2000. Vol. 1. No. 2

This paper questions the disciplinary division of labor whereby economists study value and sociologists study values; and it rejects the pact whereby economists study the economy and sociologists study the social relations in which economies are embedded. One of the core tasks of economic sociology is to develop a sociology of worth. I explore these themes by discussing the emergence of a new organizational form: heterarchy. Heterarchies are characterized by lateral accountability and the organization of diversity. In them we find an active rivalry of heterogeneous principles of evaluation as actors manuver in multiple networks by attempting to hold resources that are legitimated in more than one regime of worth. Examples of such organizational innovations are drawn from a longitudinal study of the intersecting ownership portfolios of firms in postsocialist Hungary and from my recent research on strategic alliances among new media firms in Manhattan’s Silicon Valley.

The author investigates the forced migration from CIS countries under the conception of controlling the life difficulties. Controlling behavior is described as the process of running the personal, social and material resources. This approach let us reveal the dynamics of individual behavior under the difficult life circumstances, focusing on personal resources. The result of the behavior in the difficult life situation is the movement along the scale of “accumulating advantages – intensification of deprivation”. The author analyzes the factors that influence the vector of this movement. Data source is the poll and two series of interviews with migrants in Ekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Moscow and Nijni Novgorod.

The paper investigates the transition from the forced labour to the hired employment in the coal mining of Vorkuta city in 1950-60s. The analysis is based on the theoretical approaches of social closure concept and social exclusion concept (Weber, Parkin); status crystallization (Lenski); embeddedness of economic relations in the social structures (Granovetter). It was shown how the closed from outside negatively privileged group of prisoners was changed by open positively privileged group of civilians. Data sources: archive materials of Siktivkar and Vorcuta cities.