Competitive Advantage and Human Resource Management in SMEs in a Transitional Economy

The article is based on data of the study of 151 small companies in Slovenia by J. Pranikar and others. The study is the first investigation of small firms in slovenia with a sufficiently large number of cases to enable conclusions about the ways in which SMEs are managing to cope with new opportunities and problems. The aim of this article is to investigate a link between competitive advantage and human resource management in SMEs in a transitional economy. Results indicate that a link indeed exists in that human resource efforts in SMEs to a certain degree contribute to the competitive advantage of companies.     

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On the dynamics of national scientific systems

Coauthorship links actors at the micro-level of scientists. Through electronic databases we now have enough information to compare entire research disciplines over time. We compare the complete longitudinal coauthorship networks for four research disciplines (biotechnology, mathematics, physics and sociology) for 1986–2005. We examined complete bibliographies of all researchers registered at the national Slovene Research Agency. Known hypotheses were confirmed as were three new hypotheses. There were different coauthoring cultures. However, these cultures changed over time in Slovenia. The number of coauthored publications grew much faster than solo authored productions, especially after independence in 1991 and the integration of Slovenian science into broader EU systems. Trajectories of types of coauthorship differed across the disciplines. Using blockmodeling, we show how coauthorship structures change in all disciplines. The most frequent form was a core-periphery structure with multiple simple cores, a periphery and a semi-periphery. The next most frequent form had this structure but with bridging cores. Bridging cores consolidate the center of a discipline by giving it greater coherence. These consolidated structures appeared at different times in different disciplines, appearing earliest in physics and latest in biotechnology. In 2005, biotechnology had the most consolidated center followed by physics and sociology. All coauthorship networks expanded over time. By far, new recruits went into either the semi-periphery or the periphery in all fields. Two ‘lab’ fields, biotechnology and physics, have larger semi-peripheries than peripheries. The reverse holds for mathematics and sociology, two ‘office’ disciplines. Institutional affiliations and shared interests all impact the structure of collaboration in subtle ways.     

The quality of measurement of personal support subnetworks

Data about personal networks and their characteristics are increasingly used in social science research, especially in research about the quality of life, social support and similar topics (Fischer, 1982; Marsden, 1987; van der Poel, 1993b). Since all data about a persons social network are usually obtained from the respondent himself, the quality of such measurements is a very important issue. Among other factors, the type of social support can affect the quality of social network measurement (Ferligoj and Hlebec, 1998, 1999). Differences in the stability of measurement between the core and extended personal network have also been found (Marsden, 1990; Morgan et al., 1997). The closer and the more important an alter is, the more likely it is that (s)he will be named in any measurement (Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, 1990; Van Groenou et al., 1990; Morgan et al., 1997). In this paper the results of a recent study on the quality of measurement of tie characteristics in different personal subnetworks are presented. The Multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) approach was used for estimating reliability and validity. A meta analysis of reliability and validity estimates was done by hierarchical clustering. The data were collected in the year 2000 by computer assisted face-to-face and telephone interviews from a random sample of 1033 residents of Ljubljana.