Journal of Economic Sociology

The Paths from Middle Class: Evaluation of the Poverty Risks for the Russian Middle Class

2023-04-12T11:21:23+03:00

The middle class is usually perceived as a main supporter of innovations, source of political stability, and core consumer of goods and services. As a result, its members are traditionally supposed to have high human potential and make a significant contribution to economic growth both in certain country and all over the world, which permanently generates great interest in the issues concerning middle class. However, the main research questions have changed significantly over the last years. The experts both in Russia and abroad highlight the factors that negatively influence the position of the middle class. These are changes in labor market, price growth that outruns the growth of income, increase of tax burden and problems with access to public goods. During COVID-19 pandemic the income has fallen, the risks of unemployment have increased, and the costs of healthcare also have grown. The scholars in different countries underline similar tendencies: middle-class members, who already had to live in an ambiguous world, faced the risks of falling into poverty during the corona crisis. Using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitor Survey, we evaluate the tracks of middle-class families during 2014-2020 and demonstrate that the problem of poverty affects a part of this social stratum every year. But the share of middleclass members with the income below the poverty line is relatively low and remains largely unaffected by the current corona crisis.

Social Сapital of Organized Crime

2023-04-12T11:15:28+03:00

This review is dedicated to the analysis of the Russian translation (2019) of Mark Galeotti’s book The Vory’s. Russia’s Super Mafia (2018). The book addresses the historical background and current development of organized crime in Russia. Galeotti rejects to subject his material to any specific sociological theory and uses instead the descriptive language of economics. This review seeks to find a relevant theoretical context for Galeotti’s study of crime and criminality in Russia. The review consists of four parts. The first part provides general overview of the book. The second part explores the concept of criminality in its opposition to the state as an agent of legal violence. According to Galeotti’s, Russian criminals have lost the competition but have not ceased to exist. The third and the fourth parts discuss several hypotheses why criminality persist in Russia. In the third part the persistence of criminality is explained with the wide range of resources which include not only violence but social capital resulted from fitting structural holes. Having essentially lost an opportunity to convert violence into income, organized crime had to switch to the role of a mediator between demand and supply for illegal goods and services. In the fourth part of the review the persistence of criminality is explained by decentralization. The network closure around a leader can be seen as a factor of an effective concentration of resources. However, in the context of the competition between violent entrepreneurs, centralization becomes problematic since it hinders the diversification of syndicate’s resources, including its social capital, and makes it harder to act covertly.

Labour Process Theory: From Taylorism to Algorithmic Management

2023-04-12T11:09:14+03:00

This article provides an overview of the conceptual development of Labor Process Theory, from Braverman’s classic work to contemporary research dedicated to platform work. The article examines the theory’s conceptual framework: the concept of labor and its indeterminacy, the fundamental structural contradiction of the antagonism between capital and labor, and technology as an expression of this contradiction. The article discusses the four main branches of the labor process theory: the control/resistance paradigm, the theory of consent and hegemony, a postmodern approach, and paleo-Marxism. By doing so, it maps the development of the theory and its concepts. In addition to providing a general overview, this article offers an original interpretation of the labor process theory, which emphasizes the significance of knowledge in the labour process. This interpretation clarifies why the theory has become relevant again in the analysis of platform work and why it is potentially the most adequate framework for such analysis. The article argues that control over labor in the labour process theory can be understood in two ways: as control over specific technical work operations or as control over knowledge within the production process and access to the totality of production. The article looks at studies of platform work that use labour process theory and focus on information asymmetry as a way of control. It demonstrates that the relationship between classic labor process theory and platform economy research could be based on this second interpretation. We argue that the labor process theory can become the foundation that conceptually unites research of various types of platform work and allows for the description of elements of platform work outside the framework of platform employment.

Non-Jural Labor Practices at Kuzbass Coal Enterprises: The Experience of Sociological Analysis Within the Historical Context

2023-04-12T11:02:25+03:00

Kuzbass is the largest coal mining region in Russia. Ensuring safety and labor protection is a priority area in the activities of coal enterprises and the regional government. Safety problems are significantly subjective. The accident at the Listvyazhnaya mine in November 2021 revealed safety problems in violation of regulatory requirements in everyday work. The purpose of the article is to assess the scale and causes of labor practices that violate the legal rights and obligations of the parties involved in labor relations to ensure safe work and health protection in coal mining processes. The concept of non-jural labor practices coined by T. Zaslavskaya and M. Shabanova provided a conceptual basis for the understanding of labor relations as a set of labor practices at regional coal enterprises viewed from a historical perspective. Drawing on the evidence from the scientific literature and the media, the data from sociological investigations, the state and departmental statistics, the author analyzes the non-jural labor practices at Kuzbass coal enterprises from the beginning of the restructurings in the coal industry until now. The article argues that breaking the rules and ignoring socio-cultural norms that prioritize human life and health values have been institutionalized as a set of non-jural labor practices since the early 1990s and are well established nowadays. The recommended standards of labor relations are contradicted by the everyday management and existing labor practices. It is clear that the institutionalization of non-jural labor practices is caused by the management and employees. The key factors are focused on motivating owners and management to increase coal production and profit. Improper labor practices, deteriorating the quality of human capital, create institutional obstacles to the current and future objectives of innovative development of the coal industry and the purposes of the Kuzbass–2035 regional strategy. The main directions to overcome the effects of non-jural labor practices are outlined.

The Power of Place

2023-04-12T10:56:56+03:00

Numerous books and articles published in recent years argue that the human world today is so mobile, so interconnected, and so integrative that it is, in one prominent and much-repeated assessment, “flat.” Ancient and durable obstacles are no more, interaction is global, free trade rules the globe, migration is ubiquitous, and the flow of ideas (and money and jobs) is so pervasive that geography, in the perspective of more than one observer, “is history.” The notion that place continues to play a key role in shaping humanity’s still-variegated mosaic is seen as obsolete. This book ranges over natural as well as cultural landscapes to assess the role of place in enabling as well as obstructing the world’s march toward integration, mobility, and interconnection. For all the liberating changes that have already occurred, place of birth still has a powerful influence over the destinies of billions. For all our heralded mobility, the overwhelming majority of us will die relatively close to the place where we were born. For all the “flattening” perceived and relished by globals, the world still is dauntingly rough terrain for many more locals. From personal safety to public health, from compulsory religion to coercive authority, the world remains a mosaic of places presenting widely varying combinations of challenges to their inhabitants. What makes this power of place and how it can be mitigated are the interlocked themes of the discussion that follows. Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the first chapter “Globals, Locals, and Mobals,” in which the author considers the opposition of “locals” and “globals”, explains the motivation of “mobals,” and also argues why geography and “place” are still important concepts for understanding the modern world.

The Value of Work for Russian University Students: The Logic of Justifying the Choice in Favor of Personal Gain or Social Utility

2023-04-12T10:52:29+03:00

This article is aimed at theoretical interpretation of the value concept in economy, reconsideration of the traditional dichotomy of work values as well as at providing the empirical evidence of this new approach validity. It is common to distinguish between internal work values, which are mainly described as an interest in the content of tasks and the autonomy of their performance, and external ones, associated with the desire to get high salaries and achieve other benefits, exogenous to the work itself. However, a broad theoretical analysis of the value concept in the labor sphere, supported by the overview of the monographs by economists D. Throsby, M. Mazzucato, anthropologist D. Graeber and the works of economic sociologists, appeals to focus on the dichotomy of opportunities for obtaining high earnings or social utility by the employee involvement in work as well as the problem of reverse causality between these characteristics of work under the conditions of modern capitalist economy. The data was collected in December 2021 and included 38 interviews with students and graduates of Russian universities aged 18–24 years. The empirical part begins with an analysis of the value conflict that arises while making choice between individually beneficial and socially useful areas of employment. The desire to pursue purely personal interests in the sphere of paid employment matches with the market logic of choosing a future profession, analysis of supply and demand in specific areas of employment, clear ideas about the desired level of income as well as expansive self-development strategies based on expert advice and including multiple employment, frequent change of employers and firms, desire to devote time to individual “operational activities” as a means to develop hard skills. Orientation towards social utility includes a setting for long-term and gradual self-development within the professional sphere, its conscious choice as a “vocation”, a nonpossessive attitude towards money received for work, an active desire to achieve higher levels of professional knowledge and skills as well as plans to acquire socially recognized status in the future. It was also revealed that the orientation towards social utility is justified by domestic logic, rooted in the system of parental or own family relations, and has a gender specificity. It was reflected in the author`s concept of the anchors of utilityoriented approach to work.

Editor’s Foreword

2023-04-12T10:45:43+03:00

Paid Educational Activities for Preschoolers in Russian Cities with Over a Million People: The Interrelation between Income Level and Parental Investment

2023-02-24T00:16:05+03:00

In many Russian families, the educational differences between preschoolers are mainly formed outside of the municipal kindergartens through participation in paid classes, which have become increasingly popular in recent years. This created a new problem of increasing inequality in early childhood education (ECE), as not all parents can afford to pay for extra educational activities. This study investigates the effect of income level on parental investment in ECE by examining the relationship between family income and the educational strategies chosen by parents. The study involved 260 families with children aged 3 to 7 years old, living in fifteen Russian cities with populations over one million people. The families were divided into three income brackets. To identify the correlation between the family socio-economic situation (SES) and expenditure, the study assessed the money spent on the children's preschool education, including kindergarten and for extra educational activities. The study also examined the types of extra educational activities for preschoolers, and identified the motives for parental decisions. The families with the lowest income invest significantly fewer financial resources in ECE than the families with low and middle incomes. However, the analysis of the parental preferences and motives in ECE did not confirm that children from poor families are less involved in centrebased classes. Financial constraints lead poorer parents to find other options to provide competitive education. They mostly seek help from family members in conducting ECE, and conduct more ECE activities at home. Furthermore, disadvantaged families try to find the most affordable activities, i.e. cheaper classes at kindergartens or municipal cultural centres.

The Main Ideas of the Economic and Sociological Concept of Emotions by Eva Illouz. Reply to Nina Lyubinarskaya’s Review

2023-02-24T00:00:51+03:00

This work is a commentary on the review of N. Lyubinarskaya [Lyubinarskaya 2022] on the Russian translation of the book by E. Illouz Why Love Hurts? [Illouz 2020]. In her review, N. Lyubinarskaya highlights important and interesting aspects of the book under review. However, due to the fact that the sociology of emotions is a relatively new discipline, it is likely that most readers are not familiar with other works by Eva Illouz. In this note, we overview the general logic of her concept of the constitutive relationship of capitalism and emotions. According to Illouz, economic systems (or “modes of production”) form cultural and historical matrices (for example, traditional society or capitalism in its various historical forms) that shape models of relations between individuals within social groups , as well as the relationships of individuals to themselves in the sense of self-identification. These social models of relations in the processes of socialization are internalized and become “internal”, “their own” emotional-existential factors of the psyche. Each cultural matrix constitutes its own unique conditions for the realization of feelings and emotional relationships (the ecology of emotions), making the content of emotions specific to a historical and even biographical (the architecture of emotional choice) context. Illouz’s research highlights the radical difference between emotions, particularly love and related positive and negative experiences, between traditional, early capitalist, and modern capitalist societies. She especially reviews the effects of the latter in the context of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the surge of feminism in the 1970s. She pays special attention to the analysis of the destruction of traditional identification systems as a background to the commodification of emotions (turning them into ‘emodities’). Finally, she discussed that the formation of emotional capitalism in which “positive psychology” establishes a sort of a market dictatorship of happiness (‘happycracy’).

A Book on Economics for Sociological Reading

2023-02-24T00:14:45+03:00

The book under review was first published in 2019 and could not help but draw attention from the academic community as a form of the intra- and interdisciplinary “self-reflection” for the two world “star” economists who received the Nobel Prize in 2019. Russian researchers had mixed reactions to the book, noting the development of tools to increase the efficiency of foreign aid to poor countries (see, e. g.: [Banerjee, Duflo 2007; 2009; Banerjee, Duflo, Glennerster, Kinnan 2015]); an issue topical in light of the number of the developing countries’ debts “forgotten” by the Russian state (see, e. g.: [Voronov 2020]). However, the book received positive reviews from both international and Russian readers. The former appreciated its accessible style, and the focus on applied solutions for the urgent socialeconomic global problems aimed at creating a more humane world. They, however, also, noted a lack of critical assessment of the ‘capitalist worldview’, ignorance of certain issues (for instance, shadow economy), overly bold comparisons and generalizations, and vague practical recommendations (see, e. g.: [Crabtree 2019; Ball 2020; Kumar 2020; Oommen 2020; Srivastava 2020]). Russian readers agreed with these remarks, but also noticed the regrettable mismatch between the scale and the regional coverage of the book, its reliance on facts and the fight against stereotypes, and the authors’ ignorance of the Russian “case” and political-economic generalizations, and also questioned the authors’ estimates and forecasts under and after the pandemic (see, e. g.: [Meshcheryakova 2020; Kushnarev 2021]). For the sociological reader interested in the current Russian realities, the review summarizes the main themes of the book as the status of economics and economy, types of social polarization, myths and facts about migration, opportunities and limitations of free trade, socialpsychological mechanisms of economic processes, uncertainty of economic growth, and ways to mitigate poverty. However, it is noted that it seems that one cannot speak of a victory over or even a tense struggle against poverty today due to the actualization of the militaristic-geopolitical agenda.

The Valuation of Online APE Courses: The Case of Online Consumer Reviews on the Educational Platform

2023-02-24T00:13:44+03:00

and the concept of lifelong learning has become increasingly popular in society. At the same time, the use platforms as a new economic organization is growing. It leads to a contradiction between the services’ standardization and the platform’s aim to retain consumers. This has raised the issue of determining the value of online courses as singular goods in terms of quality criteria. The goal of this research is to determine the value of online APE courses for students. A mixed methods research strategy was used, including content analysis of online consumer reviews (N = 300) on the Skillbox website and semi-structured interviews with learners (N = 16). The research found that, in terms of standardization, the singularity of the product is not in its functional utility (core area), but in the additional services (peripheral area) provided by the platform, according to J.-J. Lambin's multi-attribute product model. As a result, three groups of consumers were identified: promiscuous learners; selective learners focused on additional services (peripheral area) provided by the platform; and selective learners focused on the functional utility (core area) of the educational product. The findings can be applied to the development of digital products on the e-learning market and provide a classification of consumers based on both course selection logics and the top-priority criterion of the product in a platform economy.

Subjective Well-being of Rural Dwellers in Russia: Factors and Their Significance

2023-02-24T00:13:11+03:00

The traditional policy of rural development in Russia has focused on bridging the gap between urban and rural areas by improving infrastructure and settlements in rural areas, but has not taken into account the perspectives and priorities of rural dwellers regarding their lives. Using data from The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey from 2012 to 2019, this study seeks to understand rural residents’ priorities for rural development by analyzing their assessments of their own wellbeing and the factors that influence it. The study uses data discrimination form factor analysis to obtain multicomponent regressors; a logit model is constructed to determine the significance of selected factors. The study finds that factors such as health, education, person's economic condition, and availability of utilities in the house have a significant positive impact on rural residents’ life satisfaction. However, the most dominant factor is “job satisfaction”, which includes the attitude of rural residents to (1) pay and working conditions and (2) opportunities for professional growth. The study also finds, unexpectedly, a nonlinear impact of economic condition on life satisfaction in rural areas, and a decrease in income returns. Additionally, the study identifies a group of rural residents who despite having minimal material goods, evaluate their lives as quite satisfactory. The study concludes by suggesting adjustments to the funding structure of the State Program “Integrated Rural Development” by increasing funding for measures to promote rural employment and expanding the focus to the non-agricultural sector of the rural economy.

The Right to the City (excerpt)

2023-02-24T00:12:29+03:00

The Right to the City is an idea and a slogan first proposed by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book, Le Droit à la ville. In this book, Lefebvre critically analyzes thoughts and activities related to urbanism and calls for action to reclaim the city as a ‘to-created space’—a place for life detached from the growing and negative effects, evident in the last two centuries, of commodification and capitalism on social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in cities worldwide. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the first chapter “Industrialisation et urbanisation” (“Industrialization and Urbanization”). It traces the reasons for the crisis of the city—competitive capitalism and industrialization—in their theoretical and practical dimensions. Lefebvre also distinguishes three periods of the destruction of the city, and discusses the trends that lead to the renewal of the city in the managed society of consumption. He predicts serious dangers and raises the issue of the city society as a political one.

Ethical Consumption as a Sphere of Russian Civil Society: Factors and the Development Potential of Market Practices

2023-02-24T00:11:42+03:00

The paper explores the concept of “voting for a better world with your wallet,” which refers to the idea of using consumer choices to effect change. The study conducts a synthesis and systematic review of existing scholarship on this topic and develops hypotheses promoting a holistic model of ethical consumer choice. The model takes into account consumer characteristics, product characteristics, and the environment, as well as two facets of ethical consumer identity: civic (concern for the common good) and consumer (focus on personal benefit). The study uses representative survey data from 2014, 2017, and November 2020, the year of the pandemic (N = 2000 in each case), to understand the dynamics and characteristics of different types of consumers who hold different positions on ethical purchasing (‘actual’, ‘potential’, and ‘indifferent’). Using regression analysis, we examine the relationship between specific factors and a consumer’s likelihood of of being included in various types of ethical consumers. Special attention has been paid to identifying a comparative role of proenvironmental (prosocial) and individualistic aspirations. We found that the concern for the common good has the strongest relationship with the likelihood of actually making ethical purchases, although the relationship with personal benefit is also significant. The engagement in ethical consumption practices is positively related to the diversity of Russians’ traditional prosocial activities outside of the consumption sphere. It has been shown, however, that by “voting with your wallet,” Russian civil society undergoes in-depth development, and also grows by attracting new participants as a result of easy access to practices. The number of ethical consumer is growing and their quality is changing, with the key change associated with the younger generation coming onto the scene. The paper substantiates the conclusion that the development of independent activity exercised by ethically-minded consumers signals the transformation of civil society, its tools, and spheres of influence. However, the realization of the consumer potential of citizens as agents of change is highly dependent on the available possibilities related to the activity of other stakeholders (businesses, NGOs, and authorities).

Editor’s Foreword

2023-02-24T00:09:30+03:00

Dear colleagues, as we begin the new year of 2023, we hope that this year will be less demanding for us than the past.

24th Yasin (April) International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, April 4–14, 2023

2023-02-23T23:55:34+03:00

Why Do Women Still Quit Their Jobs? Women’s Employment Transitions in the European Context

2022-12-11T11:41:39+03:00

Vast amounts of research are devoted to the ‘motherhood penalty’: discrimination in hiring, salary, and leadership opportunities for working mothers relative to childless women. For a significant number of women, ‘employed’ is not a continuous uninterrupted status but rather a type of activity that can be paused for an indefinite period in order to pursue other life goals, such as raising a family. A large proportion of women do not return to the labour market after giving birth, and others switch to part-time or stay out of work for a long time before returning. Using data from the first and the second waves of the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) for Austria, Bulgaria, France, Georgia, Hungary, and Russia, I explore which factors influence the probability that women employed fulltime will go part-time or withdraw from paid work (i. e., become inactive). I analyse the sample of 1446 childless women employed full-time during the first wave of the study. This paper focuses on women’s individual characteristics and their employment as well as contextual factors. The results show that, apart from the transition to motherhood, the factors that influence women’s participation in the labour market are traditional gender ideology and lack of state support.

The Institutional Nature of Complaints in Market and Distributional Environments

2022-12-11T11:38:28+03:00

This paper is based on the polemics with the author of the article “Complaints are not Gifts. Dysfunctionality of the Institution of Complaints in the Field of Housing and Communal Services in Russia.” The main focus of polemics is the conceptualization of the subject of research. The main thesis of “Complaints are not gifts” follows the widely accepted view that as a feedback mechanism, the institution of complaints is ineffective. The common mistake in the study of complaints is narrowing the consideration of complaints to their socio-psychological aspects, appealing to behavioral characteristics and the concept of ‘Russian mentality,’ and ignoring the very institutional nature of complaints as the most important element of the hierarchical system of management. The “Complaints are not gifts” fails to eschew this blunder. In the present article, I will reveal the essential characteristics of the institution of complaints, and explain why this institution has been rationalized and supported by the authorities throughout the historical development of the Russian socio-economic system. I will also review the complaints that formed the empirical data for the “Complaints are not gifts” article. These complaints are used by the Russian housing and utilities management companies as a template if they choose a competitive market strategy of complaining against their clients. Finally, I will review the prospects for the institution of complaints in Russia. Apart from the general expansion of the institution of complaints, we can expect its digitalization and the creation of state portals in the regions for receiving complaints. These will not, however, change the institutional nature of complaints. The institutional environment in Russia is gradually moving away from the market forms of governance to the system of “razdatok”, or central distribution system characteristic of the USSR period. Considering this, and also the fact that the state segment makes up to eighty percent of the entire Russian economy today, private utility service companies will have to adapt more actively to the experience of using customer complaints to survive in this environment.

