It’s Hard for Chicks to Take to the Sky! Contin-gency and Culture in the Struggle to Establish an Organic Agro-Business in Contemporary Serbia
It’s Hard for Chicks to Take to the Sky! Contin-gency and Culture in the Struggle to Establish an Organic Agro-Business in Contemporary Serbia

Summary/Abstract: This qualitative, mini case-study examines the reasons that influenced an agricultural engineer and former top manager in the agro-veterinary section of a large Serbian export-import firm to attempt to establish his own organic agro-business, as well as the factors that have turned his venture into an occasional struggle against the windmills. The case study offers a personal insight into the country-specific entrepreneurial and survival strategies needed to remain economically and physically viable in the rapidly deteriorating economic setting characterised by a strange mixture of emerging state capitalism, primitive accumulation, legal system and agricultural policy breakdown, and rampant corruption. It also transmits fragments of a personal, “insider’s view” of the changing roles of culture in the complex processes of political, economic and social transformation, as well as of the nature and consequences of the interplay of what could be described as European and Serbian socio-economic cultures.

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