2005. Vol. 6. No. 2

There are many approaches towards informal employment, including different ways of its determination, measurement and interpretation of its nature. This paper gives another approach to define and estimate the informal employment. The paper discusses the results of its scale assessments and its main characteristics that were received with the help of secondary analysis of the population survey conducted within the project on middle classes of the Moscow Carnegie Center. It is the first time when the issue of dynamics and stability of individual status is raised. It was possible to investigate the dynamics due to the panel data of RLMS. The paper ends by the discussion of the nature of Russian informal employment and its possible development in the future.

The paper bases on the assumption of bigger spread and significance of object worlds in the social world. According to this assumption this flow of object worlds leads to the transformation of the people relation models which could be identified as post-social forms. These forms include object relations in which the objects are lifeless. It is the first time when such question appeared (in the new history): Is it really so that the biggest interest for people is other people?  As many studies showed the risks are the constant part of the contemporary human relations  and are linked to the objects as well as to people themselves. “Post-social forms” interfere into the social relations and the former lose their meanings. We could understand this phenomenon only if we think over the traditional notions according to which the objects are seen as just abstract technologies or fetish products that restrict any human or capital potential (К. Marks). Here we analyze in details the term of post-social ties, grounded on the idea of demand dynamics and its impossibility of realization. This phenomenon is traced with the help of the example of financial markets: traders relate to the markets as objects of attachment based on the repeated actions of non-implementation. 

The creation of the favorable conditions for the business development depends on the search of the opportunities to increase effectiveness of the interaction with regional and local authorities. Different regions have their own practices. The authors assume that there is a difference between the normative picture of the business-authorities relations derived from the formal norms of the country and the real institutional model depicted from the formal and informal rules of interaction between authorities and business in a particular region. The research is focused on the real institutional model of business and authorities interaction on municipal level. The federal level is considered as a main source of formal norms and a source of problems that are solved by the regional and municipal authorities in the process of interaction with business. The regional level is considered as the source of the informal norms and basic practices that frame the conditions of the authorities and business interaction on the municipal level. 

The first part of the paper is devoted to the description of the embeddedness of the corruption mechanisms into the system of higher education. The second part is built on the quantitative data (survey in Irkutsk) and is focused on the scales of the corruption interactions in the contemporary higher education.