Rethinking Money

2022-12-11T11:35:23+03:00

In his book The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, a professor at the LSE, presents the results of his research on money. The main purpose of the book is to reconsider the nature of money, especially its social nature. The author explores the possibilities to change society by rethinking the existing economic, sociological, philosophical, psychological, anthropological, linguistic and other social science approaches to understanding money. Referring to the history of the origin of money, Dodd showed how the theories of the invention of money proposed by K. Menger, B. Laum, G. Simmel, M. Mauss, F. de Saussure, M. Agliette, and A. Orléan, shape our ideas about money and the ways of its social construction. Based on classical economic theories, the author challenges the role of money in the reproduction of social conflicts and inequality, as well as the relationship of money with credit and debt. Dodd describes how the transition from the perception of debt as a moral obligation to debt as a monetary obligation took place and the consequences of this transition. Writing about various aspects of the functioning of money, Dodd notes that for the completeness of the analysis it is important to understand how people solve the problem of managing an overabundance of money and how this determines the cultural aspects of the existence of money. He explains his sociological view on money and applies it to the analysis of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its consequences. The author discusses the sources of the crisis, describes theoretical perspectives that underpin the previous and existing financial systems, and suggests ways to possible positive transformation of money in the future by explaining several monetary utopias. The Social Life of Money is an example of thorough analytical and methodological accuracy and profound research on money in sociology. This book can be of high value both for experts whose research is focused on money and for anyone interested in the development of social theory today.

On Thin Ice: Alcohol Promotion by Sport Resources

2022-12-11T11:31:31+03:00

Commercialization and the subsequent transformation of sports into an industry contributed to the increasingly conspicuous introduction of alcohol into the daily routine of athletes and fans. Under the current conditions, the partnership of sports organizations with the alcohol industry has become a legitimate phenomenon and has firmly rooted in the life of society, increasing social risks. At the same time, in public consciousness and scientific opinion, sport is still associated with health and constructive social behavior, but this value is increasingly being questioned. The authors of the peer-reviewed book Sport, Alcohol and Social Inquiry: A Global Cocktail (research in the sociology of sport) criticize the current situation and speak out against legislative easing for alcohol in sports to keep its true value. The monograph is an example of a sociological analysis of modern contradictions in the field of the promotion of alcoholic products by means of sports (at various levels of the sports hierarchy in an explicit or latent form). The authors demonstrate the clash of economic, political, and cultural aspects of the interaction between the state, the alcohol industry, fan groups, sports communities, and public health advocates based on protecting certain interests. The text presents vivid examples of the introduction of alcohol into the sphere of organizing sports (including big sports). The book covers a wide geography, representing a collection of cases on the “alcoholization of sports” in the United States, Brazil, Australia, France, Sweden, New Zealand and Japan.

Young Russians’ Pathways to Marriage: The Role of Networks

2022-12-11T11:28:34+03:00

How do young Russians get married? With the second demographic transition and the "great transformation", individualization and marketization of romantic relationships, the pathway to marriage seems to be reminiscent of a job search. The latter, according to Granovetter, is characterized by "the strength of weak ties". But if the labor market implies mobility and career building, marriage logic denies them—scarcely do people get married in order to get divorced and build "marriage careers". This controversy makes Granovetter's theory ambivalent in the marriage search field. So, this paper aims at uncovering the role weak and strong ties play in young Russians' marriage trajectories. 16 biographic interviews were conducted and concentric sector method and thematic coding were used. Although weak ties, especially those on Internet, showed their importance at the first meeting stage, yet further pathway to marriage required kinship network overlap and moving from weak to strong ties. Kinship ties were also a source of social capital, giving information about the future spouse. Network overlap, however, could be complicated by negative relationships one had in their parental family. This implies “path dependency”: if strong ties had not been built in one’s parental family, it would be difficult to build them in a new affinity network. As for the marriage celebration stage, once again kinship networks and bonding social capital played an important role with the latter having been converted into financial resources. So, having begun the analysis with Granovetter's theory, we then moved to network analysis in an anthropological manner, paying specific attention to the strong tie formation process and kinship networks.Keywords: networks; embeddedness; pathways to marriage; network approach; weak ties; strong ties; social capital; marriage market.

The Job Seekers Market and the Frictions of Finding Jobs on Online Platforms

2022-12-11T11:19:31+03:00

The article examines the state of the labor market of job seekers and frictions that prevent effective search behavior on modern online platforms. Matching is increasingly beginning to depend on the specifics of human capital and modern digital technologies. In general, job search on the Internet includes both a traditional set of problems (segmentation and marginalization of the labor force) and produces new ones, which, first of all, include information and communication interference and distractions, united in the literature by the term search frictions. In the theoretical part of the article, based on a review of existing literature, the problems that complicate the job search are analyzed. Unresolved problems contribute to the formation of a “spot” labor market, which accelerates the inflation of education, wages and the struggle for talent. At the same time, the (online) labor market is growing. While not in crisis, its condition can be characterized as “sluggish”, which means that a long job search and selection of personnel are coupled with a large number of fictitious and unsuitable offers from both sides. The second part of the article contains the results of the author's sociological study of the features of the functioning of the Russian online labor market for job seekers (by the method of statistical research of a structured array of cv data provided by the state service “Jobs in Russia”). The analysis showed that relying solely on the significant scale of the online job search site does not guarantee citizens assistance in finding a job. The low quality of the platform, the pronounced regionalization of the market, the existence of discriminatory practices (gender-based job search strategies, high wage dispersion), and the lack of a job search culture, on the one hand, are consistent with the labor market development tendencies in Western countries. On the other hand, a lot of friction narrows the chances of successful employment for job seekers and leads to a general stagnation of the market. The studied state platform, despite the presence of young and highly educated candidates, fully meets all the signs of a “sluggish” and weak labor market, in which “imperfect” categories of candidates dominate with a focus on “simple” signals to the employer, and as a result, on a non-optimal job search result.

The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress

2022-12-11T11:11:02+03:00

This is a Russian translation of an essay that Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1894. The essay describes ironically the social practices around the acquisition and wearing of the woman’s dress. Many references are made to this interesting source, but we have not been able to identify its accurate translation into Russian and decided to fill the gap. “The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress” was written for Popular Science Monthly. Like some other papers of Veblen, this one got published in a magazine carrying popular science content to the general reader, which does not preclude its academic significance. The essay has subsequently been republished in reputable volumes. Duke University Press generously granted the rights for a Russian language translation for the Journal of Economic Sociology from a book released in 2000. Veblen hasn’t attached an abstract to his original essay, perhaps in line with the policy of the magazine. This foreword from the translators does not intend to cover all the original author’s ideas and messages. “The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress”, just like the classical “The Theory of the Leisure Class” from the same author, describes the customs of a particular social strata, including the custom to spend wastefully and conspicuously in order to signal pecuniary strength within a given social environment. The conspicuous expensiveness and novelty of the woman’s dress and the related adornments serve precisely that purpose. Veblen shows the line of progress from the primitive efforts of the savage to beautify himself with gaudy additions to his person to a complex dress of a contemporary woman of upper classes. The three cardinal principles of the theory of woman’s dress, nevertheless, remain relevant. Without a sophisticated wording typical of many armchair scholars, Veblen uses clear and forceful language to explain the woman’s dress as an economic fact and the drivers of aggressive wasteful spending that dress implies.

Flexible Management in the IT and Creative Sector: Decentralized Capitalism?

2022-12-11T11:07:42+03:00

The article presents the results of the study of the non-material labor organization modes in Russian companies in the IT and creative industries. The paper explores the connection between the flexible structure and the actual form of labor management, and the process of implementation of flexible development methodology (Agile) in the organization of knowledge-intensive firms. The author problematizes the validity of the statement, common in the theoretical and empirical literature, about the relationship between the Agile organizational designs and decentralized forms of management, expressed in the autonomy of labor and reducing the degree of managerial control. The study aims to empirically test the thesis using data from 30 interviews with middle management of companies that combine organizational flexibility and flexible management approaches. The purpose and the research question are based on the analysis of the current literature in the field of organizational research, management, and labor process theory. The description of the research results is divided into two blocks—the analysis of management practices at the “periphery” of the flexible firm, and the management processes in its “core” (following the terminology proposed by John Atkinson). According to the study, Agile management methods form a symmetrical response to the flexibilization of the organizational structure, allowing to improve the quality of management, the degree of transparency, and the predictability of production processes. Implementation of the Agile-methodology is accompanied by standardization and intensification of labor process; the increased role of centralized planning and control; and better accounting of working operations. A deeper division of labor due to the decomposition of operations significantly changes the functionality of management and redefines the balance of power and authority in the firm. The theoretical conclusions of the study indicate that further development of management methods in the described direction can have a negative impact on the quality of professional communication and functioning of horizontally organized professional communities within the firm, and can also decrease productivity in knowledge-intensive industries.

Editor’s Foreword (Vadim Radaev)

2022-12-11T10:57:14+03:00

Dear colleagues, This issue of the Journal of Economic Sociology is published on the day of the 30th anniversary of the Higher School of Economics (HSE University). It may not be the best time for celebrations. However, we would not like to miss this important date. Our sincere congratulations to all our colleagues who worked at the HSE in previous years and stay with the HSE at present! Now we proceed to a new issue of our journal.

The Ontological Disunity of Money in Sociological Theory

2022-10-17T14:26:07+03:00

This article examines the ontological question concerning the mode of existence of money in its various conceptualisations in sociology, namely in the theories of Marx, Simmel, Moss and Zelizer. It is argued that money is considered in sociological theory at three ontological levels, namely, (1) Determinate being of money, or concrete money stuff, which is immediately experienced and singularly represented, (2) the representation of money on which the perception of money stuff as money is grounded and (3) the objectivity of money, that is, the objective reality, either material or sui generis, which stands behind money as such. The first level, represented by Zelizer’s theory of monies, contains objects to which a subjective meaning is attached according to the concrete social relations. The second level takes money regardless of its substance and treats the essence of money not as the subjective meaning attached to things but as the idea of money, i.e., the universal form of representing things. The third level points at the reality that mediates the first two as subjective conditions of ultimate reality. It is shown that in all these theories the consistent account of money seems to be possible only due to the negation of the other ontological planes of money and that creates ontological disunity within all these theories.

Determinants of Reasons for Financial Disagreements in Married or Cohabiting Couples in Russia: Relational Sociology Approach

2022-10-17T14:03:46+03:00

At present, research on financial disagreements is extensive but general. There are no studies of financial conflicts in Russian families. Taking into consideration the values of partners in dyadic relationships by utilizing relational sociology framework, the study explores five types of financial disagreements: (i) value conflict, (ii) conflict over price, (iii) conflict over necessity, (iv) goal conflict, and (v) conflict over income, in order to detail the structure and the various reasons behind conflicts about money in Russian families; and aims to understand the determinants behind each type. The analysis was built on the 2018 wave of the Survey of Consumer Finance that presents dyadic data for 3,503 Russian couples. Regression models were calculated for men and women separately to identify gender effects. All the considered reasons for financial disagreements are caused in part by partners’ different attitudes towards money. In addition, the increase in women’s share of family income increases the likelihood of conflict over price; traditionalist attitudes correlate with an increase in goal conflict; and conflict over income is connected with dissatisfaction with the decision-making process. The study shows the significance of considering partners’ values for the analysis of a family’s financial situation.

Complaints are not Gifts. Dysfunctionality of the Institution of Complaints in the Field of Housing and Communal Services in Russia

2022-10-17T14:00:18+03:00

Complaints, their forms, and their functions, as well as their institutionalization in various sectors of the economy, attract increasing interest among scientists around the world. According to O. S. Sukharev, ideas about the socio-psychological nature of complaints suggest a certain dysfunction of the relevant institution, which reduces its effectiveness but does not lead to its collapse. This article reflects the result of correspondence with a representative of the Novosibirsk economic and sociological school Prof. O. E. Bessonova, the author of a series of articles on the benefits of complaints as a signaling institution of a non-market type. The discussion concerned the controversy regarding the effectiveness and functionality of complaints in the field of housing and communal services in Russia. The author’s position is that the institution under consideration is not fully effective due to various circumstances. The dysfunctionality of complaints is demonstrated in various cases of institutional abuse, with one of the results being the mimicry of the institution as defined by E. V. Balatsky (a complaint as a denunciation). Special attention is paid to the phenomenon of vacuous, perfunctory bureaucratic replies to complaints, considered an institutional trap by V. M. Polterovich. The problem of false signals of complaints and their consequences is analyzed. The advantages of a personal appeal as an informal way of solving a problem are compared to a formal written complaint. At the same time, the role of transaction costs in the choice of one or another method of filing a complaint is noted. In conclusion, a forecast is given about the decrease in the functionality of the institution of complaints in modern Russian conditions in relation to the housing and communal services.

Reason vs Feelling: Appearance of New Ecology of Choice in the Romantic Sphere of the Individual

2022-10-17T13:55:33+03:00

The book review considers ideas and contemporary trends related to the sensual sphere of the individual and romantic relationships. In this book, Illouz writes about the consequences of modernism and the social conditioning of love, which is reflected in the romantic sphere. Her idea is that the institutions of modernism have led to the dominance of ideology of individualism, self-realization, political emancipation, independence, and free choice, and have changed personal ideas about what love should be and what romantic relationships can be. New forms of life have given rise to a “new ecology of choice” where choices are made based on culture and the sexualized discourse rather than personal preferences. In addition to using the works of well-known sociologists, Illouz’s argumentation is also based on empirical material. She analyses English novels of the XVIII-XIX centuries and modern novels about love and relationships, as well as self-help books and dating sites, soap operas, Internet blogs, and data coming from 70 interviews with men and women, aged 25 to 67, all of them with post-secondary degrees and living in three metropolitan areas in Europe, USA, and Israel. The sample included single people divided by three parameters: never married; married, but now divorced and currently single; and married people. Comparing these worlds, she tries to reconstruct the image of romantic relationships from the point of view of traditional culture and modernity. The purpose of the author is to show how the attitude of modern society to love, marriage, “love suffering”, and the relationship in general, have changed. Illouz problematizes the idea of marriage markets by Gary Becker, and writes about the crisis of family relations and the changing nature of marital obligations caused by the deinstitutionalization of marriage and the proliferation of individualized lifestyles.

Russian Instruments of Urban Planning from the Sociological Institutionalism Perspective

2022-10-17T13:51:08+03:00

In this paper, we study the role of urban development instruments in structuring the interactions among the key urban politics actors: citizens, developers, public authorities, and experts. Using the sociological institutionalism approach, we collected 39 interviews with relevant stakeholders in four large Russian cities (Tyumen, Perm, Ekaterinburg, and Novosibirsk) intending to uncover the “logic of appropriateness” behind the interpretation of the major formal planning instruments: general plans, land use, development rules, and public hearings. We show that following the formal rules of the planning process is based on their legally binding nature rather than on their embeddedness in normative-value orders. Consequently, the variability of the planning rules is determined by both the power asymmetry between the stakeholders of urban politics, and also by the absence of a general consensus regarding the value of these rules. We also demonstrate that while the informants almost universally critique general plans, they see some potential in the land use and development rules and the public hearings as instruments to build a local consensus. In other words, the problem of rule-following in urban planning has a distinct sociological dimension: the lack of a common value base in planning opens up a field of opportunities for rent-seeking behavior.

The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy (excerpt)

2022-10-17T13:31:50+03:00

The Innovation Complex presents a broad history of changes occurring worldwide. Focusing on New York City, Sharon Zukin shows a development of a new innovative economy. Each chapter is a study of the production of a particular space with its own embodied cultural forms and economic norms. In these processes, the whole innovation complex, including buildings, districts, and the city acquires scale, form, and sense. To show the scale of the innovation complex and how it works at different levels, the chapters in the book progress from describing smaller spaces to larger ones. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the seventh chapter devoted to how educative channels aim to develop the principles of technical and financial meritocracy. The chapter starts at several private elite universities of New York—Cornell, Columbia, and New York University, which use their place within the innovation complex for promoting the institutional agenda of academic capitalism. Then, it considers "Channel for technical talents," the project for creating more inclusive technical labor force, which may involve lower qualified citizens of New York City, including graduates from the New York City University. The last channel covers commercial program schools, such as the General Assembly and Flatiron School, where students pay large fees for 12-week intensive courses to be prepared for work in the technological industry. At the end of the chapter, the author discusses whether the combination of talent, meritocracy and academic capitalism will increase social inequality in the city.

Online Practices of the Economic Behavior of Russian Women during Maternity Leave]

2022-10-17T13:26:44+03:00

The article analyzes the increasing importance of visual media content in the daily life of Russian women with children under the age of 3 and suggests methods for studying visual social networks, both graphic and intertextual content. Based on the theory of social construction of gender, the authors introduce the concept of “non-maternal practices of young mothers”, defining it as a set of actions performed by women during maternity leave and aimed at meeting their social, economic, psychological needs that arise from the disappearance of the usual rhythm of life. A significant part of these practices is implemented in the online space, which makes it possible to resolve the problem of their social isolation during this period. We analyzed 720 social media accounts to understand what the thematic field of the modern mother community is and what types of economic activity are implemented in it. The results of the study represent a classification of online practices of young mothers implemented in social networks and aimed at obtaining an economic effect. The classification is based on the principle of dominant agency: real or virtual. A feature of the first group is the choice of practices aimed at creating a product or providing services in direct interaction with the consumer (food production, clothing manufacturing, hairdressing and cosmetology services, education, and creative crafts), and the social network acts aimed at promoting a product or service. The second group focuses on the direct use of the digital environment as an economic resource (blogging, online consultations, network marketing). Most practices spring from women’s desire for communication, self-realization, and earnings, which is understandable in terms of gender analysis and economic realities. However, some actions may have problematic sociocultural consequences. The riskiness of the digital environment is associated with psychological consequences, including the formation of Internet addiction, as well as negative economic effects (the vulnerability of young mothers to Internet fraud, the discrepancy between time and labor costs, and the profit received). The main conclusion of the article is that the study of women’s online economic practices during maternity leave with a focus on non-maternity practices is a promising and strategically important area of research in the landscape of modern motherhood.

Editor's Foreword

2022-10-17T13:16:21+03:00

It is with great sadness that we share the news that Professor Nigel Dodd passed away in August 2022. Nigel Dodd was a Professor of Sociology at the LSE. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1991 with Anthony Giddens as Supervisor, and lectured at the University of Liverpool before joining the LSE in 1995. Nigel’s main interests were in the sociology of money, economic sociology, and classical and
contemporary social thought. He was the author of The Sociology of Money and Social Theory and Modernity (both published by Polity Press). His most recent book, The Social Life of Money, was published by Princeton University Press in 2014. Nigel Dodd was also co-editor (with Patrik Aspers) of Re-Imagining Economic Sociology, published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Professor Dodd was editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Sociology from 2014 until 2022. He made major contributions to the sociology of money. He was a wonderful and pleasant person we have known for many years.

Economic and Sociocultural Aspects of Transnational Migration to Russia

2022-10-17T12:58:07+03:00

This compendium presents the transnational approach to migration in action. The book contains articles on the movements of migrants, predominantly from Central Asian countries to Russia and back. Therefore, there is a compilation of data to support the heuristic potential of the concept of transnationalism, taking into account both homelands and host societies. The authors of the publications rely primarily on qualitative research, which is not very common, and it allows a reader to ‘hear’ the voices of the migrants. Simultaneously, some statistics are also given. The book deals with a wide range of objects and topics - transnational models of existence of migrants, the role and the movement of goods in the migration context (exchange of gifts, presents and souvenirs; the migrant car), the role of remittances, migration infrastructure, the use of mobile communications, etc. The apparent focus of the book is on how social and cultural factors impact transnationalism in addition to economic factors. Most of the articles in one way or another deal with the analysis of the interaction of these factors. The authors introduced references to some economic-sociological and economic-anthropological concepts for a better contextualization of the transnational migration processes. The major critical remarks in the review touch upon the issue of duplication of some provisions of the theory of transnationalism, ignoring links with other concepts of migration, and unwillingness to take into account the discussion on the topic previously developed in Russian academia. Also, although the issue of racism and discrimination is mentioned in passing, it would be desirable for future research to explain how transnationalism influences the (non)spread of racism. This collection may be of interest to both specialists and researchers of migration processes, and a wide range of readers.

Geneticization from the Point of View of Geneticists: Practices, and Prospectsof Personalized and Predictive Molecular Genetic Testing in Russia

2022-10-17T12:57:37+03:00

The article offers the results of a qualitative empirical sociological analysis of medical geneticists on their assessment of the problems, opportunities, and prospects of predictive genetic testing in Russia as a relatively new branch of healthcare. The gradual introduction of a new genetic biopredictive technology into everyday life is regarded in the article as a phenomenon of geneticization or genomization. The analysis takes into account three main categories of medical geneticists: physician geneticists (who deal with patients), laboratory geneticists, and academic geneticists working in medical universities. The analysis revealed, firstly, those positions within the professional community of medical geneticists that can be called consensual. For example, concerning the problematic nature of the methodology for calculating risks associated with the development of multifactorial diseases, or with regard to the high cost of testing now and its inevitable reduction with biotechnological progress; about the reluctance of people in Russia to take preventive care of their health, and about the special prospects and demand for the oncology and pharmacogenetics industries. Other points of consensus include the clinical benefit of the results of predisposition testing for multifactorial diseases, the prospects for the development of the industry as a whole, etc. Between the poles of consensus and dissensus lie different views of professionals on the possibilities and prospects of predictive genetic testing practices. The results of the empirical research presented in the article are grounded in a historical and theoretical review of the scientific literature on the problem of the article. Initial conclusions are drawn as part of the study of social science (mostly Western) geneticization and its social consequences. The relevance of the conducted research is especially evident in the background of a large deficit of empirical studies of geneticization practices in Russia.

