ABSTRACT
Cooperation with foreign business partners is based completely on the effort of an individual enterprise, without any support from inter-cooperation among domestic enterprises. While traditional economic sociology primarily studied the role of networks in the economy and in large organizations the more recent and very copious literature, focuses on the cooperation and networking of small and medium-sized enterprises, as offering major development potential also for post-socialist entrepreneurs. There are a large number of entrepreneurs in Medimurje still oriented towards the domestic market, and this partly explains why more complex forms of production cooperation with foreign partners are relatively weak. Thus, entrepreneurs from Medimurje–very much aware of their tradition–believe that entrepreneurship development in their region is based primarily on their own hard work and diligence, and that of their parents, and also on the knowledge and skills that were brought from abroad as specific cultural capital.
