s investment of time and resources lightly and irresponsibly. In other words, they often take advantage of acquiring infor-mation 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 expe-rience 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 ambassador’s 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 can’t give it out. ‘Why not?’ ‘It just isn’t 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 ad-vanced 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 em-bassy 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 14 days 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 de-manded of them and they were very satisfied with how we did the job.”


4.2 Perception of the established relationshipsThe established relationships with foreign clients, as perceived by the manage-ment, 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 af-ter 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 sub-scription 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 experi-ence 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 ba-sis, primarily with foreign banks and embassies. However, owing to the fact that most of them still do not have a regular budget for such expen-ditures, 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 vari-ety 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.”


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 dis-trustful, 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 con-crete 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 repairman’s pres-ence, almost never offering baksheesh, comfortable with making a complaint, and satisfied by the firm’s quality of performance. Occasionally, in the contact with the call center they appeared intolerant, this being the case when not un-derstanding 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 rea-son 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 bak-sheesh. 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 re-ceive a tip and not the one who cleans the streets, or the one who emp-ties the containers, generally why not the one who may deserve it more than the waiter. A waiter’s 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 peo-ple 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 situ-ation 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 opera-tive 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


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 con-tacts 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 lev-el, by persons holding a position of maintenance, technical or office manager. They usually inquire about the scope of Hauzmajstor activities or have a con-crete request for a service. The first contact by the embassies, though, is some-times made from a higher level, particularly by the attaché 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 approv-al 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 for-eign institutions and firms takes place between people of different ethnic/na-tional 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 mid-dle 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 Hauz-majstor 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


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 Städtische, 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 cultureThe inclusion of clients into the research of Hauzmajstor business culture aimed at analyzing what outside business actors noted as “surprises” in their encoun-ters with the repatriate based concept of real estate maintenance, in other words, what “makes the difference” when you compare Hauzmajstor to their competi-tors 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 profes-sional 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 Hauz-majstor 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 24 hours. There are others you can find in ads that work non-stop, but you don’t 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 8:00 o’clock 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.”


The employee of the small mixed capital firm explained that after the initial con-tact 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 in-terviewee was the mode of communication Hauzmajstor establishes with the cli-ents, 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 neces-sary 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 apart-ment 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 hauzma-jstor. 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 con-cerning the communication skills, competence and perseverance.

“The communication of Hauzmajstor is above what is existent on the do-mestic 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 ex-periences 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 poten-tially important, I am not sure, but this approach is positive.”


Comparing Hauzmajstor to the state maintenance companies such as Infostan or Army Maintenance Company, the interviewee thinks that they are on a com-pletely different level.

“The latter have contracts with the residents’ assemblies and their effi-ciency 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 re-pairmen 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 se-cured 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 do-mestic clients.

5 Conclusions

The presented material gives opportunity for a discussion of the nature of con-tacts 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. Actu-ally, 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


through brand development. In this process, the principle of Occidentalism is implemented in both directions. The image of a modern, highly equipped, effi-cient, and, most of all, reliable maintenance firm is internalized by the employ-ees through training, but also imposed on the clients via marketing and real per-formance. 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 po-sition 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 be-ing 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. Hauzmajstor’s 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 institu-tions, cultural mediators are acknowledged among the foreign top management. Beside the cultural mediators who conceptualize and impose the Western mod-el 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 for-eign organizations, mostly represented by locals, proves to be this specific so-cial 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 work-ing 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 manag-ers or secretaries. In embassies, though, only the initial contact will be made by foreigners, i. e., the attaché in charge of technical affairs, while all the opera-tional activities are done in contact with “our people”. Thus, it should be noted that the business communication consists of a complex mix of interpersonal re-lations between people of different ethnic or national backgrounds and profes-sional 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


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 es-tablished relations brought their annihilation, after which the same actors be-gan 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 man-agement 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 ori-gin, were caught in a trap of self-Occidentalism. They tried to avoid contracts (using “the local strategies”) despite Hauzmajstor’s 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

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26 About the importance of perceiving the foreign potential partner with “trust” and as “nor-mal people” by the Hauzmajstor insiders, see Vučinić-Nešković 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 con-tracts 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 Macaulay’s 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.


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intercultural experiences of hauzmajstor - a case study of repatriate entrepreneurship in serbia

Documents

study of motives

introduction1this study

project development

daughter firm hauzmajstor

business activities

daughter firm of komon

better business opportunities

development of hauzmajstor