Contribution of Assisted Reproductive Technologies to the Reproductionof the Russian Population and Social Aspects of their Application

2022-10-17T12:57:10+03:00

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are perceived in modern society as one of the ways to increase the birth rate of the population. Despite the fact that they do demonstrate a noticeable increase in the effectiveness of increasing the share of successful cycles leading to pregnancy and childbirth, their contribution to the total number of births in Russia remains modest — only 2% (as of 2018). The role of ART is determined to a greater extent by their social significance: the development of this area provides an opportunity for the birth of children to those married couples who have problems with reproductive health. The present study shows what factors hinder the population's access to ART, and provides an assessment of the proportion of families that make up the potential for expanding the scale of coverage of the population with these services. The key factor determining the willingness to turn to assisted reproductive technologies is the presence of unrealized reproductive plans in the family. Based on the data of a representative sociological survey, it was found that respondents who demonstrated a willingness to resort to ART for the birth of children had a significant gap between the planned and actual number of children in the family. Such families were mostly prosperous, and showed a willingness to take risks associated with ART (for example, associated with a higher probability of having twins). In the final part of the work, conclusions are formulated regarding the prospects for expanding the use of ART in the regions of Russia. It is shown that the most significant barriers that limit this growth are the relatively cautious perception on the part of the population and payment for some concomitant procedure by the patients.

Automation and the Future of Work (excerpt)

2022-10-17T12:56:25+03:00

Thinking over what people will do in the automized future, researchers come to the conclusion: we will meet mass technologically-based unemployment, and we will be able to cope with it only by accepting universal basic income as major social groups will lose an opportunity to earn enough money for living. In this book the author critiques the new automation discourse, rejecting the hypothesis that overwhelming technological changes result in destroying jobs. In reality, changes in labor productivity are slowing not speeding up. Coupling with the decline in economic growth, the creation of new jobs is also down. Namely, this fact, and not technological innovations, is responsible for squeezing the demand for labor. In this book, the author opposes the new wave of automation discourse, and suggests his version of history of the global economy and labor development in the last 50 years. The author further believes that the majority of employed people will stop being tolerant of the chronicle decline in demand for labor and resulting economic inequality, which will turn the world towards a more humanized future. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the first chapter “Discourse of Automation” in which the author systematizes arguments of the new automation discourse in order to provide his explanations for the declining demand for labor in the next chapters.

Social Structure in new Russia: Evidence from Bayesian Latent Class Analysis

2022-10-17T12:55:43+03:00

The study presents the results of the multidimensional approach to the social stratification of contemporary Russian society. The proposed model employs the Weberian concept of life chances which has been operationalized on the map of 24 binary items measuring the positive and negative privileges of individuals and their households in four major domains of life, economic stability and security, industrial relations, human development, and economic consumption and leisure. Drawing from the Monitoring data conducted by the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2015 and 2019, we proposed the posterior model of vertically integrated five socioeconomic classes. These are as follows (2015 and 2018): disadvantaged (lower) non-economic class (23 and 21,8%, correspondingly), disadvantaged (lower) economic class (19,4% and 17,3%), two semi-privileged classes—lower middle class (29,4% и 34,1%) and true middle class (15,8% и 13,4%)—and advantaged (upper middle) class (12,4% and 13,4%). The obtained results reassess the popular view that there are no big classes in industrially advanced societies and highlight the importance of the noneconomic forces of multidimensional stratification of the Russian society in the posttransition era. The results also showed that the disadvantaged economic class demonstrates the highest degree of protest voting. The upper middle class turned out to be the most politically loyal, which saliently contradicts the prevailing stereotypes about the patterns of the political behavior of citizens in the new Russia.

Indigenous economy in the Arctic regions: traditions, market, state (on the example of the transformation of the economic activity of the Indigenous peoples in Russia, Finland, and the USA)

2022-10-17T12:53:36+03:00

The article describes the interaction of the economy and culture, in the frameworks of Indigenous economic development. It implies strong embeddedness of the economic activities of Indigenous peoples in their social and cultural life. The Indigenous economy is based on traditional nature management and it is closely linked to their knowledge of nature, folklore, language, social norms and expectations. At the same time, the active inclusion of Indigenous communities into market relations leads to significant social and economic transformations of their lives. This implies the question of how to preserve the unique indigenous culture in the market context. The paper considers three different scenarios for the development of the Indigenous economy in the Arctic regions using the examples of Russia, Finland and the United States. In Russia, the state plays a significant role by providing paternalistic care to the Indigenous population and focusing on the preservation of traditional culture; Finland is dominated by a market scenario for the development of Indigenous traditional economies and governmental support for indigenous culture and welfare; and the United States represents an intermediate case in which market incentives and paternalism are combined. The article also examines how the chosen scenario affected the social and cultural aspects of the life of the Indigenous people. The latter are associated with a new attitude to nature, the development of new cultural patterns, and the emergence of new culturally colored types of economic activity. The study is based on qualitative methodology. The main research methods were semi-structured interviews, observations, and analysis of documents.

Editor's Foreword

2022-10-17T12:52:56+03:00

Dear colleagues,
The geopolitical positions of Russia and the general situation in the world keep on deteriorating. Predictions for the future are becoming increasingly gloomy. Let us hope that worst of these predictions will never come true.

Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Spatial Inequality: the Case of Russian Education

2022-04-25T00:03:34+03:00

In Russia, the sheer size of the country and the diversity of its socio-demographic and economic contexts are factors that greatly shape educational outcomes and student opportunities. Current research on the spatial context of educational inequality is insufficient. There is a risk of underestimation of importance of spatial differences and the challenges they create for researchers and policymakers in the field of education. The purpose of this work is to analyze the existing conceptual approaches to the study of spatial inequality in Russian education. This paper present two conceptual approaches to understanding spatial inequality, and, respectively, two different answers to the question of whether socio-economic differences between territories is the main factor in educational inequality. Much of the existing research on educational inequality in Russia follows the spirit, if not the letter, of “geography of opportunity,” in which spatial inequality is the geographic dimension of social segregation. This approach implies that due to the historically uneven distribution of economic capital in space, geography is becoming a significant factor that limits students’ opportunities in terms of access to educational resources, choice of trajectory and educational achievement. However, this does not take into account the more complex social hierarchy of space, which is described in the works of Bourdieu and his followers. This second approach opens up prospects for studying the symbolic status of space, as well as the spatial capital of individuals, organizations, and the territories themselves. The approaches described in this article introduce new opportunities for educational researchers and pose a number of challenges for educational policy in Russia. This paper also shows the possibilities of operationalizing these concepts for transferring them to the field of education.

Interview with Samantha King

2022-04-25T00:00:40+03:00

The interview with professor Samantha King, the author of the famous Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), reveals her current studies within the field of cultural politics of health, sport and the body. Samantha introduces her research group in Queen’s University that critically looks at the healthification of market and political processes when social control, inequality and power asymmetry are pursued under the super value of health. She describes how her team uses the genealogical method by M. Foucault to reconstruct the dynamics of historical, ideological, economic, social agendas that shape local judgments about fruitful cultural frames for corporate charity, medicalized performance in professional sport, and painkiller use by people from different social classes. King’s Group studies criticize discourses about individual responsibility and good citizenship as those that may welcome getting pills into bodies instead of transforming the economic and social contexts out of which the disease arises. In the interview, Samantha traces the changes in anti-cancer philanthropy in recent years, comments on the political struggles behind the COVID-19 pandemic and points to the the hidden layers of the protein supplements market challenged by the post-humanistic ban on eating animals, emerging laboratory-meat supply, and ecological concern. The interview with Samantha King as well as her scientific articles will be useful for those who reflect on the incorporation of the human body and subjectivity into capitalistic production in different geopolitical realms.

Digital Utopia: Labour in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

2022-04-24T23:57:55+03:00

In recent years, we have been hearing more about the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence technologies, which are invisibly but surely being introduced into our lives in all its manifestations. Will these technologies revolutionize work? Can the digital utopia be realized? British researcher Phil Jones tries to answer these and many other questions in his book Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism. Jones invites the reader to look at the reverse and very unsightly side of the digital utopia. The focus of the research is microwork, realized in the form of the so-called “human intelligence task” (HIT) or “artificial artificial intelligence” (AAI). The purpose of the book is to show that it is the poorly paid and mentally destructive tasks performed by humans that make our digital lives more convenient and understandable, and not the functioning of artificial intelligence algorithms. The author analyzes the work of the “Mechanical Turk” service employees and its negative consequences, for example, the lack of guaranteed work and its payment, alienation, and an increasing number of psychological problems. The review presents the key provisions of the book: it describes the specifics of the MTurk service and the reasons for the author’s interest in this platform. It reveals Jones’s understanding of the term “microwork”, its main characteristics, and features of work, considers the factors that make it difficult to protest in the age of platform capitalism, outlines new utopia, and contains some critical remarks. The conclusion is that Jones’s book can be recommended reading for anyone interested in labour issues in the contemporary world.

“3D-model” of the Russian Economy

2022-04-24T23:53:53+03:00

The review considers the results of a study implemented in 2020—early 2021, and reflected in the presented collective monograph. It is shown that the applied approach (macroeconomic analysis in combination with the mezzo-level analysis of each of the industries and at the level of individual firms) enabled showing an ambiguous reaction to the pandemic of different companies and the new risks and opportunities associated with it in six sectors of the Russian economy, and in the global context of the development of the relevant sectors in the world economy. In particular, the trends of the previous development, as well as the situation in the first period of the pandemic and after the initial recovery, as well as possible trajectories of further development in retail trade, IT, the tourism sector, pharmaceutical production, automotive industry and the chemical industry are considered. The resulting picture allows us to better understand both the opportunities and limitations of further development, as well as the challenges and possible junctions the Russian state policy is facing. In the book they are presented as follows: (1) the further increase in the already high internal and interregional divergence (regarding the technological development, productivity, profitability, etc.) in sectors with vertical coordination; (2) the further digitalization, which in sectors with developed horizontal ties will entail updating business models and formats; (3) the increased role of intangible assets of companies (knowledge, skills), growing competition both within and between industries for human capital; (4) health, safety, nutrition, and entertainment will become the core drivers of the economy.
In conclusion, critical remarks are formulated: underestimation of the specifics of the pandemic as an extraeconomic shock, in comparison with typical economic crises (and models for overcoming them); the need to analyze the general trends in the global and Russian economies in the context of the downward wave of the current long economic cycle; compositional difficulties of the monograph.

Conspiracy Thinking: Concept, Measurement and Factors

2022-04-24T23:49:03+03:00

The article provides an overview of the literature on conspiracy thinking. Although there is no consensus on the definition of this concept, as a rule, researchers pay attention to the following similar aspects: belief in secret and covert actions, a group of interested persons influencing world processes or hiding information about something, the false or implausible nature of conspiracy theories. There are two fundamentally different approaches to measuring conspiracy thinking: (1) in terms of agreement with several real conspiracy theories, (2) in general terms, without reference to specific conspiracy theories. Each of these approaches has serious limitations, both specific (for example, the arbitrariness of the choice of conspiracy theories for the first approach and the lack of one-dimensionality of the scales for the second), and general (the difficulty of using the scales in comparative international studies). The article provides examples of scales that correspond to each of the approaches. Factors influencing belief in conspiracy theories can be divided into psychological and social. Conspiracy beliefs are more common in people with high anxiety, low self-esteem and less developed analytical skills. In addition, conspiracy theories are more often believed by people with low social status and educational level, low level of generalized and political trust, belonging to the ends of the ideological spectrum, and consuming information from glossy magazines and social networks. The role of age and religiosity is less straightforward.

Online Dating: Market or Bazaar? The Marriage Partner Search Process on an Orthodox Dating Site

2022-04-24T23:44:57+03:00

According to a number of researchers, in view of the marketization of culture, the processes of searching for and choosing a romantic partner have taken on the characteristics of a market which becomes especially apparent in case of online dating platforms [Heino Ellison, Gibbs 2010; Schmitz 2017]. The logic of religious dating platforms, where the proclaimed goal is to find a spouse once and for good, may conflict with the market integration logic of a platform itself. In this study, based on the in-depth semi-structured interviews with 18-35-year-old Orthodox online dating platform users from Moscow and the Moscow region, the objective is to identify the form of integration that is suitable for describing the search for a couple on this site. Firstly, the search for a partner is studied through G. Akerlof's perspective as search on the market so that the website’s questionnaire and photos are treated as institutional mechanisms used to tackle the problem of imperfect information and the quality uncertainty. Secondly, the search process in hand is considered as a bazaar in line with C. Geertz’s argument where messaging is bargaining, and users, motivated by the desire to find a soulmate, aim at clientelization. Finally, the authors infer that the bazaar perspective is more relevant for describing the search process in the considered case. In conclusion, the market angle itself is problematized, and attention is also paid to the functioning of the platforms in general.

Why Demography Matters (excerpt)

2022-04-24T23:34:31+03:00

Demography is not destiny. As Giacomo Casanova explained over two centuries ago: ‘There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our own lives.’ Today we are shaping them and our societies more than ever before. Globally, we have never had fewer children per adult: our population is about to stabilize, though we do not know when or at what number, or what will happen after that. It will be the result of billions of very private decisions influenced in turn by multiple events and policies, some more unpredictable than others. More people are moving further around the world than ever before: we too often see that as frightening, rather than as indicating greater freedom. Similarly, we too often lament greater ageing, rather than recognizing it as a tremendous human achievement with numerous benefits to which we must adapt. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the chapter eight “Population and Politics,” where the authors discuss the political demography. Here they address eugenics, in both its historical and contemporary manifestations, and then look again at migration and past fertility patterns that may influence it.

The Role of Social Media in the Adaptation of Russians Working in Precarious Labour Markets in Korea and China

2022-04-24T23:15:09+03:00

How do migrants use social media to adapt to new social conditions, including those in the labour market? Does it matter which social media and how many of them are available for migrants? Answering these questions, we focus on particular social groups—Russian citizens engaged in precarious work in China and South Korea. These labour market segments have hardly been described in the academic literature, mainly because such migrant flows are not observable in the receiving or sending country. As a rule, these people do not have legal migration status (they do not have work permits, long-term residence permits, insurance, and other necessary documents). We aim to compare two situations—the Korean one, where different social media (WhatsApp, VK, Viber, and others) are available to migrants, and the Chinese one, where WeChat dominates, and hence, in so doing to understand what happens in the context of one dominant media. In addition to analyzing work requests and job vacancies published in social media (WeChat, VK, Telegram, WhatsApp), we use in-depth interviews with precarious workers (23 interviews obtained in China and 31 in Korea).

Editor's Foreword

2022-04-24T20:56:56+03:00

Dear colleagues, Events that started on February 24, 2022 brought radical changes to Russia and the whole world. Both academic activity and daily life have become much more uncertain and complicated. Quite quickly, many members of the nternational Board cancelled their affiliations with our Journal. We really appreciate the attitude of those who did not cancel their cooperation with us on the basis of our nationality. Despite all expected difficulties, we have to fulfil our professional duties and present to you the next issue of our journal.

A Guide for Market-Based Interventions and Public Problems

2022-02-09T00:25:10+03:00

Is it possible to apply economic mechanisms to solve public problems, especially sensitive and morally rooted ones? Can markets effectively and fairly regulate social issues in the public policy field? During the last several decades, with the spread of market mechanisms in the social order, theoreticians and practitioners have been searching for market-based interventions. While a significant body of literature criticizes neoliberalism for its limitations and contradictions, the collective of the sociologists Daniel Neyland, Véra Ehrenstein, and Sveta Milyaeva suggest in their book Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Study of Neoliberalism in Action problematizing not only the role of the market in the implementation of government interventions but also the very definition of the market—its constituent relationships, practices, meanings, and calculative devices. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), the authors propose looking behind the processes of market assembly work and investigating how in the course of market-based interventions social problems, entities, and relationships are shaped, transformed, and allow the achievement of certain results in public policy. Based on the empirical materials of an extensive ethnographic study (legal and historical documents and semi-structured interviews with experts, managers, and stakeholders), the authors use six empirical cases to illustrate how competition, investment and return, property, trade and exchange, incentives, and selling can, in practice, not only become instruments of market-based intervention but also shape and redefine the subject matter itself. The book will be of interest and beneficial to researchers in the field of sociology of markets as a source of rich descriptions of markets, which generally constitute a subject of active government regulation and which become a platform for the symbolic struggle of various market actors.

Fieldwork Challenges Stemming from Doing Studies in Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT)

2022-02-09T00:19:39+03:00

This article presents the authors’ self-reflections on the challenges they faced as researchers during their long-term study of the illegal wildlife trade of sturgeon meat and caviar and Caspian seals’ skins and oil that they carried out from 2012 to 2019. The authors focus on the following main topics: personal health and security issues resulting from the activities of the police and the Federal Security Service, the recruitment and training of local assistants and university students, intergenerational and gender gaps that exhibit a strong influence on the development of trust between researchers and respondents, the network density of market dynamics and speed of communication through the market, and the shift in environmental legal regulations as an influence on current studies. In addition, the authors stress the lack of appropriate infrastructure to conduct systemic data collection and local populations’ unawareness of research fieldwork on social and economic issues ever undertaken in the areas under study. The authors show that for the study of informal economy activities to prove successful, several points should be identified: first, the formation of identity to be considered acceptable in the local community so that the researcher is perceived as a member of the community; second, the influence of gender boundaries on research driven by the ever-increasing complexity of social interactions set in different social and cultural contexts; and, third, time and funding as two of the most important things that should be taken into account when planning field studies, depending on how strong the illegality is and whether assistants are ready to face “others” from their own community.

Self-Employment, Secondary Jobholding, and Labor Income Inequality

2022-02-09T00:07:33+03:00

Using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey from 2000 to 2014, this study analyzes the evolution of various sources of labor income: salaried employment in a primary job, self-employment in a primary job, secondary employment, and irregular earnings. The composition of income sources reflects the strategies of adaptation to economic shocks, institutional changes, and technological innovations. The paper contributes to the debates about the precarization of employment and, more broadly, to the development of sociological views about social class structure. The importance of salaried employment in a single job markedly increased between 2000 and 2014, both as the share of the workforce and as the fraction of total labor incomes. Simultaneously, the prevalence of secondary job holding and irregular work activities declined, which indicates the stabilization of the social structure. The results show that additional labor incomes and total labor income are distributed less evenly than earnings from a primary job. The observed changes in the structure of employment are associated with a 7–8% reduction in labor income inequality, which exceeds the contribution of changes in the education structure or population aging. Multiple jobholding retains its role as a source of social differentiation, despite a significant reduction in its incidence.

A Theory of Fields (Excerpt)

2022-02-09T00:29:24+03:00

The central goal of this book is to explicate an integrated theory that explains how stability and change are achieved by social actors in circumscribed social arenas. The theory rests on a view that sees strategic action fields, which can be defined as mesolevel social orders, as the basic structural building blocks of modern political/organizational life in the economy, civil society, and the state. In constructing a new perspective, the authors draw upon the rich body of integrative scholarship produced by economic sociologists, institutional theorists in both sociology and political science, and social movement scholars. The Journal of Economic Sociology is pleased to publish the first chapter, “The Gist of It.” In this chapter, the authors sketch the basic features of this perspective in some detail, differentiating the new elements from the old, including Bourdieu, Giddens, institutional theory, network analysis, and social movement theory.

Social Mobility of Russians in Terms of Life Chances and Risks

2022-02-08T23:51:01+03:00

This paper focuses on the issues of social mobility and immobility of Russians in the neo-Weberian stratification hierarchy of Russian society, based on indicators of life chances. Social mobility is interpreted as a transition between three mass strata. Trajectories of mobility (rates and factors) are analyzed using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) panel data of a six-year interval from 2013 to 2018 and the group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) method. It is shown that a quarter of Russians moved between strata. Mobility usually occurs over a short distance. Cases of significant life changes that would lead to transition between polar strata (low and high) are exceptions to the rule. The chances of getting into polar strata depend on the quality of human potential and, as a result, on individuals’ places in the system of industrial relations. Only highly qualified Russians with good health, who also originate from highly educated families, have high chances of getting into positively privileged (high) strata. For these Russians, composite rents work. Risks of moving down to low strata are present for Russians with low education, bad health and parents with low education, mainly due to employment in bad job positions that violate employees’ rights. The paper shows that social background continues to play a significant role in shaping chances of social wellbeing and mobility. It also draws attention to the fact that skills in use of information technology form a new basis for inequality between people.

Throwing Food Away and Food Rescue Practices in Russia (Microlevel Analysis)

2022-02-08T23:43:28+03:00

About one-third of all food produced in the world is thrown away. The higher the development level of the country, the more this practice is contributed to by microlevel actors, i.e., consumers (households). Food waste is a serious environmental, economic, social, and ethical issue, and a search for effective ways to alleviate this issue conforms to sustainable development goals. The problem is systemic, and its theoretical conceptualization follows this path. However, some aspects of this problem have not been examined equally: one of its least studied aspects is the relationship between (not) throwing food away, on the one hand, and actual food rescue practices implemented by consumers, on the other. Capturing this relationship is important for understanding both the nature of the food waste phenomenon and the comparative role of various recovery practices, including new ones (e.g. peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing), and the civil society potential in alleviating the waste issue. Based on a representative survey (N = 2,000 respondents, November 2020), the levels and factors of Russians’ engagement in groups with different attitudes toward throwing food away have been identified (“not throwing away food,” “throwing away edible food,” and “throwing away spoiled food”). We used regression analysis to estimate the relationship between the probability of being included in any of these groups and the involvement in various food rescue practices (feeding animals and food waste composting, extending the shelf life of products, and donating unneeded food to others, including P2P food sharing). It has been shown that consumers using social channels for food rescue (both practicing food sharing and not), ceteris paribus, are less likely to throw away edible food and more likely to throw away spoiled food (at least during the pandemic, although probably this is not so much due to the pandemic). Conclusions are made about the importance of combining social rescue practices with other types of food rescue and about the potential of civil society in mitigating the issue.

