2004. Vol. 5. No. 2

The paper discloses the impact of trust on management structures of the inter-firm relations in the sector of small business in the country with the developed market relations (Germany) and transition economy (Russia). The authors put into focus the impact of the trust types on the management of the inter-firm network relations of the German and Russian small enterprises. The empirical basis of the study is the standard poll of 197 German and 400 Russian small enterprises as well as the materials of the in-depth interviews, conducted within the international project in 2001-2003.

We publish here the main part of the paper devoted to the roles that state plays in the contemporary economy. The text is an example of political-economical approach in the economic sociology. The author compares the old and the new paradigms of the analysis of the state role in the economy. He claims that traditional approaches underline only one issue: to what extent the societies rely on the market regulation in a contrary to the state regulation? The considerable advantage of the new approach is that it draws our attention towards the important issues related to the economic role of the state.

Almost all enterprises have charity activity in that or this form. At the same time the question of why they are doing so is not clear: help giving is a rational action but its economic effects are not so clear. The paper provides some results of the sociological investigation of the charity activity of the business, which was conducted by the international consulting centre (Yekaterinburg) in 2002-2003 within the project “Business-sector and non-commercial organizations on the Middle Urals: the start for the collaboration and the partner perspectives”.

The paper deals with the change in the employment and consumption behavior of the poor in Russia under the condition of the cancellation of the benefits for housing payments and the tariffs increase at the same time. The author uses the following sources for the empirical data sets: Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of  2001; VCIOM Monitoring (2000-2001); Materials of Goskomstat of the Russian Federation (2000-2001); the data base of the Independent Institute for Social Policy on the reform ofhousing and communal services, calculated on the basis of RLMS within the project of RAS «EES Russia».