New economic elites, institutions and spatial dependency of development

Croatian modernization at the executive (local) level depends on the behavior of its new economic and political elites because, according to recent European analyses, “the internal workings, commit-ments, and actions of elites constitute basic distinctions among political and economic systems.” (Higley , Lengyel, Elites after State Socialism, 2000, p. 1). While European sociologists at the beginning of this decade mainly investigated the re-constitution of post-socialist elites in new political and institutional circumstances, until now – due to the contextualization of the topic – we have investigated them as special ‘economic participants’ of Croatian capitalism, that is, their relationship to the modernization of Croatian society (Čengić , Managerial-entrepreneurial elite and modernization: development or rentier elite?, 2005). With the new project, in accordance with previous European and our analyses, we want to investigate the activities of the new economic elites at the local levels of the Croatian institutional system. The main purpose of this project is to investigate the growth strategies of the new Croatian economic elites in the real social space and the existing forms of interdependence between the observed growth strategies, institutions that determine (slow down/accelerate) their growth and local development strategies. Our basic hypothesis is that the new economic elites, once constituted as participants in the growth process in the concrete social environment (however different they may be in some other important characteristics), use their growth strategies as forms of their own expanded economic and social reproduction and as a ‘meta- measures of dis/functionality of existing (local/national) institutions and existing local development strategies. Accordingly, the goals of the project are as follows: a) identification of appropriate typologies of new economic elites, company growth and local development; b) identification of relevant institutions – determinant of current growth strategies of new economic elites and selected Croatian counties; c) identification of the relationship between growth strategies of local economic elites, local formal and informal institutions and endogenous type of development (in two differently developed counties); d) identification of the role of managers in (business) networks; e) identification of links between new economic elites, growth strategies, types of competitiveness and types of state interventionism. The project will enable new knowledge about Croatian economic elites, endogenous development and guidelines for conducting pro-entrepreneurial policies.