Editor's Foreword

2022-02-08T23:36:51+03:00

Dear colleagues,
After the pleasant Christmas vacation, we are back to our routines. Universities have returned to conventional teaching of their classes, although nobody knows whether we will be able to keep these activities offline, given that a new strain of coronavirus, Omicron, is spreading around the world.

"Digital Rush": In Search of Balance between Professional and Market Logics in Web Journalism

2021-12-30T23:52:53+03:00

A book written by French-born American sociologist Angele Christin, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms, is devoted to the specificities of the functioning of publications during the traffic-chase era. The book's main goal is to show how the implementation of algorithms affects the professional identity and working practices of journalists. The scholar uses a multi-stage theoretical framework as she turns to Bour- dieu's concept of field, the sociology of "Worlds" by Boltanski and Thevenot, the theory of institutional isomorphism proposed by DiMaggio and Powell, and other relevant approaches examined in The New Economic Sociology. The book is based on a comparative study of two web publications in the United States and France during the period 2011-2015. The author uses a mixed methodology whose core is comprised of observation and semi- structured interviews with the staff of media organizations. Referring to the broad empirical material, Christin wonders whether metrics are really able to eradicate dis-tinctions between national mass media in different countries. Although the two web publications face similar challenges in terms of modern journalism, they tackle them in different ways. This is due to the embeddedness of the professional activity of journalists in the institutional context, organizational structures, and profes-sional fields. The review raises the key issues of the book: a brief history of the formation of web journalism in the United States and France, the media organizations' perception of metrics and audience, and the role of independent professionals in news production.

The Problem of Defining the Essence of Money in Contemporary Economic Sociology: Between the State and Trust

2021-12-30T23:52:22+03:00

The article considers the problem of defining the essence of money, which is one of the main problems in the contemporary sociology of money. This problem cannot be explained using the neoclassical economic analysis of money, in particular, the evolutionary theory of money by Menger. The main idea of this approach is that the origins of money should be found in the reducing cost of exchange based on the rationality of economic agents. Consequently, the universality of money and its spatial spread have remained unexplained (including temporary uncertainty and the use of money in the future). The paper presents two approaches—by Ingham and Dodd—to defining the essence of money. Considerable attention is paid to classic works in the field written by Simmel and Keynes. From the analy¬sis, we see that the main features distinguishing monetary exchange from other forms of exchange (including barter) can be found in Simmel's The Philosophy of Money. Simmel also provided two solutions on how to de¬fine money: the state's production of credit money or trust in money from society. Ingham developed the first solution and singled out the state's pro¬duction of credit (and the creation of money as account). Meanwhile, Dodd insisted on the fiduciary component of the financial system as a crucial element. Both authors used the metaphor of money as an idea or process embedded in social relations, which contrasts the commodity metaphor in¬troduced by Menger. The main assertion of the article is that the metaphor of money as an idea corresponds to the proposition that the basic function of money is the measure of value (money of account), or store of value, while the neoclassical model suggests that the commodity metaphor of money and its unit of exchange function are crucial. In addition, contemporary theories of money introduce the distinction between money as account (which is more abstract) and particular forms of money (which can be named money stuff). Similarities and contradictions between the two solutions to the problem of uncertainty— by Ingham and Dodd—are also presented in the article.

High-Quality Donor: Criteria for the Selection of Gamete Donors in the Russian Field of Assisted Reproductive Technologies

2021-12-30T23:51:12+03:00

The emergence of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has been one of the groundbreaking solutions to the problem of infertility, but these technologies involve interference with the natural process of giv¬ing birth to a child. In this study, we answer the question of whether we can talk about attempts by parents to influence the "quality" of their child in ART through the mechanism of choosing gamete donors. The theoretical analysis considers the concept of the "quality" of biomaterial in the context of the commodification of vital goods as well as the problem of kinship associated with the transformation of family relations as a result of the application of ARTs. Foreign studies have confirmed the attempt to influence the "quality" of the child through the choice of donors with certain characteristics. However, in the Russian context of social conservatism, previous studies have found interference in the ge¬netics of a child to be unacceptable. The aim of this work is to explore how the possibilities of controlling the "quality" of a child are distributed between doctors and infertile couples as well as the hidden social grounds behind the criteria used for choosing a donor. The focus of the study is on the representatives of reproductive centers and sperm and egg banks in Moscow. The strategies for selecting respondents were targeted selection and the snowball method, with the database consisting of fifteen semi-struc¬tured interviews.
The analysis revealed that potential parents are included in the ART process as actors whose actions are subordinate to those of medical centers . The image of a "high-quality" donor is formed through the prism of certain requirements put forward to donors by ART centers and then transmitted to parents. In addition, the study found a tendency in the desire of potential parents to influence the "quality" of their child—not in an absolute but a relative sense—to have a child of the same "quality" as themselves.

Land Use Regulations: Legally Fluid Technology

2021-12-30T23:43:35+03:00

Urban law is changeable, and its changes may be associated with those in the material environment of the city as well as those in legal instruments. Conse¬quently, the law itself is unstable. Two types of changes are associated with two types of conflict in urban law: conflicts of norms and property rights. The coordination of the two types of conflict means that urban law is decidedly technical. Therefore, the established methods of analyzing urban law, which emphasize the distinction between formal and informal relations, do not work to explain the ways of city law. According to the hypothesis of the study, urban law does not act as a normative or political tool but as an "unstable technique" (a term used de Laet and Mol) that unites a bundle of normative styles. In exemplifying the unstable technique of law, the article considers a local docu¬ment of Russian urban regulation—Rules of Land Use and Development (PZZ). The research material was collected in the spring of 2021 in two Russian regional cities named in the text: Frontier City and Factory City. In the empirical part, two cases are analyzed. Changes in the PZZ that affect the material form of the city are described as moving objects that go through a series of negotiations and approvals. For legal changes in the context of the PZZ that affect the structure of the document and its normative styles, the study shows how such changes can be integrated into the existing structure of the PZZ. As a result, we see that the two cities work with material and legal changes in different ways, but both types of changes are irreducible to each other: the transformation of one into the other will lead to the destruction of the existing social order. This type of trans¬formation, which Lo calls non-homeomorphic, sets the structure of the variability of PZZ and urban law and determines their topological nature, built on the ongoing switching between different normative styles.

24/7. Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (an excerpt)

2021-12-30T23:42:54+03:00

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expansion of non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates around the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life. In his book, Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of our contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep—a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism—points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation. The Journal of Economic Sociology will publish the first chapter of this book, which engages in a discussion of the reasons for sleep erosion and its connection to the dynamics of modern capitalism. Crary also alludes to the main threats of the 24/7 world and the possible human consequences.

Precedence and Conspicuousness in Car Consumption

2021-12-30T23:42:09+03:00

We study how the availability of bank loans feeds excessive consump¬tion, including the acquisition of goods for the sake of appearances. The aim of the paper is to review the institutions of consumer behavior and borrowing behavior, which have taken root due to consumer lending, in the case of auto loans in the Rostov region, Russia. We rely on material and statistical data from 2002-2020 from a variety of sources, including the Central Bank of Russia, Rosstat, National Bureau of Credit Histories (NBCH JSC), traffic police, etc. We build and estimate metrics featuring household borrowing behavior with regard to auto loans. The empirical results suggest a habitualization of the precedence of consumption (a term borrowed from Jean Baudrillard), including debt-driven ostenta¬tious consumption. Borrowed money closes the gap between the cost of affordable cars and that of sought-after cars under the influence of socially induced criteria. Household spending on these items grew in ab¬solute and relative terms. Our theoretical contribution is that we integrate the elements of several theories, namely, the concept of the precedence of consumption from sociology, osten-tatious consumption from institutional theory, the social significance of banks as creditors, the socio-economic consequences of financialization, etc. Unlike some other authors, we extend the concept of ostentatious con¬sumption to practically all goods, depending on the motivation that drives an individual, instead of confining it to luxury goods purchases by high-net-worth individuals. The contribution to the empirical literature is that we operationalize theoretical constructs in order to quantify them using factual data on auto loans. We conclude that the concepts of the precedence of consumption and ostentatious consumption remain valuable instruments in enabling us to interpret a number of empirical effects of financialization at the household level.

Editor’s Foreword

2021-12-30T23:44:45+03:00

Dear colleagues, We hope that this new academic year will lead to easing restrictions and removing barriers. Let us present a new issue of our journal.

Editor’s Foreword

2021-12-30T22:46:38+03:00

Dear colleagues,
By the end of this year, we will be facing the next wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, but we do anticipate a
better future. The barriers are still in place, and many students have returned to online education once again.
However, this does not affect the publication of a new issue of our journal.

To Reassemble Capitalism: Economic Sociology and its "Political Unconscious"

2021-10-06T09:06:06+03:00

The article offers a commentary on the discussion of the article "Political Economy after Neoliberalism" by Fligstein and Vogel, published in the current issue of the Journal of Economic Sociology. The authors draw the attention of Russian-speaking readers to the fact that the work of American researchers not only problematizes the content of political debates in the United States, but also shapes the basic principles of economic and sociological analysis of various economic systems in their connection with regulation policies and public control. Arguments are given in favor of the fact that the article by Fligstein and Vogel is a kind of manifesto of new economic sociology, demonstrating its "political unconscious"—a number of axiomatic assumptions about the functioning of the capitalist political economy, arising from the research perspective of economic sociology and related disciplines. The structure of the argument proposed in the article includes an analysis of several theoretical and empirical directions: a discussion about the varieties of empirical models of capitalism and statements about the political nature of choice of the institutional architecture of economies, the ways of organizing relations between corporations and society, and the role of the state in the economy. The authors note that the so-called neoliberal turn in social and economic policy in recent years was partly based on the purely intellectual principle in mainstream economic theory that opposes states and markets. Studies in the field of economic sociology, history, and comparative political economy demonstrate the fallacy of this statement, offering a conceptual resource for rethinking modern capitalism.

Skinner's Box for the Consumer

2021-10-06T08:59:22+03:00

The review signifies the key ideas of the book by Shoshanna Zuboff, who indicates the rise of a new form of capitalism called surveillance capitalism. This economic order is dominated by commercial IT companies, with a power advantage anchored in the monopoly for the means of behavior modification. Algorithms track the personal experience of users, while the scientific processing of these data opens unprecedented opportunities for the prediction of human feelings, desires, and decisions that transform new digital certainty into an inexhaustible source of economic and political profit. Zuboffs research constructs a conceptual language for assessing the quality of a social order that is performatively produced by surveillance capitalism. The author criticizes the new economic system for breaking away from democratic principles. Control over human life, which can be achieved with modern information technology, is overarching. Recently, the massive expansion of consumer markets has fostered democratization and personalization. Surveillance capitalism involves objectifying a unique person to an anonymous Internet user and beginning to make money not out of consumer needs but by selling aggregated information about human behavior that can be used in consumer demand management. The fundamental message of the book is that European society is again risking its humanistic ideals for monetary gain. The book proves this message with the author's eight-year ethnography in the field of global technology corporations. Field results are assessed against the postulates of social behaviorism. The review reveals the experience of reading Sh. Zuboff's book in the context of the exploitation of man by man in modern European society. Researchers who compare different forms of capitalism with each other, think about the digitalization of the social order, or care about the challenges for human rights under different economic regimes will find the book thought-provoking and, therefore, useful.

Field Experiments and the Rubin Causal Model: Review of Approaches and Current Research

2021-10-06T08:55:05+03:00

Experiments of various kinds are increasingly being used in the social sciences to derive causal inference. Among the varieties of this method, field experiments are especially noteworthy. Explosive growth in their numbers has been observed in recent years, primarily in economics and political science. Gradually, field experimentation is starting to spread to other disciplines. One of the most important reasons for this is the popularization of the so-called Donald Rubin model of causal inference, which allows researchers to link experimental methods with statistics and other mathematical methods. In the Russian-speaking academic field, one can observe a lack of texts describing how field experiments are related to this model in causal inference, while such a research design allows us to focus specifically on the search for the causality of various social phenomena. This article provides a critical-bibliographic review of both the conceptual model of causation and the existing research carried out in the design of field experiments in the Rubin model. The first part of the paper provides a brief overview of the main paradigms of causation and how, from one of them (the approach of potential outcomes and counterfactual inference), the Rubin model logically arises. The following describes the milestones in the history of field experiments before the Rubin model. This is followed by a description of the model and today's debate about the advantages, limitations, and design features of the field experiment. Finally, with a few examples, we analyze several well-known field experiments to illustrate the operation of the described method.

Venture Capitalism, High-Technology Financing and the State's Innovation Policy: A Sociological Analysis of the U.S. Experience (1940s-2010s)

2021-10-06T08:07:38+03:00

This paper reviews the theoretical and research literature on venture capi¬talism. The major approaches to the study of venture financing and its institutional forms are considered against the background of the experi¬ence of the U.S., where this industry exists the longest. Economists ana¬lyze venture capital as an institutional response either to the failure of the market for knowledge or to the failure of the market for entrepreneurial finance. Economic sociologists complement this analysis by emphasiz¬ing venture capital firms' role in socializing technological entrepreneurs, indirect financing of innovation ecosystems, and risk management. In the more recent literature inspired by critical political economy and economic history, this functionalist, market-failure type of argument is increasingly called into question because of its insufficient attention to the role of the state in creating and maintaining the venture capital industry. Based on this literature, the paper illustrates the connection between the genesis of the venture capital industry in the U.S. and the evolution of the devel¬opmental state in post-war U.S. In conclusion, this paper discusses insti¬tutional alternatives to venture capital and the applicability of the U.S. experience to other contexts.

Imagination, Uncertainty and Business Strategies of Russian Companies in the Field of Medical Devices

2021-10-06T08:01:48+03:00

High-tech innovation is often understood as creating new worlds and tra¬jectories of development and generating uncertainty. On the basis of 15 interviews with the heads of Russian medical technology companies, the paper presents the different types of uncertainties faced by med-tech entre¬preneurs. Is the lack of exact knowledge about the results of the develop¬ment and implementation of new technologies (a classic type of uncer¬tainty in the innovation sector) perceived by entrepreneurs as a difficulty? Or do they deal with uncertainties of another type, for example, related to the political and economic context in the country? What business models are emerging in the industry for regional companies? What is the role of expectations and the imagination in the work of the company director or R & D engineers? How is this related to the specifics of the health industry? As a theoretical basis, the concepts of uncertainty in the innovation sector, as well as uncertainty associated with the rules of the game set by political and economic institutions, are considered. The strategies of innova¬tive entrepreneurs in conditions of uncertainty are investigated using the concept of the imaginary in the ver¬sion of science and technology studies (STS). This research identifies four business models of hi-tech entre¬preneurs in Russia: Small deal supporters, Revolutionaries, Conformists, and Isolationists. In the development of medical equipment, it is important that the main customers of medical devices in Russia are state-owned hospitals. One of the most winning strategies for Russian entrepreneurs is the use of ambiguity, i.e., to second- guess the agenda set by government agencies and use official rhetoric in negotiations with officials. One might have expected that, especially in such a situation, imaginaries might be a vehicle for innovation. However, uncertainty about rules and ambiguity in political priorities results in an imaginary drama—imaginaries in med-tech companies do not exist, and neither does innovation.

Political Economy after Neoliberalism

2021-10-06T07:59:05+03:00

The Journal of Economic Sociology has published an article, "Political Economy after Neoliberalism," by one of the most influential figures in the tradition of New Economic Sociology, Neil Fligstein, and economic historian and comparative political economy scientist Steven Vogel. The article, originally published in Boston Review, was re-posted on the web¬site of the professional online community Economic Sociology & Politi¬cal Economy (ES/PE) and became one of the most-read texts in 2020. The authors offer a broad review of the current literature in the realm of eco¬nomic sociology, economic history, and political economy, and articulate a theoretical and practical alternative to the mainstream economic view of the nature of markets and the role of the state regulation of the economy. The text explores the causes and consequences of the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic and highlights the relationship between the crisis management measures adopted in different countries, their institutional arrangements, and the current balance of power. Fligstein and Vogel define three theoretical principles of the new political economy and then dem-onstrate its heuristic potential by analyzing the responses to the pandemic by the authorities and the United States and German markets. Strong at¬tention is paid to the analysis of the practical consequences of the politi¬cal economy project proposed by the authors: according to Fligstein and Vogel, accumulated knowledge allows the social sciences to participate in determining the preferred development scenarios of modern capitalism.

How the Sense of Community Arises in Marriage: The Logic of Mutuality in the Narratives of Women from Large Families

2021-10-06T07:54:31+03:00

In the proposed article, based on in-depth interviews with women in large families, the author discusses the following hypothesis: in families where, as children are born, conjugality does not give way to household and parenthood, a sense of community in marriage is enhanced. This arises in families where a man, as children are born, becomes more involved in relations with his wife and children, and the relations are developed in the logic of mutuality. Using the results of 22 in-depth interviews with women in large families from Moscow, Arkhangelsk, and Vladimir, the author objectifies this logic by the category of the "mutual sacrifice of the spouse," which indicates the wife's confidence in unmitigated communion and support from her husband. In the social sciences, this category is similar to the concept of the reciprocal gift. Gift commitment theory emphasizes the fundamental distinction between the material and perceived spiritual sides of the exchange, which helps to explain why, despite the factual workload and vulnerability of the mother, which grows as the children are born, she perceives married life in terms of friendship with her husband and community in the family. In conclusion, the author proposes that the logic of mutuality in marriage can become a fruitful source for reflection on the division of labor between the sexes, as opposed to the logics of justice and independence.

The End of Bureaucracy? New Organizational Forms, Social Media, and Millennials

2021-06-06T16:56:26+03:00

In recent years, Silicon Valley startups have become some of the most successful corporations in the world. They advance the abandonment of bureaucratic control of employees, for example, they do not keep track of what time employees come to work or what they are wearing, and instead delegate decision-making rights to employees and are attentive to their opinions. But what happens behind the closed doors of those companies promoting such openness and the overthrow of the hierarchy and bureaucratic rules? How and by whom are they controlled? The book by Catherine J. Turco (2016) shows how corporate communication, culture, and control actually work in a company run by millennials reared on social media. During her ethnographic research, Turco describes how a new organizational form she calls a “conversational firm” has arisen and succeeded in solving business problems due to cross-hierarchical communication. One of Turko’s main findings is that subverting the hierarchical control of communication does not mean the hierarchical structure of decision making must fall as well. Thus, employees may prefer some bureaucratic practices and insist on them.

Can We Explain Differences in Patterns of Alcohol Consumption? Review of Theoretical Approaches

2021-06-06T16:51:59+03:00

Alcohol is an important part of the culture of many people, and the patterns of its consumption differ according to the types of drinks people drink, in what circumstances they drink, what kind of meaning drinking offers them, etc. In this article, we decided to classify publications on differences in drinking patterns based on a dominant idea. We highlight the criteria for identifying such patterns: quantitative (depending on the volume and frequency of consumption) and qualitative (depending on the chosen drinks, circumstances, and motives for use). The quantitative criteria make it possible to identify frequently used patterns, such as episodic alcohol consumption in large quantities, binge drinking, sporadic drinking, and light and heavy drinking. Within the framework of the qualitative criteria, Northern, Southern, and Central European types are often distinguished. The emphasis on consumption motives reveals four patterns: reinforcement, coping, conformity, and community. However, researchers tend to understand what explains the differences in consumption patterns. Therefore, in the second part of the article, we turn to the systematization of such explanations based on cultural-anthropological, historical, and structural approaches. In the last part of our article, we show that the approaches we have identified allow us to explain the features of alcohol consumption patterns in Russia and their changes over the past several decades. It can be concluded that the most productive way of analyzing alcohol consumption is the complex application of the approaches we have considered—the identification of patterns based on various criteria and the explanation of their choice by different highlighted approaches.

Flexible Commuting Patterns by Current Residents of Chelyabinsk

2021-07-02T16:31:16+03:00

Digitization is changing the organization of work. Work is becoming independent of time and place, which affects changes in mobility patterns. This article explores the commuting patterns of current residents of Soviet-designed industrial cities with strictly delineated contours of practice and commuting patterns. Using a case study of the city of Chelyabinsk, this study proposes a typology of residential mobility patterns that varies in relation to employment. For this purpose, Hägerstrand’s theory of the temporal and spatial constraints of mobility was used. By analyzing quantitative data collected in February 2020 through a standardized street survey, three types of commuting patterns were identified: “flexible,” “temporally flexible,” and “regular.” Each type of pattern is described by quantitative characteristics, such as employment sector, form of employment, and place of residence. This study extends the understanding of what commuting patterns in current Russian cities might look like. It demonstrates the dominance of the “temporally flexible” commuting patterns of residents of Chelyabinsk, designed as an industrial center with regular commuting patterns. While the stufy does not provide a certain depth of analysis, it can be taken as a starting point in understanding individual mobility patterns in Russian cities. The results of the study may be of interest to researchers on work and urban mobility, as well as to city planners and policy makers on social and transport issues.

Algorithmic Management in the Platform Economy

2021-06-06T16:11:40+03:00

The platform model is the distinguishing organizational form of the early decades of the twenty-first century. Whereas actors in markets contract, hierarchies command, and networks collaborate, platforms co-opt assets, resources, and activities that are not part of the firm. As a distinctive organizational form, the platform model confronts a distinctive managerial challenge: how to manage value-creating activities that are undertaken on the platform but not in the firm? In a triangular geometry, platform owners co-opt the behavior of providers and users, enrolling them in the practices of algorithmic management without managerial authority having been delegated to them. Acting on their own behalf, the ratings and other activities of providers and consumers are algorithmically translated into rankings and other calculating devices that circulate through feedback loops that are twisted rather than circular. Algorithmic management involves a peculiar kind of cybernetic control because at each fold of the feedback loop accountability can be deflected and denied. Whereas Scientific Management in the early twentieth century offered a legitimating principle for the growth of a new managerial class, algorithmic management in the early twenty-first century is reshaping the managerial class. Its power asymmetries at the organizational level are related to coalitions at the regulatory level in which platform owner and investors are in alliance with platform consumers.

