2003. Vol. 4. No. 1

The paper provides the empirical results of the study, the main idea of which is that entrance to the university costs something. The author identifies several types of such cots, tries to explain the people’s choice of the costs’ relation and to disclose if these costs are alternative or complimentary ones. The factors of these costs and the parents’ readiness to pay them are discussed in the text. The basis for the paper is the special poll, held in April-September in 2001 in Moscow region, Pskov region, Rostov region and Perm region in Russia.   

The chapter deals with an important aspect of Soviet state heritage, that was not studied carefully before. The puzzle of the lack of state impact could be partially solved by the research of “quite” changes of large segments of state forced organizations into the system of private guarding services.  The powerful tool of the compulsion of the former Soviet Union that became useless due to these changes could not disappear without a trace. It only changed by the organizational shape: private companies appeared and started to provide guard services and information support. The employees of these companies are the former staff of state security and militia.  The author analyses these important newcomers on the market, their background, fields of business and their relations with other force structures as well as their future development. 

The author claims that social institutions include markets. Using the expression of “markets as policy” he investigates sociological model of action, according to which the market players are looking for stable relations and solving the problem of competition via social means. The author analyses the strong linkage between the market and the state. Basing on these statements the author provides hypotheses of how the policy on the markets is done at different stages of their development: appearance, stability and transformation periods. It is claimed that during the market formation when the actors-firms are trying to build status hierarchy the political action reminds social movements. When markets are stable the firms that are more powerful defend their positions from the potential competitors. During the transition period these firms could act for more unstable situation on the market that arises due to social movements. 

The paper analyses the characteristics of federal and regional unions of employers and their relations with trade unions in the practice of social partnership. The relations between three partners are in the focus. They are employers, trade unions and the state.

The paper considers the possibility to investigate the economic life with the help of the notion of “social-economic set-up". The main statement is that social-economic set-up is not an independent theory but the continuation of other sociological theories. Any theory is an analytical block of definitions and notions. The concept of set-up is series of analytical blocks derived from the basic theoretical block. The author states that the concept of set-up could be applied to any sociological theory. The example of the construction scheme of the social-economic set-up on the basis of the Fligstein’s, Bourdieu’, Polanyi’s and Chayanov’s papers is given.