The Subjective Perception of Employment Instability: Is It Bad to Be Unstable?

2021-06-06T16:07:05+03:00

Nowadays in the literature, there are two perspectives on the spread of atypical labor contracts and unstable employment trajectories: some authors insist on the vulnerability of modern employees and the weakening of their bargaining position; others emphasize new opportunities for flexibility and independence from the employer. However, it remains unclear how employees react to these new employment conditions. Is instability a benefit or a sign of vulnerability for them? This discussion is most relevant for skilled young workers, as freedom and flexibility are of great value to them. The authors make an attempt to discover which position is closer to unstable workers in Russia. The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey—Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE) data for 2014–2018 were used for the analysis. The panel data was used to construct the variable of instability in the labor market, taking into account the previous working status of the respondents (the sample size was 1,507 respondents). The main method of analysis was linear regression. The dependent variables were the components of subjective well-being, and the explanatory variable was the status of employment instability. The results show that employment instability is not related to respondents’ subjective well-being, nor to job insecurity. No differences in the subjective assessments of stable and unstable employees with different skills and income levels were found. The findings allow us to state that employment instability is not perceived by Russian employees as a distinct situation in the labor market, or as referring to negative or positive type of work or social position of an individual.

Effects of Modernization on Social Capital: Evidence from Dagestan

2021-06-06T15:59:55+03:00

The paper scrutinizes the differences between the traditional and modernistic social groups of Dagestan, Russia—a region in the south of Russia that is only now undergoing the process of modernization. As an important factor in economic development in developed countries, social capital and trust often have a negative impact on the level of well-being in traditional communities. The research, based on a sociological survey of residents of the Republic of Dagestan, shows that this pattern is due to the fact that in traditional society, the radius of trust (which is one of the most important components of social capital) extends only to the immediate environment. This is why social capital in such communities produces lower returns. Moreover, using variables associated with the process of breaking traditional norms (residence and birth in the city, modernist religious beliefs, importance of free time, and desire to educate children in self-expression values and foster values of obedience), this article argues that the modernization process leads to the destruction of closed social capital, expressed in the decline of trust in relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and representatives of the same nationality. At the same time, the transformation of traditional norms has a different effect on open social capital—having more modernistic values is positively linked to generalized trust, while being a part of modernistic social groups demonstrates a negative link. The results enable us to conclude that the high level of social capital recorded in other studies in the North Caucasus (and in Dagestan, in particular) is actually associated with a high level of trust in the surrounding environment and is not as productive as in other regions.

Editor's Foreword

2021-06-06T15:55:52+03:00

Dear colleagues,

At present, we are still hoping to escape from the shock of the pandemic in the near future while also expecting the possibility of a third wave. Meanwhile, let us turn to a new issue of our journal.

The Exception that Proves the Rule: The Development of Central Banks as an Example of Successful Institutional Reforms in Post-Communist Countries

2021-04-21T21:01:24+03:00

Juliet Johnson is a researcher of politics and finance in the post-Soviet countries and chairperson of the Department of Political Science at McGill University. Her book Priests of Prosperity informs us about the history of the development of central banks in post-communist countries. This story is one of the most interesting episodes of post-Soviet institution building, presenting a rare example of the successful import of an institution birthed in developed democracies. The creation of independent central banks in the early 1990s was accompanied by the introduction of advanced economic approaches that did not exist in these countries. However, this process has completely succeeded, even in those countries where other reforms did not succeed. Johnson recreates this story in an extremely reliable and detailed way. Over a 15-year period, the author conducted more than 160 interviews in 17 countries; she also examined five of them more closely by using a case study and statistics. This investigation contains a large amount of unique empirical material. In addition, it presents the author's own theoretical approach. Johnson's book is not only an example of serious large research, but is also an example of using the institution transplantation model. The book received a number of positive reviews in leading journals on the post-Soviet region as well as prestigious international awards. This review briefly presents the contents of the entire book, containing the opinions of some authors while also discussing in detail certain points of the book that seemed most interesting to the author of this review.

What is Wrong with the Concept of Job Readiness in Higher Education?

2021-04-21T21:00:56+03:00

Equipping students with employability skills has become a novel mission of universities since the late 21st century. Discussion on how to make students more job-ready has appeared as a core of the education policy agenda. The roots of the job readiness agenda in higher education (HE) are mostly studied through the lens of changes in the HE sector and are regarded as a result of the massification and vocationalisation of HE. But these explanations only implicitly consider labor market changes that trigger the employability agenda. This paper challenges the job readiness agenda in HE, especially the pressure being put on HE institutions that are expected to fit students to employer’s needs. In order to find the grounds and justification for the employability agenda, I study its cornerstone theses through the lens of labor market theories. The research reveals that not all of these theses are well grounded in labor market theories and empirics. On the one hand, the employability narrative is justified by the decreased signaling function of education credentials and the increasing demand for universal skills and updated technical skills. On the other hand, alarmism concerning skill deficits and shortages that places pressure on HE doesn't fully match theories and empirical evidence. The most relevant concept of employability and job readiness could be elaborated in the framework of universal competencies or 21st-century skills. Being job-ready means being prepared for a flexible career and lifelong learning instead of being fitted to short-term requirements. This conceptual framework establishes a shared responsibility for developing skills and managing skill gaps between individuals, employers and educational institutions.

Participation in Professional Training and Non-Economic Effects for Workers in Russia

2021-04-21T21:00:29+03:00

The goal of the paper is to identify the relationship between participation in professional training financed by the employer and its non-economic effects: subjective control and job satisfaction (including satisfaction with pay and with professional growth opportunities). According to the human capital theory, participation in professional training accumulates both specific and general human capital; workers develop their skills and become more flexible in the labor market. We test the hypothesis that participation in professional training will be positively interrelated with employees’ subjective control and job satisfaction. The empirical base of the study is formed by the Russian Longitudinal Household Monitoring Survey (RLMS—HSE), waves 19 and 20 (2010 and 2011). The analysis identified positive effects only in the case of subjective control, but not for job satisfaction. This partially supports our hypothesis. The results show that workers who participated in professional training, compared to the workers who did not, will have a higher level of subjective control, i.e., workers feel more in control of their circumstances at work and in life. However, no effect of training was found in the case of job satisfaction. A possible reason is that training is not sufficiently integrated in the short career structures of low- or middle-skill jobs. Therefore, participation in professional training does not widen professional mobility opportunities in this labor market segment and thus is not associated with higher job satisfaction.

Consumption of Cultural Goods in Russia: Scale, Determinants, Differentiation

2021-04-21T20:59:58+03:00

This paper is the first in the Russian economic and sociological literature that provides a general stylized picture of the consumption of cultural goods in Russia using microdata from representative household surveys. The empirical basis of analysis is Rosstat’s Complex Observation of the Living Conditions of the Population for 2011–2018, which so far has been ignored by researchers. Four main kinds of cultural goods are distinguished—cinema, theater, concerts and museums—and the probabilities and intensity of their consumption are assessed. The analysis shows that in Russia at present, about every second adult consumes some cultural goods during the year. Cinema is the most popular good, followed by concerts, theater and museums. A regular audience is approximately one-fifth of the total audience. The primary focus of the paper is on evaluating the contributions of various factors of demand for cultural goods. There is also a detailed discussion of another important behavioral question: to what extent does demand by individuals for any one cultural good stimulate their demand for all other ones? In the econometric part of the paper, two types of models are constructed and evaluated: ordinary logit (for likelihood of consumption) and multinomial logit (for intensity of consumption). The results obtained show that two groups of factors make the highest contributions: on the one hand, economic (such as income), and, on the other, cultural (such as education, occupation and experience with the Internet). In the Russian context there is a visible empirical regularity: the higher the income of individuals, the more active they are culturally. The wealthiest groups go to the movies two and a half times more often, to the theaters seven times more often, to concerts twice as often, and to museums six times more often than the poorest ones.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths (an excerpt)

2021-04-21T20:59:28+03:00

In the book The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato challenges the widespread idea that the State cannot pick winners, that it is clumsy, bureaucratic and incapable of entrepreneurial risk taking. Her analysis is not just Keynesian; it is also Schumpeterian. The role of the State is not limited to interventions in the macroeconomy as a “market fixer” or as the passive financer of public R & D. The State is also seen as entrepreneur, risk taker and market creator. Mazzucato’s argument goes well beyond the role played by government in countries that have recently forged ahead (Japan in the 1980s or South Korea in the 1990s) to focus on the role played by the public sector agencies of the United States, the wealthiest country in the world and an active promoter of “free markets,” in making risky investments behind the Internet and in funding most of the crucial elements behind the “stars” of the information revolution, companies such as Google and Apple.
The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes Chapter 1 of the book, “From Crisis Ideology to the Division of Innovative Labour,” in which the State is presented as an entrepreneurial agent, one taking on the most risky and uncertain investments in the economy. The State does not “derisk” as if it has a “magic wand” that makes risks disappear. It takes on risks, shaping and creating new markets. The author displays the role the State has played in the past, in areas like Silicon Valley, and the role that it can play in the future in areas like the “green revolution.”

Transformation of the Institution of Administrative Complaints in Civilian Uniforms

2021-04-21T20:58:43+03:00

On the basis of the integration of A. Hirschman's “voice-exit” theory and the author's theory of the distribution economy, the universal nature of the institution of complaints as a mechanism for generating new social practices is substantiated, and an analysis of civil complaints is carried out. In restricted access orders, complaints are an attribute of administrative management, while in open access orders, the civil complaints employed are not only received by the authorities but are also presented in public forms. In contrast to the widespread understanding of complaints as a socio-psychological phenomenon, this article reveals the mechanism of their active influence on the formation of the institutional environment throughout its historical development, which explains the revival of this institution as a feedback signal in new digital and communicative forms in the modern Russian economy. To solve this task, we used a methodology of analyzing institutional changes as “a path dependent on the previous development,” which traces the formation and development of the basic institution of complaints at three stages of the evolution of the distribution economy in Russia, as well as the institution’s acquisition of a modern state on the basis of new platforms and authorized public events. As a result, there has been a gradual transition to civil forms of complaints, which include different types of public activity to present unresolved problems. It is established that local protests on socio-economic issues, in fact, are an unformalized part of the institution of complaints and actively influence decision-making in the modern management model.

Transformation of the Institution of Administrative Complaints in Civilian Uniforms

2021-04-21T20:58:18+03:00

Dear colleagues,

On the day when this issue of our journal will be published, the students of the HSE University are expected to return from distant studies to their classes. We believe that this return is for good despite the obvious fact that the pandemic is still with us.

Create not to Commercialize: On the Everyday Practices of Russian Technopreneurs

2021-02-08T01:46:29+03:00

What is the reason for the low commercialization of high-tech innovations in Russia? Given the Russian engineers’ high scores on initiative, creativity, and technical competence, why is there no successful launch of manufactured—often amazing—inventions on domestic and international markets? Does Russia have a specific way of development in the sphere of high technologies? The research team of sociologists from the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP)—Olga Bychkova, Boris Gladarev, Oleg Harkhordin, and Zhanna Tsinman—offer answers to these questions in their book, Sci-Fi Worlds of Russian Hi-Tech. Based on a large set of in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from Russia, as well as Finland, Taiwan, and South Korea, the authors’ focus is not on institutions but on the technopreneurs themselves, who update the hightech markets on their daily practices, ways of social interaction, worldviews, interactions with developers, technical prototypes, and themselves. Employing the concepts from the theory of practice and science and technology studies (STS), the authors have attempted to re-examine the life worlds of Russian technopreneurs and to align their individual narratives with the sociocultural context in which the daily life of developers is embedded. The researchers show the way that engineers live, in which value categories make sense of their work and daily practices, and how it may determine the technological development of the Russian economy and the whole society at the macro level. The book is filled with detailed and thorough descriptions of methodology and fieldwork, rich and illustrative quotations from the narratives of innovators, and the justification for the theoretical framework of the study. It is addressed to a wide readership and will be useful for sociologists, including those interested in research on science and technology, and for the general public who strives to open up the daily life of those whose works try to “crack the laws of the universe.”

School Socio-economic Composition as a Factor of Educational Inequality

2021-02-08T01:41:46+03:00

The socioeconomic composition of schools is considered one of the most significant factors of educational inequality at the school level. Most of the reviewed works demonstrate a positive relation between the student population’s socioeconomic status and educational outcomes. At the same time, a number of authors confirm that this effect is a statistical artifact and is significant due to the limitations of existing studies’ methodology. Despite a fairly large number of works, a few questions remain: How is the composition effect formed? Under what conditions does it occur? What mechanisms involve interconnection? How can the negative effect of school composition be minimized? Is it about causality? In Russian studies, this subject area is out of sight. In this article, the author aims to provide a systematic analysis of relevant works with a focus on developing recommendations and further directions for empirical research. In this review, the author introduces the term socioeconomic composition and describes the main approaches for measuring it, taking into account the choice of the composition indicator, aggregation method, and data analysis method. Following assumptions about the presence of an indirect effect of composition and methodological recommendations, the possible mechanisms of the effect at the peer, teacher, and school levels are described. Based on the analysis of critical works, the prerequisites for research design are formed. The author concludes the paper with a summary of the recommendations and substantiates the scientific and practical importance of studying the causal relation between the school composition and educational results.

‘Alien Elections’: Neighboring State News on the 2018 Russian Presidential Elections

2021-02-08T01:26:25+03:00

News media tend to reflect voices in the political establishment while covering international events. Is it still true when almost half of the national audience speak the language of the country featured in the coverage? In this paper, we present an analysis of 19.5k news messages collected from Russian-language Ukrainian news outlets covering the 2018 presidential elections in Russia. Using a mixed-method approach (topic modeling and qualitative reading), we identify key topics and stories and evaluate the extent of personalization in the election coverage. We find three central angles: the focus on polls and election results, election preparations in Crimea, and Vladimir Putin’s victory. The elections are linked predominantly to Crimean issues through the date of the elections, each candidate’s stance on the subject, the election management in the region, and other countries’ reactions to the results. Such coverage has an accusatory bias; it stresses the legal status of the Crimean referendum and the Russian authorities’ actions and reports the pressures on locals by authorities, especially the Crimean Tatars. Not linked directly to Crimea, other angles are less emotionally charged. Political personalization of the discussion has a contradictory nature. On one hand, the overwhelming majority of the messages mention public figures. On the other hand, the coverage of the figures is limited and omits their traits. Moreover, at times, public figures are replaced by non-personalized symbols (e.g., Kremlin, Russian invaders). However, if the former’s coverage is predominantly neutral, the latter’s coverage is more prone to negative and loaded statements.

Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (an excerpt)

2021-02-08T01:18:15+03:00

Capitalism without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake explores the changes in the types of investments that have occurred in almost all developed countries over the last forty years. If tangible investments predominated in the past, most investments are intangible at present, meaning that money is spent on buying and creating knowledgebased products, including computer software, research and development, design, works of art, market research, learning, and new business processes. The authors attempt to answer why the economy in which intangible assets are intensively used is so different from the economy where tangible assets dominate. The authors conclude that these changes are explained by the basic properties of the intangible assets and have resulted in long-lasting stagnation, lower economic growth, increasing inequality, and difficulties in public policies for economic and financial sectors. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the introductory chapter, ‘Valuation, the Old-Fashioned Ways: Or a Thousand Years in Essex’ from Capitalism without Capital, where the authors discuss the meaning of investments, define the distinctions between tangible and intangible assets, and explain why some basic properties of intangible assets generate such dramatic changes in the contemporary economy.

Cultural Professions in Modern-Day Russia: Statistical Portrait of the Workers

2021-02-08T01:12:00+03:00

In this study, we aim to provide a statistical portrait of employment in the cultural field with regard to occupations on the Russian labor market. The data from the ‘Comprehensive Monitoring of Living Conditions’ are used to illustrate the main differences in the socio-demographic and occupational characteristics of culturally employed respondents and other professional groups. Additionally, the most relevant factors that may have an impact on individuals’ probability to be cultural workers are analyzed. Our study is based on the theoretical frameworks of U. Beck, R. Florida, J. Urry, and Z. Bauman. We also consider the possible Soviet legacy of the contemporary Russian culture, which may interconnect with labor conditions in this field, using S. Fitzpatrick’s works. We also provide an overview of other relevant studies. Our findings show that a larger number of cultural workers among the respondents are librarians, archivists, teachers of music and art schools, linguists, museum workers, journalists, and writers. The results on the statistical portrait display that on average, the cultural workers are highly educated married women in their forties or older who live predominantly in the largest regions of the Russian Federation (Moscow and Moscow region, St. Petersburg). Almost three-quarters of the group have relevant education. They are mostly regular full-time employees with a daytime work schedule. We have also found that the most influential factors for becoming cultural workers are the region of residence and relevant professional education.

Психологические причины коррупции: роль тревоги

2021-02-08T01:04:13+03:00

This study is devoted to answering two questions: (1) Do individuals’ worries and sufferings correlate with the acceptability of corruption from their perspectives? (2) Does this correlation differ by country in terms of corruption levels? We focus on analyzing the correlation between macro and micro worries, on one hand, and individual acceptability of corrupt behavior, on the other hand. This study is based on the data from the 6th-wave World Value Survey. We identified three groups of countries based on the corruption perception index: countries with low-level corruption (Australia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and Sweden), countries with medium-level corruption (Belarus, China, South Korea, Malaysia, and Romania), and countries with high-level corruption (Russia, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Thailand). For the purposes of our analysis, we used structural equation modeling. We have found that macro and micro worries are significantly correlated with the acceptability of corruption. Our analysis shows that the more the people worry about themselves or their families, the more they accept corruption. The people who worry about society are more likely to disapprove of corruption. However, the significance of these links varies, depending on the group of countries. For the countries with low-level corruption, the correlation is significant only for the link between micro worries and the acceptability of corruption. The countries with high-level corruption show a significant correlation only for the link between macro worries and the acceptability of corruption. For countries with medium-level corruption and for Russia, the acceptability of corruption is significantly correlated with both micro and macro worries.

Editor’s Foreword

2021-02-08T00:54:57+03:00

Dear colleagues,

This new issue of our journal comes out during these difficult times. The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is on its way. It brings new challenges, which are comparable with those of the previous wave. Lockdowns and distant communications are returning. We hope that you and your friends and relatives will survive this time safely.

A Loosening Grip: Why Do Autocracies Engage in the Neoliberalization of Their Welfare Sectors?

2021-02-08T01:51:04+03:00

Despite the wealth of studies on neoliberalism, research on why authoritarian states engage in processes of neoliberalization remains scarce. Therefore, our article seeks to explore why autocracies use neoliberal power practices, which, as suggested by Foucauldian governmentality approach to neoliberalism, are understood as governance techniques aimed primarily at disciplining and controlling populations through promoting the free market as a key form of societal organization. Empirically, these power practices can manifest in a state’s withdrawal from the provision of welfare services. However, scholars have argued that control over the public sector is essential to the maintenance of authoritarian regimes, and hence, governments must have compelling reasons to opt for its neoliberalization. In this study, we employ three mutually nonexclusive theoretical perspectives that suggest incentives that may motivate autocrats to retreat from the welfare sector; these are the authoritarian legitimation, authoritarian modernization, and political economy perspectives. By means of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we tested the foregoing theories on a sample of 42 autocracies active during 1980–2005. The results revealed that authoritarian modernization theory has the highest explanatory capacity, as it identifies two distinct pathways to public sector neoliberalization—internal and external policy considerations or one of the two—while the political economy perspective was an important theoretical concern in several cases. Overall, our paper contributes to research on the governmentality approach to neoliberalism and serves as a departure point for further investigations into neoliberal authoritarianism.

Why do the Rich Consume More Discreetly? A Theory of the Aspirational Class

2020-12-05T01:16:50+03:00

This paper is a review of The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspira-tional Class, written by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and published in 2017. Prof. Currid-Halkett leads the Public Policy Department at the University of Southern California. Her research interests tend to focus on the arts, culture, the consumer economy, and the role of culture in geographic and class divides. Her main idea, portrayed through this book, is that, at the beginning of the 21st century, conspicuous consumption becomes more democratic. In other words, due to the mass-production economy, luxury goods have become significantly more accessible. The abundance of leisure no longer indicates a higher status. As a result, the leisure class is substituted by the aspirational class, whose members reveal their position through cultural signifiers and value systems. The objective of this book is to accurately analyse the portrait of this aspirational class, which transmits completely different consumer behaviour when compared to Veblen’s leisure class. The book combines both quantitative and qualitative research de-signs. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett examines the nationally representative Consumer Expenditure Survey from 1996 to 2014 (covering 35 000 American households per year). In addition, she draws on 15 interviews to explore Americans’ con-sumer practices in greater depth. This review seeks to emphasize the importance of the author’s conclusions re-garding studies of consumer behaviour, social stratification, and social class the-ories. The first part of the paper covers the scientific background of the book and its methodological framework. The second part describes its theoretical frame along with statistical evidence and findings. The paper concludes by highlighting key limitations of the study and suggesting further research directions.

Conceptualizing Job Satisfaction and Its Determinants: A Systematic Literature Review

2020-12-05T01:16:23+03:00

Job satisfaction is considered an important aspect of employee behavior. This article focuses on a critical analysis of the accompanying literature to determine the various factors that shape job satisfaction and to gauge their relative signifi-cance in conditioning employee behavior. The conceptualizations of job satisfac-tion in the existing literature are multitudinous, reflecting the breadth of critical perspectives on the subject. A systematic literature review, therefore, consisted of: (a) isolating databases and a set of publications; (b) selecting publications and developing a database; and (c) conducting bibliometric analysis, content analy-sis, and testing the relevance of results to further research. The review included publications from the years 2000–2018 and covered psychology, sociology, eco-nomics, and management science. Analysis of previous theoretical publications and empirical studies reveals that they are not without their cognitive and meth-odological limitations. Even at the level of definition, despite numerous criti-cal attempts to clarify exactly what constitutes job satisfaction, an unambiguous and clear-cut conception has yet to surface. Equally, critical consensus is lack-ing among researchers over what contributes to job satisfaction, and divergent research approaches have been adopted as a result. Indeed, despite the rising popularity of job satisfaction studies, some of these factors have yet to be ex-plored fully, while some research has yielded contradictory results regarding the strength of the influence of certain factors on job satisfaction. This paper fills this gap and, through a systematic analysis of the literature, indicates the direction in which current research is headed.

The Phenomenon of Downshifting in Central and Eastern European Countries: Case Studies from Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia

2020-12-05T01:15:38+03:00

The article introduces discussions of sociocultural post-material practices that are connected with downshifting and with efforts to thrive in the shadow of dominating forms in contemporary societies. The author extends her conceptual framework beyond ecology, sociology, and the politics of sustainable lifestyles and draws from Anthony Giddens’s “reflexive project of the self.” The introduced notion of “experiencing downshift” is understood as the reflexiveexperience by those individuals, who reshape their lives to reflect its “authentic” meaning, which is connected to the resignation from high material living standards. The article offers the concept of identity as central rather than peripheral to downshifting research.
Following a longitudinal panel study on the processes of far-reaching and radical changes in the lifestyles of 31 downshifters, five areas were examined: motives for the change, the character of the change, reactions of others, balance of benefits and losses, and decision consistency. Findings suggest that the contested meaning of (material) life success leads to the reframing of value priorities and the reconstruction of personal and social identities. Ideals of downshift move away from productive efforts and consumption-based identities toward practices of being reflective, self-aware, and fostering well-being, which is variously characterized by harmony, pleasure, and creativity. Most of them are not unique to downshifting, but this is not (as I have emphasized) a limitation but simply a chance for the movement to get out of the frame of a politicized, radicalized critique of capitalist growth society and make consumers appreciate that what they already do could be potentially supportive of downshift transformation.

XXII April International conference on the development of the economy and society, Higher School of Economics, April 13–23, 2021

2020-12-05T01:14:32+03:00

XXII Апрельская международная научная конференция по проблемам развития экономики и общества, проводимая Национальным исследовательским университетом «Высшая школа экономики», состоится 13−23 апреля 2021 г. Председатель Программного комитета АМНК — научный руководитель НИУ ВШЭ профессор Е. Г. Ясин.

Конференция посвящена широкому кругу актуальных проблем экономического и социального развития страны. Основную часть выступлений на АМНК составляют научные доклады российских и зарубежных учёных. Важной частью программы конференции являются специальные мероприятия, которые проводятся в формате пленарных заседаний и круглых столов с участием членов Правительства Российской Федерации, государственных деятелей, представителей бизнеса, российских и зарубежных экспертов.

В сложившихся эпидемиологических условиях XXI Апрельская конференция прошла в распределённом формате, что означало совмещение различных форм проведения и более длительные сроки проведения. Приём заявок на XXII АМНК был открыт 21 сентября 2020 г. Планируется, что конференция пройдёт 13−23 апреля 2021 г. в смешанном формате и объединит как онлайн-, так и офлайн-мероприятия.

“Difficult Money”: The Question for the Next Revision of the Nature of Money

2020-12-05T01:13:47+03:00

This book, edited by N. Bandelj, F. Wherry, and V. Zelizer, comprises a series of articles united in a collective monograph; it opens the reader to a multilateral view of the nature of money as a system of meanings and signs, and clarifies the mechanisms of the formation and functioning of financial flows and institutions. Trends associated with the active dissemination of new forms of money that are not tied to a specific financial system, as well as the expanding practice of the consumption of goods and services related to issues of morality and ethics, are becoming relevant. The authors were tasked with revising the conceptual framework for the study of money, and the main goal was to show the principles of the functioning of money in the financial system and, to a greater extent, in the system of social relations. In the book, the conceptual framework is examined in five sections, each of which provides sociological, cultural, anthropological, and historical perspectives. The authors of 14 chapters illustrate the connection of their theses with the approach of Viviana Zelizer, as outlined in a number of her famous works, and the analysis of money itself is based on the subject of the fungibility of mediums, functions, and meanings (earmarking) of monetary units, the understanding of financial accounting by people themselves (mental accounting), and the influence of the state on this process. This review aims to define the logic of the presentation of the material in the book in order to better understand the theoretical and empirical principles set forth in the chapters.

Access to Modern Medical Technologies in Russia and Europe

2020-12-05T01:13:11+03:00

The authors discuss the results of a comparative analysis of the access to medical technologies in Russia and the countries of the European Union. The study included the most popular diagnostic technologies: computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET). The key indicators of access to this kind of equipment are its distribution—the number of units per share of the population—and the frequency of use of existing installations by patients. The research information base consisted of Russian and European statistics for the period from the 1980s to the present.

A comparative analysis of the accessibility of the technologies under consideration in Russia and European countries based on these indicators allowed us to come to the following conclusions.A review of the literature confirms that the development of public health in the modern era is largely determined by the introduction and widespread use of new medical technologies. Among them, the important role of diagnostic technologies play a part in the article, but access to these diagnostic procedures remains limited in many countries. As a comparative analysis of European countries shows, Russia is significantly inferior to almost all EU countries in the level of accessibility of these procedures due to the insufficient number of CT, MRI, and PET scanners and the low rates of their use. The technological lag in Russian health care is associated with low levels of state funding for the sector given that, in the state’s policy, social spending is less important than other areas of budget financing. Limited access to modern diagnostic tools prevents the rapid and high-quality determination of the causes of many diseases and, consequently, their successful treatment. In addition, a significant shortage of modern technological equipment can aggravate the problem of social inequalities in health, which is clearly manifested in Russian society. Thus, well-off people with the ability to spend significant funds on receiving modern medical services will benefit, while people with low incomes will be forced to be content with less-effective procedures for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

The Value of Everything. Making and Taking in the Global Economy (an excerpt)

2020-12-05T01:12:28+03:00

According Prof. Mazzucato, to understand economic growth it is necessary to return to issues relating to what wealth means and where value comes from. The aim of this book is to reinvigorate the debate on value, which traditionally was—and should still be—at the core of economic thinking. Prof. Mazzucato points to the fact that in economics, various types of economic activities related to value extraction (or even value destruction) are camouflaged as or pretend to represent value creation. This results in a huge increase in social inequality and a significant decrease in investments in the real economy. Understanding the negative consequences of value extraction requires clarification of what is really taken. Which social, economic, and organizational conditions are necessary for value production? The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes “Introduction: Making versus Taking,” where Prof. Mazzucato makes distinctions between value making and value extraction (e.g. tax evasions, share buy-backs, etc.). It also defines “value creation” as the ways in which different types of resources are established and interact to produce new goods and services. Finally, the introduction provides details of how the book is structured.

Is Industrial Agriculture Sustainable During Climate Change and Ecological Threats?

2020-12-05T01:11:43+03:00

Russia has experienced food revolutions in production, distribution, and consumption since 2000. These revolutions have transformed the food system, but systemic changes are not complete — a sustainable agricultural system is not likely in Russia anytime soon; the effects of climate change are likely to worsen and force further revolutionary change to Russia’s food system, which in the short-term could cause food insecurity. The state retains its key role in regulating the food system, primarily due to considering food security a factor of national security, has been achieved. The Russian statist discourse on food security, which has intensified under the Western sanctions and pandemic restrictions, ignores the challenges that the global agro-industrial sector faces at the same time being the source of anthropogenic changes. Moreover, this discourse rarely takes into account environmental challenges for the Russian agro-industrial sector. The article shows the relationship between climate/ecological changes and the dominant industrial agriculture not in the form of alarmist statements, but by describing the social-economic-ecological context, in which the research questions about current and future restrictions and consequences of industrial agriculture should be asked. The article presents examples of sustainable agriculture in Russia, identifies obstacles to moving away from industrial agriculture, and considers possible scenarios for the transition to sustainable agriculture.

Editor's Foreword

2020-12-05T01:10:59+03:00

Dear colleagues, this new issue of our journal is published during difficult times. The second wave of the covid-19 pandemic is here, and it brings new challenges comparable to those encountered during the previous wave. Lockdowns and communicating from a distance are back. We sincerely hope that you and your friends and relatives will remain safe during this time.

Types of Financial Disagreements in Families: Qualitative Evidence from Russia

2020-12-05T01:23:26+03:00

Financial disagreements have been previously identified in the literature as the main predictor of divorce in families as well as the most difficult and prolonged type of disagreement among spouses. However, the topic of financial conflicts between spouses remains undertheorized and has been insufficiently studied empirically in Russia. This study attempts to fill this gap in answering the question of how financial disagreements in families can be classified. To resolve this research problem, 35 Russian married or cohabiting couples were interviewed. In-depth interviews were conducted with each of the partners separately to determine their positions and compare their views within the couple. The results show that financial disagreements are normalized phenomena in the life course of Russian couples. However, the issue seems to be very sensitive, and the qualitative methodology allowed for the detection that partners may feel embarrassed and stressed while discussing the reasons for financial conflicts. Nevertheless, five types of financial disagreements were identified based on their underlying reasons: price conflicts, conflicts about necessity, conflicts of goals, conflicts due to a lack of planning, and conflicts of values. The last type seems to be one of the most difficult and unpleasant types of family conflicts, as it shows that partners hold different and often incompatible positions regarding the family’s finances. This result highlights the importance of using a relational sociology approach while studying marital financial disagreements. Also, the identified typology can serve as a guide for studying financial conflicts in families more deeply and for family therapy and divorce prevention.

International Workshop “The Varieties of Power in the Economy,” Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, NRU HSE, Moscow, Russia, July 2–3, 2020

2020-12-05T01:22:52+03:00

The international workshop ‘The Varieties of Power in the Economy’ was held from July 3 to 4, 2020 in Moscow, Russia. The seminar was organized by the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology (LSES) at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. The seminar primarily aimed to initiate a discussion on power practices, modes of influence, compliance, and governance structures in the economy. The keynote speakers of the workshop were Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (University College London, UK) and Valery Yackubovich, Professor at the Management Department (SSEC Business School, France). In their lectures they shared their understanding of the topics and how they can be incorporated in various conceptual frameworks within economic sociology. Apart from LSES, the seminar engaged researchers from various research institutions, backgrounds, and traditions. Invited speakers included Elena Bogdanova (University of Gothenburg), Tamara Kusimova (Central European University), Aleksei Pobedonostsev (The European University Institute in Florence), Olga Sidenko (Voronezh State University), Daria Shcheglova (HSE University—Institute of Education), Maria Tysiachniouk (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Ulla Paper, Stanislav Klimovich, and Katharina Bluhm (Freie Universität Berlin), and Maya Shmidt (Uppsala University). The researchers took a closer look at their academic fields and identified the issues of power practices, forms of influence, and control in economic exchange. By examining completely different social spheres and institutional fields, the participants discussed the ambivalence of power and the variety of power relations and practices in the economy.

Homo Sapiens Socialis

2020-12-05T01:22:13+03:00

Homo sapiens is the greatest mystery of science. The main property of this biological species is the mind, but what are the laws of consciousness and how does ignorance of these laws hinder the development of ideas about various spheres of functioning of society? These and other relevant issues of cognitive science are tackled in the book Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create by Pascal Boyer, a professor at the University of Washington. This work is reviewed so that potential readers can understand how convincing the author is in solving the tasks he sets—the problems of a new science, the foundations of which he intends to lay. The French-American evolutionary psychologist poses six questions: What is the basis of intergroup conflicts? Why do we need information? Why do religions exist? What is natural family? How can society be fair? Can our minds comprehend society? In answering these questions, Boyer uses a variety of facts from various disciplines of natural science and humanities. The scholar seeks to show and refute the prejudices of many prevailing concepts, for example, the traditional opposition between nature and culture, which has dominated for several centuries. The anthropologist provides a lot of fascinating data, including from personal field experience, and does so using simple language. However, in the end, most hypotheses are explained by human evolution and the need for groups to simultaneously consolidate within themselves and resist other communities. The book could be useful to anyone interested in anthropology and the structure of society, as well as laws of thought.

Sticky Economy’s Social Consequences

2020-12-05T01:21:37+03:00

The book Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems is the answer of the 2019 Nobel laureates in Economics Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo to the fundamental challenges of modernity. Its pages are devoted to the questions: why do economists and other social researchers offer ineffective responses to global challenges? What are the dangers of stereotypical thinking and outdated economic schemes and theories? Why can't we rely only on the scientist's intuition? What is the power of painstaking social research based on experimental methods and careful processing of facts? Why are there no universal recipes for economic growth? Why is each national variant of socioeconomic development unique? What role do traditions and values play in these options? Why does the growth of income inequality turn into a polarization of ideologies and political positions, leading to an increase in intolerance, racism, tribalization, and so on? How do ideological approaches and populism become a distorting lens of reality? Why do the anger and despair associated with personal injuries and failures turn into anti-immigrant rhetoric and wallbuilding? Why does the idea of a universal basic income not find empirical support and what can replace it? All readers and researchers who are interested in these issues will be introduced to a large-scale, thorough study based on the generalization and analysis of a wide range of social surveys and other studies with the widest regional coverage. The authors strive to dispense with the prevailing stereotypes in science, relying only on facts and their experimental confirmation. The book is written in a very lucid literary style, with a certain amount of humor.

Arhythmic Tempo: Dynamics of Readiness to Join the Collective Actions in Russia (1996–2019)

2020-12-05T01:20:57+03:00

The propensity of the public to protest is a dynamic process, the direction of which determines the level of political stability. Aggregate indicators of the readiness to act collectively against declining standards of life can be used as a thermostat that indicates the level of economic grievances in society. What explains these dynamics? Do incremental changes in objective economic indicators such as inflation or unemployment matter the most, or is it the subjective evaluation of the situation in the country that drives protest attitudes? In this paper, I argue that two mechanisms link inflation and unemployment to the readiness to join economic protests: first, high levels of both indicators increase the gap between actual and desired consumption levels; second, high levels of inflation and unemployment signal the lack of governmental competence. I also argue that the subjective evaluation of the direction of the country has an independent effect on the aggregate level of readiness to join the collective actions with economic demands. Statistical analysis based on the autoregressive model with distributed lag (ADL) confirms the hypothesis of the consumer price index and unemployment’s lagged impact on the readiness to protest, while public optimism exhibits both short- and long-term effects on the protest mood. The analysis also reveals the high level of persistence in the dynamics of protest attitudes. The study contributes to the discussion on the determinants of the mobilization and significance of objective and subjective economic grievances.

Testing and Being Tested in Pandemic Times

2020-12-05T01:20:19+03:00

The coronavirus pandemic is witness to a great proliferation of two types of tests. The first type is testing —– new medical diagnostic tests as well as epidemiological models that simulate and project the course of the virus. In the second type, actors, organizations, and institutions are being tested in this moment of social and political crisis. This essay analyzes the similarities and differences between these two major types of tests in order to understand their entanglements in the crisis. In the process, we find a great diversity of tests operating in multiple registers, themselves not clearly demarcated, often combining and sometimes conflating, for example, scientific and public discourse. The study opens by identifying three aspects of testing, drawn from the sociology of testing. First, tests are frequently proxies (or projections) that stand for something. Second, a test is a critical moment that stands out – whether because it is a moment deliberately separated out or because it is a puzzling or troublesome “situation” that disrupts the flow of social life. Third, when someone or something is put to the test, of interest is whether it stands up to the challenge. These insights serve as the building blocks for addressing three major issues – representation, selection, and accountability – regarding testing in the time of the coronavirus crisis. In this moment we see a new model of testing: from statistical calculation of risk in a population to algorithmic prediction about the riskiness of particular persons.

How Different are the Models of Administrative Adjudication Across the Russian Regions? On the Example of Antitrust Cases

2020-12-05T01:19:39+03:00

The Russian practice of implementing the decisions of administrative authorities, including challenging them in the judicial system, provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of institutional changes on the effectiveness of legal norms. This article is aimed at describing the main features of the Russian system of contesting the decisions of administrative authorities (in this case, we consider cases of contesting indictments of an antimonopoly body); it also considers key parameters that are characteristic of Russia as a country in a transitional stage of institutional development. The analysis is based on data obtained from the Arbitration Card File of the Federal Arbitration Courts of the Russian Federation on decisions of the Russian arbitration courts of first instance with respect to contesting the decisions of the antimonopoly body on all types of charges for the period 2012–2018. For the indicated period, a sample of 14,790 decisions of arbitration courts of the first instance was formed, which covered different subjects of the Russian Federation. The considered statistics of contesting antitrust decisions of arbitration courts of the first instance demonstrate a high level of differentiation of the institution of judicial regulation regarding disputes arising from the relationship between the antimonopoly body and companies. Subsequently, such features become some of the essential parameters that determine the differences in the processes of law enforcement and the quality of the institutional environment. At the same time, significant differences in the levels of judges' workload relative to average values make it possible to determine both the insufficient and excessive composition of judges, both in general for the courts of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, and for groups of judges considering disputes arising from administrative legal relations.

How Different are the Models of Administrative Adjudication Across the Russian Regions? On the Example of Antitrust Cases

2020-12-05T01:18:49+03:00

The paper describes an experiment aimed at creating a categorical and interactive stratification schema for the population a major Russian city (St. Petersburg). We used the data on friendship ties of 3200 adults to create a network of ties among occupations. We then used the Louvaine community detection algorithm to identify six clusters. The clusterization obtained distinguished between skilled manual, routine non-manual and professional occupations demonstrating that close social ties are more likely to be found within, rather than between, their boundaries. However, in contrast to Goldthorpe’s class schema, the algorithm also identified cleavages between sectors of professional occupations (pedagogical/ artistic, clerical, etc.) The boundaries between such groups of occupations are reproduced inter-generationally even in the absence of considerable economic inequality between them. We demonstrate that clusters of occupations differ in their lifestyles and consumption patterns (e.g. consumption of highbrow culture) even controlling for age, gender, and education. We interpret the clusterization as evidence of the existence of milieus confined within institutional barriers of social sectors. Such milieus, rather than classes, serve as the building blocks of social structure defined through intensity of interaction or lifestyles.

Editor's Foreword

2020-12-05T01:18:14+03:00

Dear colleagues, the very first issue of the Journal of Economic Sociology came out in September 2000, exactly twenty years ago. It was one of the pioneers among the academic e-journals in Russia at the time, when the very notion of ‘electronic journal’ was not widely recognized. We contributed to a new standard, which became quite common many years later

Social Embeddedness as a Business Goal: New Theoretical Implications from the Case of a Global Value Chain

2020-05-26T11:41:39+03:00

This paper provides new theoretical implications for the concept of social embeddedness as one of the main objectives for business relations. Previous studies have considered social embeddedness as an external factor to market exchanges that forms outside of economic relations; in other words, embeddedness appears as an incidental product of market interactions. Here, I propose that social embeddedness is being intentionally constructed by market actors as an integral part of a business process. This view is developed by a theoretical adaptation of studies in relational marketing and the sociology of valuation. Relational marketing shows that interfirm relations have additional value for businesses and can educate market practitioners to intensify social interactions. Valuation studies explain the process of value creation for end goods, and this explanation is applied to interpreting the value of interfirm relations. For the empirical validation, I focus on the field of global value chains because the global coordination of business interactions requires an explicit discussion of relational characteristics. The research is performed using a qualitative design. The empirical part consists of 13 months of participant observation as a sales manager in a Russian global value chain that works in fast-moving consumer goods and consumer electronics. Also, 33 deep semistructured interviews were conducted with employees of the global value chain. Data analysis is performed within a grounded theory perspective. The empirical section demonstrates that the proposed vision of embeddedness as an integral and desirable part of a business process is applicable to firm practices. Economic actors participate in permanent valuation processes to maintain a common interpretation of interfirm relations; they conceptualize business ties as an important source of market value.

Constitutional Review and Dissenting Opinions in Nondemocracies: An Empirical Analysis of the Russian Constitutional Court, 1998–2018

2020-05-26T11:48:00+03:00

Whereas constitutional courts are associated with democracy and the rule of law, today, they these courts exist in nondemocracies, where they face direct threats to their existence or backlash from domestic actors. For a court to survive, it has to constantly strike a balance between performing the functions imposed by the ruler and trying not to lose its legitimacy. What is the role of constitutional courts in nondemocracies? When do they rule against the government, and when do they side with it? To what extent can regional governments, citizens, or political activists succeed in challenging the state? Given the higher risks judges in nondemocracies face, when do they author dissenting opinions? To answer these questions, I use a novel dataset on all final judgments issued by the Russian Constitutional Court (RCC) between 1998 and 2018 (N = 502). Using a regression analysis, I show how the outcomes of cases depend on who petitions the court and about what. First, the results show that the political regime and institutional settings matter—applications about the government’s structure have the lowest probabilities of being nullified but have higher probabilities of carrying a dissenting opinion. Additionally, judges dissent more when cases are brought by highlevel political actors, such as the president, federal parliament, and government. Second, social rights are an area of consensus among judges—the court is more likely to strike down laws that violate social rights, including social welfare and cases on antidiscrimination, and judges are less likely to dissent in such cases. When higher courts in nondemocracies exist—and as long as they benefit the ruler or ruling party—they tend to (1) avoid confrontation with the ruler and (2) shift their focus toward “safer” areas, which, in the Russian case, became advancing and protecting social rights.<\p>

International Seminar on Environment and Society “Current Challenges and Pathways to Change”, University of Lisbon, Portugal, March 2–3, 2020

2020-05-26T11:30:48+03:00

The first International Seminar on Environment and Society was held from March 2nd to 3rd, 2020 in Lisbon, Portugal under the motto of “Current Challenges and Pathways to Change.” The seminar was organized by the Environment and Society Section of the Portuguese Association of Sociology in collaboration with the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and the PhD program in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies. The seminar aimed to engage social science researchers in a discussion of global environmental agendas, thus establishing complicated relationships between environment and society (both natural and anthropogenic), their consequences for sustainable development, and critical assessment of the current and forthcoming risks of decision-making for the future. The program was organized in two days: the main sections were held simultaneously in five auditoriums, and the presentations of keynote speakers opened and closed each day. Apart from researchers in sociology and social sciences, the seminar was attended by a wide range of participants from a variety of disciplines including geology, philosophy, and legal studies, representing 19 countries around the world. The keynote speakers of the conference were Alan Irwin (Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark), Luísa Schmidt (Professor, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal), Matthias Gross (Professor, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research — UFZ and University of Jena, Germany), Noel Castree (Professor, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, United Kingdom). They shared their understandings of the relationships between social groups and the environment and the environment and society as a whole. This seminar has established itself as a crucial event for productive discussion, demonstrating that social scientists around the world are responsive to environmental issues and stand ready to contribute to solving them.

Context in Leisure: The Neglected Side

2020-05-26T11:46:14+03:00

Studies of leisure stand apart at the intersection of sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology, as they tend to focus on subjective experience. Ten years ago, Robert Stebbins, a research veteran in this discipline, emphasized all sorts of contexts and external factors that cannot be omitted and should be taken into account when doing such research. Over 30 years of studying this phenomenon, Stebbins managed to build his own theory, the “Serious Leisure Perspective,” and addressed boredom and choice as components of leisure. In Leisure Activities in Context, he further develops the fundamental idea he introduced 10 years ago (the Serious Leisure Perspective) based on Anthony Giddens’ theory of structure—which is reflected in the subtitle of Stebbins’ book: “A Micro-Macro/AgencyStructure Interpretation of Leisure.” Stebbins categorizes context at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, emphasizing that leisure research always focuses on only one layer, and no one has previously attempted to paint the big picture. In this vein, he formulates the goal of his new book—to show how different levels communicate with each other in the field of leisure. Stebbins uses his own theory as a classification of leisure activities divided into three types: serious, relaxed, and project-based. He expresses the hope that, after reading his new book, readers will stop looking at leisure activities solely from the perspective of micro-structure.

Way Out of the Matrix

2020-05-26T12:01:02+03:00

The feature of this review is to study the properties of modern communications and relations between humans and information. An American journalist and ex-editor of The New Republic, Franklin Foer studies the origins, present, and future of new media. Starting with the meaning of their own names, global network companies claim to everyone that they are ruling the world. Social networks and even search engines collect data with ease and impunity from unsuspecting users who voluntarily publish open access information about themselves. Then, after acquiring the information they need, corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon use algorithms to control the behavior of a large part of the world. The review highlights the most important topics of the book: the reasons for degradation of individual taste and thought, ways corporations can follow their clients, the crisis of book publishing and professional journalism, and the importance of privacy. Foer does not spread panic; rather, he explains to the reader what problems modern information society faces. One of the main difficulties is that search engines and social networks do not allow users to filter content (despite an abundance of it) according to users’ personal interests but instead organize the output of material according to internal algorithms. Perhaps we should turn to traditional ways of comprehending the world, such as reading paper books. The Internet itself as a means of communication is not the ultimate evil but the fact that it has been turned into the only way of communication means it is relied on too extensively. As a result, the book World Without Mind by Franklin Foer offers a way to “exit the matrix” of the digital age.

What Do We Know About 21st Century Youth? American Teens Through the Eyes of a Psychologist

2020-05-26T11:59:23+03:00

A book written by American psychologist Jean M. Twenge iGen. Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us describes the change in values, identity and behavior of adolescents born during the period from 1995 to 2012, the Internet Generation known as iGens. The book represents a good example of thorough data analysis, using the results of sociological surveys that originated in the 1960`s and covering opinions of more than 11 million Americans. Guided by such extensive empirical material, the author infers that adolescents have begun to grow up more slowly, plunge into the virtual world at the expense of reality, presume upon new media, communicate less, and show less interest in news. All that led to a degradation of knowledge and skills, a lack of sophistication, the growth of mental disorders, a lack of self-confidence, angst, and the spread of perverse attitudes towards education, work, family and money. The main reasons for such fundamental changes lie in the safer environment of iGens’ childhoods as well as their greater involvement in digital technologies and information. Accustomed to being supervised externally, iGens internally dive into virtual reality, lose interest in extracting knowledge themselves (reducing their ability to overcome obstacles or desire to take risks), and receive much less real experience. iGens are a few times less likely to meet friends, go on dates, get professional experience, drive a car, drink alcohol, read books, or keep up on the news than representatives of generations X and Y. At the same time, iGens spend twice as much time on the Internet than millennials. Uncontrollably and indiscriminately absorbing primitive and chaotic information, modern adolescents lose their integrity. This is evidenced by the growth of anxiety, mental disorders, and suicides. The example of American teenagers shows that people might lose the very abilities for which the technologies have been created (e. g. interpersonal communication, critical thinking, information awareness, creativity, personal growth, safety, etc.).

Behind the Scene of Soviet Runway Fashion: Capital and Position in the Field

2020-05-26T10:58:23+03:00

This paper presents an approach to describe and analyze the accumulation of specific capital in a Soviet design organization during the late Soviet period from 1968 to 1982. Compared to the Stalin and Thaw periods, the system of fashion production under Late Socialism is less explored. The functioning of regional clothing design houses which constituted a specific feature of the Soviet system of fashion production during this period is underexplored as well. As far as we know, this study is the first attempt to apply Bourdieu’s theory of the field of production to Soviet fashion production. Researchers do not typically use sociological theories of production to analyze Soviet fashion. The study denotes the categories of specific capital, hierarchies, and dynamics of the field of production. The system of fashion production in the late Soviet period is considered a very particular case in a non-capitalist society. There are two components of the study. The first one reconstructs the hierarchy of the Soviet system of fashion production. The second one describes professional strategies to accumulate specific capital and to occupy a position in the field of production. The study focuses on two cases of development and presentation of clothing collections by Perm Clothing Design House during union and cluster meetings of designers from 1968 to 1969 and 1979 to 1982. The paper relies on published research on Soviet fashion history, archive documents from the Russian State Economic Archive and State Archive of Perm Territory, and in-depth interviews with former employees of the Perm Clothing Design House. The results discuss the applicability of the term of “specific capital” to the explanation of the construction processes of hierarchies in the late Soviet field of fashion production. The paper contributes to the earlier conclusions on the ambiguities of Soviet fashion policy. It also introduces the definition of “specific capital” as official representatives’ appreciation of the balance between an officially approved seasonal fashion trend and the creative search achieved by designers of a certain design house. It suggests that a weird combination of socialist and pseudo-market practices penetrated and restricted Soviet fashion production.

Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (excerpts)

2020-05-26T10:51:03+03:00

The authors of this book argue that Western capitalism has recently undergone a fundamental transformation that especially apparent in those countries responsible fpr European industrial primacy. There are two significant dimensions of the work: historical and analytical. The first dimension focuses on economic changes that have been observed since the late 20th century and dramatically modified the way value and wealth are created today: on one hand, the transformation characterized by deindustrialization; and, on the other, the increased exploitation of certain resources that, while not entirely new, have taken on an unprecedented importance. The second direction aims to understand how different commodities can generate transactions perceived as normal by buyers and sellers and that fit preliminary expectations to a certain degree. From a theoretical perspective, the authors deliberate pragmatic structuralism that combines social history with the analysis of cognitive competences upon which actors rely. In terms of empirical data, the authors use statistics enriched with a set of various formal and informal interviews, focusing on France as a case where the mentioned transformation is more distinctive.

The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes some excerpts from the second chapter “Toward Enrichment” where the authors define the main sources and benefits of the enrichment economy. The enrichment economy is based less on producing new objects and more on enriching existing things and places by connecting them with specific narratives.

The Dynamics of Dissertation Industry in Russia, 2005–2015. Did New Institutional Templates Change Academic Behavior?

2020-05-26T10:43:40+03:00

The paper introduces the notion of the “institutional template,” defined as a highly legitimate example of a certain practice to which formal mechanisms of assessing the degree of correspondence are attached. Arguably, institutional templates are currently the major vehicles through which coercive isomorphism spreads across the academic world. While correspondence measures often take form of quantitative indicators, this is not always the case, so this paper analyzes the history of regulations of dissertation production in Russia as an example of a predominantly non-quantitative template. We use three datasets covering approximately 250,000 cases of dissertation defenses in Russia between 2005 and 2015 to discover the outcomes of the template’s introduction in the dissertation industry. We show how the new regulations allowed a reduction in the number of defenses—nearly by half. However, contrary to the intentions of the template inventors, the reduction was distributed evenly between mathematics, natural sciences (presumably less affected by degree devaluation), and social sciences (the most affected). There was also no concentration of dissertation production in the top research centers and no evidence of intensified migration of degree candidates to such centers. Overall, there is no evidence that the template produced more obstacles for authors of low-quality dissertations than those of high quality. Using the data from interviews with members of dissertation councils, we argue the results of the template: first, it required enormous bureaucratic efforts to demonstrate an individual’s ability to fit into it, and, second, its inability to account for local circumstances of particular disciplines sometimes resulted in de facto negative selection.

Editor's Foreword

2020-05-26T10:09:37+03:00

Detailed description in the text

Why do Marshrutkas Exist in One City and Not in Others? Toward a Political Economy of Routes in Russian Urban Public Transportation

2020-04-05T15:13:21+03:00

Urban public transportation in Russia has changed significantly since the fall of the USSR. In many cities, marshrutkas have completely replaced the classical public modes of transportation. Other cities have, however, tried to balance the electric transport system with marshrutkas. Some cities also have trams and articulated buses on their streets, with minibuses completely absent. The reasons for such huge differences are not obvious. Various approaches have failed to explain why marshrutkas are present on the streets in one city but absent in others. The hypothesis here is that the routes were privatized by marshrutka-operating companies. The conceptual framework is based on the works of Karl Polanyi, Vadim Volkov, and Michael Burawoy. Nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted in the autumn of 2016: eight in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg, and ten in provincial cities, such as Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Ulyanovsk, Dimitrovgrad, and Cherepovetz. Research has shown that the fundamental problem for marshrutka operators is the danger of the reconsideration of route owners’ property rights. The difference between cities with and cities without marshrutkas is described not only in terms of a continuance of property rights but also through spatial characteristics of the industrial backgrounds. This view on urban public transport calls for a fresh discussion on regulation issues in transportation studies, the commodification of mobility, and the political economy of transport.

The Philosophy of Early Christianity and the Challenges of Digitalization.

2020-04-05T15:16:29+03:00

From December 6 to 7, 2019, the international conference, “Philosophy of Early Christianity in the Era of Digitalization,” was held at Fu Jen Catholic University in the capital of Taiwan, Taipei, with the participation of sociologists from the Saint Tikhon Orthodox Humanitarian University. Currently, all developed countries are evolving the digitalization process. It goes without saying that this is reflected in the economy. Today, even traditionally offline sectors of the national economy are increasingly using cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of things. At the same time, the process of digitalization cannot be reduced solely to the development of the digital economy, since it affects all significant areas of society’s life—social, political, and cultural.

Some researchers believe that the digitalization process affects not only the social but also the personal sphere of the individual and brings about a changein needs, whereby the need for information exchange becomes basic. In this regard, the risks of the digitalization process should be noted: technological (artificial intelligence can get out of control); economic (the risk of unemployment due to automation and the substitution of artificial intelligence for a number of professions, on the one hand, and the risk of a shortage of qualified personnel necessary for the development of the digital economy on the other); socio-political (including the risk of escalation of cyber wars between countries); and finally the moral risk, which is the dehumanization of consciousness. The speakers at the conference, representatives of both European and Asian universities, endeavored to understand the trends in the development of the social process of digitalization from the positions of early Christian thinkers.

The conference showed the need to study the social process of digitalization in the framework of an interdisciplinary approach at the international level.

The Enemy of My Enemy or About the Uniting Potential of Market Radicalism

2020-04-05T15:16:05+03:00

This paper is a review of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, the book by Eric A. Posner and Glen E. Weyl and published in 2018. Prof. Posner works at the University of Chicago, where his scholarship is dedicated to international law, foreign relations law, contracts, and game theory and the law. Glen E. Weyl is a Prior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England who also teaches a course Designing the Digital Economy at Yale University. The book concentrates on solutions for the problems of inequality and stagnation. The authors claim that solutions need a combination of left and right theoretical principles. Such a combination allows for institutional systems to approach market principles of freedom, competition, and openness. The market is considered the best tool for providing both equality and economic growth. Five relatively separate spheres are studied in the book, and the same monopolistic restrictions are highlighted. Each chapter presents a solution for one sphere that should enforce free competition and destroy a monopoly.

This review proposes an interpretation that the reasonings presented in the book do not create a compromise between left and right. The authors develop a right liberal tradition instead. All the propositions are based on the principles of utilitarianism, marginalist calculations, and neoclassical economics. Simultaneously, the presented solutions appear historically relevant for both approaches, while the solutions do not overcome the theoretical contradictions between neoliberalism and critical theory in the economy and between liberalism and republicanism in politics. The book’s general ideas are discussed after the introduction. Next, specific cases are analyzed through comparison of the principles of liberalism, critical theory, and republicanism. A discussion about the efficiency of theoretical compromises concludes the paper.

The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (an excerpt)

2020-04-05T15:15:40+03:00

The book by David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, presented deep research into the nature of postmodernism, considered not as a set of ideas but rather as historical conditions. The author claimed that roughly since 1972 cultural as well as political and economic practices changed globally, including the rise of postmodern cultural forms and the emergence of flexible capital accumulation. According to the author, those changes were conditioned by the new prevailing modes of how people experienced time and space, indicating the new cycle of time-space compression in the organization of capitalism. The book consists of four parts. In the first part, Prof. Harvey reviewed the dominating but conflicting theories of postmodernism. In the other chapters he considered the relationship between the dynamics of the historical and geographical development of capitalism, complicated processes of cultural production, and ideological transformation. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the tenth chapter, “Theorizing the Transition,” from the second part of the book, “The Political-Economic Transformation of Late Twentieth-Century Capitalism.” In this chapter, the author demonstrated that existing theories had difficulties in explaining the observed historical transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation. In order to overcome these problems, Harvey proposed a return to capitalism's origins to reconsider its logic generally with the help of Marx’s theories.

Transformations of Governmentality Regimes under the Influenceof New Areas of Knowledge: the Case of Behavioral Economics

2020-04-05T15:15:18+03:00

This article is a review of relevant scientific literature on the consequences of the growing popularity of behavioral economics in the field of public administration and public policy. The main result of behavioral research that arose in the 1970s at the intersection of psychology and economics was the discovery of irrational decision-making mechanisms and the rejection of the traditional economic concepts of human nature. Revision of the axioms of the rational choice theory in turn made possible the emergence of new public policy instruments that can influence unconscious psychological triggers, compensating for the cognitive insufficiency of the governed subjects. An active appeal to cognitive sciences, including behavioral economics, neuroscience, and research in the field of artificial intelligence, is one of the main trends in modern public administration. In many countries, the recommendations of the so-called nudge theory by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein are being introduced at the national government level. The question arises whether behavioral economics can become the new paradigm of economic policy, or whether we are witnessing the radicalization of neoliberalism, which is trying to overcome the structural economic problems with the help of new scientific discoveries. Using Michel Foucault’s governmentality analytics and existing research on this topic, the author shows that conceptual changes in economic theory significantly influence the balance of power relations in society. In particular, the pressure of modern cognitive sciences on liberal notions of autonomy, as well as the expansion of the range of psychological tools used to govern the population, sharpen the question of the compatibility of the basic political categories of liberalism and the new technologies of governance. It creates the prerequisites for the formation and strengthening of quasi-authoritarian regimes of power that are able to achieve economic efficiency without appealing to active subjects and personal freedom.

Some Regularities in Establishing Regional Categories of Specially Protected Natural Territories

2020-04-05T15:14:31+03:00

Protection of the environment and specially protected natural territories are in the joint jurisdiction of the Russian Federation and its constituent entities. In particular, constituent entities have the power to establish their own categories of specially protected natural territories (called regional categories) besides the categories prescribed by the federal law On Specially Protected Natural Territories. The diversity of regional categories has been studied only superficially, despite the fact that such research may be valuable for finding out the drawbacks of federal and regional legislation and for identifying the ways it can be improved. It may also result in general insights about Russian lawmaking under joint jurisdiction. The study presented in this paper aimed to find the regularities in the legislative activity of Russia’s constituent entities in the field of establishing regional categories. For this purpose, the full list of regional categories as of August 1, 2019 was made and then processed with text mining algorithms, including word clouds, bigram analysis, word correlations, and clustering of categories’ names using their vector representations made with Fasttext. Several large groups of regional categories were determined as a result: protected natural objects (analogous to natural monuments), protected landscapes and natural complexes, protected green zones of populated localities, recreational areas, and areas of historical and cultural designation, which are similar to cultural heritage objects. Some constituent entities fill the gaps in federal regulation; they follow the paradigm of anticipatory lawmaking and provide for special rules for territories under international agreements, such as wetlands of international importance, or they partially implement protected area categories adopted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. However, some regional categories are likely to indicate a low level of legal technique in regional lawmaking. This analysis of regional categories points out three deficiencies of the Russian federal legislation on protected areas: instability of legislation, excessive rigidity of the federal categories system, and flaws in the protection of areas valuable for conservation of biodiversity, recreation, and support for ecological balance.

Editor's Foreword

2020-04-09T13:28:05+03:00

Detailed description in the text

International workshop “The Varieties of Power in the Economy”, NRU HSE, Moscow, July 3–4, 2020

2020-02-02T13:14:44+03:00

Journal of Economic Sociology. Vol. 21. No 1. January 2020www.ecsoc.hse.ru140International workshopThe Varieties of Power in the Economy3–4 July 2020Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (NRU HSE), Moscow, Russia

Deadline for Submissions—15 February 2020

Interview with John W. Meyer: If You Study Organizations You Should Not Believe in Them (interviewed by Elena Gudova)

2020-02-02T13:13:11+03:00

An interview with John W. Meyer, emeritus Professor of Sociology, and by courtesy Education, at Stanford University, was conducted in October 2019 during his visit to the 10th International Russian Higher Education Conference (RHEC) in Moscow on “Contributions of Higher Education to Society and Economy: Global, National and Local Perspectives.” The interview was performed by Elena Gudova, PhD and a lecturer in the Department of Economic Sociology at the Higher School of Economics. John Meyer talks about the rise of hyper-managerialism and its implications for modern organizations. While previously, organizations tended to be subordination actors, today they have more legitimation in choosing mission and purposes, which marks a shift from management authority toward leadership and implies a need for managers with charismatic qualities. Business schools, in their courses and educational processes, emphasize the importance of failures as part of entrepreneurs’ experiences, while questions of vision are rarely a part of the agenda. Still, even a great charismatic leader/entrepreneur may lack authority because of a decontextualized vision as local communities’ interests are usually not represented. Organizations with good vision (i.e., with proper corporate social responsibilities) may legitimate themselves through the routinization of the leader’s charisma, the incorporation of norms of good citizenship, and the self-management of employees and citizens. As Meyer puts it, “You have to be an okay-person in the modern hyper-organizational context.” Due to these new scripts in the character of an individual, John Meyer discusses distinctions between the American and German educational systems and some possible outcomes for the world based on the German educational model instead of on the American one. As current types of organizational responses might be treated as invasive for individuals (even though they are useful in many ways), the German system resists many of the hyper-liberal changes in a much better way. Another focus of Meyer’s interests is connected with changes in universities and those in science in general. He talks about the mutual influence of society and academia and the legitimation of scientific knowledge, both per se and in educational process. A simple, but still important, issue regards keeping a research distance and asking the right questions, as moral commitment might weaken the research. The solution may be in comparing education to the forces that produce the observed changes, and not to what we imagine to be an ideal educational process and product.

International workshop “The Varieties of Power in the Economy”, NRU HSE, Moscow, July 3–4, 2020

2020-02-02T13:11:10+03:00

Deadline for Submissions—15 February 2020

Between Gift and Profit: Appropriative Practices as a New Approach to Digital Economy Analysis

2020-02-02T13:08:26+03:00

The author of the book sets the non-trivial task of developing an approach to the economic analysis that would include the diversity of economic practices and at the same time indicate the recipients of benefits. In criticizing the ideas of Marxists and mainstream economists, the author concludes that they are unable to see economies beyond capitalism and market relations, which automatically excludes gifts and hybrid economic forms from any economic analysis. Five case studies from the digital economy of Apple, Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and Facebook demonstrate the analytical potential of a new approach—the political economy of practices, which considers the diversity of economic practices. By putting emphasis on various combinations of appropriating practices, the author demonstrates the success of the enterprises in the digital economy, which cannot be explained by perfect competition or the exploitation of wage labor.
This book is an excellent example of the substantive approach to economic analysis and would be especially interesting to those who are interested in the coexistence of market and non-market economic forms, particularly in the digital world.

The One-Sided Participation

2020-02-02T13:06:16+03:00

This book by three prominent researchers of communities' cultures and the technological impact on the society includes a conversation in the title and takes it seriously. The text is a compilation of authors’ talks about applying the definition of participatory culture to the analysis of diverse spheres of social life and is an implicit call to join the conversation, argue for theses and offer your own at the same time.
Each author unsurprisingly has his or her own interpretation of the major definition of participatory culture, but all of them feel deeply involved in their research subject, which M. Weber has warned against: All three scientists identify themselves as former or present natives of the participatory culture. The deep emotional involvement in the research subject leaves a trace and, in our view, complements the analysis.
Hence the authors have not only made fruitful (almost autobiographical) research into participatory culture but also have made very useful social recommendations about the efficient and cautious application of it in the educational sphere and resolution of the intergenerational conflicts and have called on researchers generally not to marginalize the representatives of participatory cultures’ communities. Of course, promotion of democratizing, educational and other positive roles of the participatory culture is important and very practical. Alongside its analysis of participatory cultures the book includes an updated look at the traditional definitions of social groups, social networks and forms of capital. In this review, the author tries to systematize scientists’ points of view on the most prominent themes highlighted in the book. Moreover we had the opportunity to join the conversation with these three eminent scientists and mentally visit (and present to the reader) the living room of Henry Jenkins, which was the site of most of the conversations in the book.

Work Practices of Older Population Groups: Reasons for Choice

2020-02-02T13:04:07+03:00

The most important challenge for developed and developing countries of the 21st century, in the opinion of the United Nations, is increasing lifespans alongside fertility reduction. This is shown to result in the maintenance of older people’s health and labor activity at an average level. At the same time high developed IT leads to a growing sharing economy. This results in labor market changes and global digitalization of the economy compounds this. At the same time the economic crises lead to reducing household incomes. There are a lot of older population groups in the labor market at an age when their parents had already retired, so youth unemployment stems from older people competing with younger for jobs. Aggressive ageism is one of the characteristics of such a situation. Governments are paying people to retire later. As a result, the labor market consists of senior employees who are trying to give their family an acceptable standard of living even if they are old enough to retire, and young and middle-aged employees. These groups compete with each other, and the more heterogeneous the labor force, the more intense the competition becomes. As a result, countries propose political programs to reduce the negative impact of the demographic crisis. For Russia this problem is also a current problem. But Russia is beginning its path. It needs to interpret the experiences of Western countries and choose its own way. This article offers a detailed examination of the labor practices of older population groups. The first labor practice investigated is leaving the labor market, the second is employment and the third is self-employment, including entrepreneurship. The author shows how the classification of causes leads to the choice of a specific strategy at labor market. She theorizes that neoliberalism gives older people a new ability to help country economy, rather than being disability recipients. As a result, the author concludes that although the problem of the aging population in Russia and in developed countries is the same, but a common practice is not suitable. And the new Russian pension reform that increases the retirement age may lead to a national catastrophe as older people have difficulties to find work and have no cash savings.

Regional Differences in Access to Educational Resources, Academic Results and Students’ Trajectories in Russia

2020-02-02T13:01:55+03:00

Today little is known about regional inequality in education in Russia. In this article we analyze regional differences in educational resources in association with regions’ socio-economic characteristics, and in addition we assess the relationship of regions’ socio-economic characteristics and educational resources with the proportion of students remaining in high school as well as with the average results of the Unified State Exam (end of high school test) in two compulsory subjects—Russian and math. We test theories of effectively maintained inequality and maximally maintained inequality using data of Russia regions that we retrieve from open sources—publications of Rosstat and federal and regional education agencies. To estimate the relationship we use correlation and regression analysis. Our results show that more urbanized regions with higher levels of human capital and GRP are usually characterized by the higher level of school expenditures, more experienced teachers, and higher chances for students to study at the advanced level. The same time, the level of urbanization and human capital is positively related to the proportion of students that choose an academic trajectory after finishing secondary school. Finally, the results of the Unified State Exam are also positively associated with access to educational resources. In both subjects, the average test score is higher in the regions with a higher proportion of students in lyceums/gymnasiums and in schools with advanced study options. In Russian, the exam results are also related to the proportion of students remaining in high school. In general, regional inequality in access to educational resources overlaps with socio-economic differences, which produces a situation of double loss or double advantage. Greater access to better educational resources in regions with higher human capital supports effectively maintained inequality theory. At the same time the fact that a lower proportion of students choose an academic trajectory after grade 9 in regions with less human capital could be evidence of maximally maintained inequality. The article could be interesting to readers whose area of study relates to problems of education inequality and education policy.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (excerpts)

2020-02-02T12:58:40+03:00

The idea of providing people with income independently of the job they perform or seek seems mad. However, providing each individual (rich and poor, economically active and inactive) with an unconditional basic income was supported by such famous thinkers as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and John Kenneth Galbraith. For a long time this idea has not been taken seriously. At present, as the traditional welfare state has been straining under an increasing pressure, the basic income has become the most popular social policy project to discuss worldwide. Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght argue that the basic income can overcome the economic insecurity and social exclusion of the 21st century. The authors combine some evidence from philosophy, politics and economics in order to compare the proposal of a basic income with other projects to alleviate poverty and unemployment, trace its history, and find answers to economic and political arguments against unconditional income, including the argument about a tendency to decreased stimulus and free-rider models of behavior that might result from the basic income; to explain how this seemingly impossible idea can be achieved economically and politically; and to consider its applicability to the extending global economy. In the age of increasing inequality and political fragmentation, when the old answers to deeply embedded social issues are not credible, the basic income offers the hope of achieving a free society and a sane economy. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes some excerpts from the first chapter “The Instrument of Freedom” in which the authors provide the main considerations in favor of an unconditional basic income, demonstrating how it solves the problems of poverty and unemployment as well as how, as one of the most important elements of a sustainable emancipatory institutional infrastructure, it can become a tool of freedom.

Subjective Well-being of Migrants in Russia: Effects of Regional Characteristics and Migration Legislation

2020-02-02T12:55:06+03:00

Migration is an important and rapidly growing phenomenon in the modern world. Many countries are facing problems with integration and adaption of migrants to new living conditions. Subjective well-being (SWB) can be considered as an indicator of how successfully migrants are adapted and integrated into the host society. Levels of migrants’ SWB are often determined by the same factors as for other people—good health, high salary, employment and youth make them happier. Nonetheless, migrants’ decision to migrate is often led by economic motives, which leads them to overvalue economic characteristics of countries and regions of destination and undervalue non-economic factors. This paper aims to estimate the effects of the economic prosperity (measured by gross regional product) and social capital of Russian regions (measured by general social trust and relative size of the community of the migrant’s compatriots) on the life satisfaction of migrants. In addition, we analyze possible effect of the inclusion of the migrants’ country of origin into Eurasian Customs Union. To answer the proposed questions we employed data of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey—Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE) and statistics provided by Russian Federal State Statistics Service. The main method of analysis is a cross-classified multilevel linear regression modeling. The results show that the economic performance of a region has no effect on the life satisfaction of a migrant. It appears that social factors play a greater role—the effects of general social trust and the relative size of the community of a migrant’s compatriots in a region are positive and statistically significant. We found that inclusion of the country of migrants’ origin into the Eurasian Customs Union positively and significantly affects the life satisfaction of migrants. We associate this effect with a decrease in the economic and psychological costs of migration.

Editor's Foreword

2020-03-31T17:01:48+03:00

Are Russian Students Ready to be Law-Abiding Taxpayers? Tax Morality Issues

2020-02-02T12:22:07+03:00

Tax morality is formed by the influence of social and psychology factors on society and has a great impact on the choice of deviating model behaviors by taxpayers. In this regard, tax evasion would be preferable to use in the behavioral economy instrumentarium, as it provides an opportunity to evaluate the effects of norms and behavior stereotypes formed in an individual choice. A survey among students from districts in the North-Caucasus Federal Region was held to estimate the level of tax morale. The results were analyzed using the z-test and the model formation of binary logistic regression. The research results have shown that interviewees are ready to evade tax legislation, even though most express a strong reluctance to attempt tax evasion. The main reasons for this are a low level of confidence in the legal system, the perception of the tax system as unfair, and the social norm distortions and the existence of entrenched behavioral stereotypes. With these stereotypes, tax evasion is not perceived as a grave violation. The existence of an unfair tax system, with a focus on retributive justice, leads to the violation of a psychological party to the agreement between the state and taxpayers as the appearance of “moral reasons” for the excuses of strategy choice for the tax evasion. In this regard, the integration of social norms, which regulate the interaction of the tax payers and the state, as well as a stimulating mechanism of loyalty enhancement on base of expanding frontiers in collaboration, into the system of tax administration will enable to create an alternative way of the rational choice for the tax players which will be not only morally praiseworthy but also economically justified.

Editor's Foreword

2020-02-02T12:07:06+03:00

Interview with Joseph Vogl. Intellectual History and Political Economy of Modern Capitalism (interviewed by Ivan Boldyrev)

2020-02-02T12:09:08+03:00

The contemporary positions of economic theory and the modern development of the capitalist system were the main topics of discussion with Prof. Joseph Vogl. Several questions were discussed regarding aesthetics, historical and political contexts, the temporality of economic knowledge, and its reflexivity. Prof. Vogl spoke about his studies aimed at the investigation of aesthetic representation and the poetics of economic models and abstractions in different genres, such as literature, theatre, and poetry. During the conversation, Prof. Vogl problematized the objectivity of conclusions in economic disciplines, while economics has not been considered in a historical context that forms an agenda. The author problematized the objectivity of conclusions that pretend to be in the economic discipline, although economics has not been considered as a historical context that forms its agenda. Prof. Vogl claimed that modern economic theory, like early political economy, is historically rooted in its agenda determined by the structure of power interests. Furthermore, the expansion process of financial markets represents the development of new forms of governmentality and institutional order. Through these forms, financial capital becomes the lender of last resort, which is not subordinate to central banks and federal governments.

Official (Biomedical) Obstetrics and Alternative (Home) Midwifery: Formalized and Informal Interaction Practices

2020-02-02T12:12:00+03:00

The article discusses the interaction practices between the formal system of obstetric aid and alternative (home) midwifery, which together constitute a continuum of formal and informal in the sphere of medical services. For the analysis of these practices, I turn to critical medical anthropology and such important concepts for this research area as resistance to medicalization and medical pluralism. I also rely on the social studies of public health that regard it as an organizational field in which different types of institutional logics compete and come into the conflict: professional, state (or bureaucratic), and managerial.
In the first part of the article, I show that the care in a home birth can be provided by both amateur midwives and certified medical specialists, such as obstetrician-gynecologists and midwives of the maternity hospitals, although in Russia, this activity qualifies as illegal. In the second part of the article, I discuss how, as a result of the conflict of institutional logics reinforced by several waves of health care reforms, various options have emerged for the formalized interaction of home midwives with maternity hospitals. At present, the most common practice is the part-time employment of midwives in the commercial departments of state maternity hospitals. The third part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the informal interaction of domestic midwives with maternity hospitals. I show that these practices arise in place of serious institutional gaps in the system and represent attempts to organize natural childbirth within the framework of the free-of-charge state medicine. In general, it can be argued that the dominant biomedical models of obstetric care and alternative midwifery do not exist in isolation from each other, but instead create complex and contradictory relationships of cooperation, confrontation, and competition. The study is based on in-depth interviews with home midwives, obstetrician-gynecologists and midwives working in maternity hospitals, as well as with women with home birth experience.

Trust vs. Disorientation: Economy of the Russian-Speaking ‘Migrant’ Groups in Social Media (The Case of VKontakte)

2020-02-02T12:14:27+03:00

The article discusses the economic practices presented in the “migrant” groups in the social network VKontakte. “Migrant” groups refer to groups positioned as communication platforms for migrants, which is reflected either in the name of the group (for example, “migrant bulletin”) or mentioned in its description. “Migrant” groups are quite a common phenomenon; almost every major Russian city has digital communities that position themselves as platforms for discussing migration issues. Social media plays an important role in migration processes, acting as a tool to minimize the information deficit as one of the effective mechanisms of integration. One of the key functions of “migrant” social media is seen as partial compensation for the deficit of social capital in the host country, therefore-minimizing the costs and risks associated with a particular stage of the migration process. At the same time, Russian-speaking “migrant” digital communities rarely come into the research field. In this regard, the question arises: do “migrant” sites in Russian social networks perform the same functions? Is it possible to talk about the existence of a “migrant” economy in the Russian-speaking digital media, and what does it represent? Is it possible, in principle, to expect to extract from Russian-language “migrant” sites any valuable information about the economic activity of migrants, given all the difficulties associated with qualitative research of digital communities? The search for answers to these questions was the purpose of this study. Forty Russian-speaking groups in the social network VKontakte were selected and positioned as “migrant” and at the same time, “live,” containing user dialogues in open access. Next, the search and analysis of messages containing mentions of purchase and sale, exchange, rent, donations of various types, services, and information were carried out. As a result, it was possible to construct several summaries. In particular, the “migrant” economy in VKontakte can be divided into two categories: the economy for migrants, and the economy on migrants. Both are linked to a lack of information and social capital. In the first group, we attributed the practice of freely providing their information and services that allow us to eliminate this deficit or partially reduce its cost. The second group included practices that exploit the lack of social capital of migrants, such as paid legal services, trade in documents, involvement in alternative integration, and — often associated with illegal activities — integration trajectories.

Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy (an excerpt)

2020-02-02T12:16:54+03:00

According to Michael Munger, there is some evidence of the Third Great Economic Revolution, which can be traced within two dimensions: the sharing economy and the brokerage economy. Although in many industries, these two dimensions are far from each other, in some spheres where they interact, their intersection results in extending the new economy. In his book, Prof. Munger describes the features of the sharing economy; entrepreneurship is oriented toward cuts of transactional expenses rather than production expenses, use of new basic program tools, a business running with the help of mobile intellectual equipment, and an internet connection. In turn, the emergence of a brokerage economy results from skills used to sell cuts of transactional costs, opening new opportunities for mutually gained exchanges that have not yet been perceived as commercial. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the first chapter, “The World of Tomorrow 3.0,” where the author describes key features of the new economy resulting from the Third Great Economic Revolution. It means that innovations with the usage of digital technologies come to the fore, allowing more intensive usage of durable goods and reducing the total number of circulated goods. As a result, the human experience turns out to be more important than the obtained things, thus changing the idea of private property dramatically.

The Theatre, the Audience and the State: Twelve Economist’s Comments

2020-02-02T12:18:48+03:00

Rubinstein’s article presents the results of the “First All-Russian Sociological Survey of Theater Audience,” which covered all Federal Districts and constituent entities of the Russian Federation (about 200 cities), in which more than 90% of all professional theaters are registered. More than 12,000 respondents expressed their opinions by answering a special questionnaire posted on the sites of the regional branches of the Union of Theater Workers, special theatrical tickets, and their own theatre sites, as well as several higher educational institutions. For the first time, this work reveals the preferences of the public, from their attitudes toward the repertoire posters of Russian theaters and traditional and innovative productions to the creative composition of theaters and their functions, including performances in movie theaters. A fundamentally new result is a measured audience assessment of the creative potential of Russian theaters, which made it possible to find the reasons that impede its full implementation. The obtained sociological information characterizes the assessments and behavior of the theatrical audience. The results of economic analysis, using official statistics, made it possible to view the whole process of creating performances comprehensively look at the whole process of creating performances and their public demonstration as well as the production and consumption of theater goods, including the relationship between state and municipal theaters. Their founders, who are fulfilling their budgetary obligations, finance theatrical activities. It is known that due to budgetary underfunding of theaters and the commercialization of their activities, which caused an inflationary increase in ticket prices, about 30% of the audience experience financial difficulties in attending performances. Students and pensioners “suffer” most of all, which not only worsens the quality of their life but also harms the growth of the theater’s audience. Based on the construction of the econometric model, recommendations were formulated, aimed at creating conditions for the complete realization of theatrical potential and an increase in attendance.

Dynamics of Middle Classes: Between Expansion and Uncertainty Russian-French Scientific Conference, NRU HSE, Moscow, October 3rd, 2019

2020-02-02T12:31:31+03:00

The conference “Dynamics of Middle Classes: Between Expansion and Uncertainty” was conducted at NRU HSE. The conference was devoted to stratification issues in general and the middle class in particular. The conference was organized by the Institute for Social Policy NRU HSE and the French Embassy in Russia.
The topic of the middle class has been popular for a long time, but there is still no unique definition for this notion. The participants in the conference managed to touch upon three levels of work in terms of “the middle class”: theory, methodology, and empirical studies. Regarding the theory of the middle class, the presenters mentioned that economic and sociological theories exist and are described in their main theoretical models. The analysis of different papers devoted to the middle class provides the ability to show diversity at a methodological level, including the diversity of criteria used for middle class identification. Nevertheless, the common idea for most of the approaches is the idea of object complexity and the necessity to combine several characteristics to identify the middle class. Appealing to empirical studies of the middle class in Russia and France showed that in both countries, the middle class is not homogenous, and it is better to use the term “middle classes.” In Russia, the middle class has relatively high levels of well-being but is not autonomous from the state. However, it does not feel that social protection is critical due to existing inequalities and a lack of stability in society.

“When a Failed Contract is Better than Doable”: How a “New” Understanding of Financial Obligations in the Mortgage Market Led to the Financial Crisis in the United States and Around the World

2020-02-11T19:18:05+03:00

A book from an American anthropologist of Indian origin, Arjun Appadurai, was written much later than the World Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 (WFC). The book introduces the origins of the crisis not from a purely economic position, but from a “substantive” perspective through the prism of economic anthropology and sociology. In this book, Appadurai seeks answers to the question of how the financial systems of some countries began to rely on a large set of “special” arrangements via working with derivatives, thus being tied to great risks and serious uncertainty. Appadurai introduces the principle of “failure of the language,” meaning the communication between financial participants and their intermediaries, emphasizing that the “risks” of non-fulfillment have been “forced” to be more important and mostly more profitable than the direct fulfillment of obligations. The resulting economic collapse was possible to clarify and “foresee” by considering the nature of long-term financial obligations (particularly derivatives), placing them into the analytical frameworks of M. Weber, compared to the logic of E. Durkheim and K. Marx, F. Knight, and E. Ayash. The value of the book is in the understanding of modern financial ideology, where “flirting” with uncertainty and working with “air” are considered as working practices. In a series of chapters, Appadurai indicates the hidden “spiritual” power of contractual obligations, which to some extent, fits into the logic of the Western capitalist system. At the same time, it casts a shadow on the nature of contracts, in particular the capitalist one — their assimilation into “scoring,” “promise,” speculation and excitement, which benefit more than the actual activity of people. The central empirical object of the book is that CDS is in the mortgage lending market, in which “overheating” was provoked (in many respects) by the WFC. The review attempts to disentangle the logic of the presentation of all nine non-standardly written chapters of the work, with subsequent analysis and reasoning over the aspects left over from the framework of the author's argumentation system. We believe that the review complements these theses.

Paradoxes Legality—Illegality—Legitimacy Intersections in the Architecture of Markets

2020-02-11T19:17:44+03:00

Boundaries of illegality in markets for goods and services are blurring. These boundaries are associated with the development of capitalist relations. The illegality becomes pervasive and gains increasingly sophisticated links with formal legality and social legitimacy. At the same time, the role of the state in the illegal market exchanges is intensified by preserving the institutional gap between formal and informal rules. In this respect, the book The Architecture of Illegal Markets. Towards an Economic Sociology of Illegality in the Economy develops a non-trivial research task for the modern economic-sociological paradigm. Its authors contest the existence of boundaries between the phenomena of legality and legitimacy, including mechanisms for compliance with informal rules within formal institutions that regulate illegal markets. The purpose of this review is to demonstrate the paradoxical interdiction of legality and legitimacy that the book’s authors describe, using the metaphor of interfaces that build the essence of illegal market architectures. The review reference points are the most important topics that the authors of the conference proceedings mention, such as the types and components of illegality in the markets of goods and services; the question of the boundaries between legality, illegality, and legitimacy; and the role of the state in the development of illegality in the markets. This text concludes that the book draws the landscape of illegality, which is viewed in close association with the phenomena of legality and legitimacy. The authors’ research goes beyond the phenomenon of illegality and expands the understanding of the informal economy constituents.

Ovsey Shkaratan (1931–2019)

2020-02-02T10:08:10+03:00

Professor Shkaratan, who passed away on July 31, 2019, was a professor emeritus of the Higher School of Economics, head of the Laboratory of Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Societies (National Research University Higher School of Economics), as well as founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Universe of Russia.

Will the Gig Economy Prevail?

2020-04-21T23:46:29+03:00

The book Will the Gig Economy Prevail? by Prof. Colin Crouch is devoted to the “gig economy,” which is seen as set to gradually replace the costly rigidities of the old-fashioned employment contract. In this book, Colin Crouch takes a step back and questions this logic. He shows how the idea of an employee— a stable status that involves a bundle of rights—has maintained a curious persistence. Examining the ways companies are attacking these rights, from proffering temporary work to involuntary part-time work to “gigging,” he reveals the paradoxes of the situation and argues that it should not and cannot continue. He goes on to propose reforms to reverse the perverse incentives that reward irresponsible employers and punish good ones, setting out an agenda for a realistic future of secure work. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the first chapter—“The Rise of Precarious Work”—in which the author considers the notion of the “gig economy” and issues associated with its expansion. It also describes the structure of this book.