2006. Vol. 7. No. 2

The key task for the authors of the paper is to show that besides standard procedure of purchasing administrative services there is a formatted process of “political investment” when business buys not services or a bureaucrat but a place in the authority and puts his own representative and pays for that by shadow recourses.  The basis for the research is the interviews with those who is involved in the process of political interest formation and acquainted with shadow economy and shadow political issues.  The interviews were taken within the project “Jointing shadow economy and shadow policy” funded by HSE. The authors analyze how, in what forms and why are the shadow economic recourses invested into the political sphere.  

All various theories of economic development  (theory of modernization, interdependence, micro-systemic analysis and the theory of market reforms) suggest a core factor as the key. The followers of each of these theories claim that the countries’ development has an obstacle for their economic growth. We state that economic development does not depend on only one key factor and does not have the only one way for growth on the contrary there are several successful trajectories.  Economic growth depends on how successful the country is in connecting  its historical models of social organization with the world market possibilities. This paper is devoted to the sociological theory cross-countries comparative advantages, which takes into account not only the influence of the economic factors but  institutional models of power relations. Such models legitimize the actors and specific relations between them, and in some spheres this counts for the successful development and in other spheres it does not. The given approach is supported by the comparative analysis of rather difficult processes of automobile industry development in South Korea, Taiwan, Spain and Argentina.  

The first part of the paper is devoted to the theoretical interpretation of guarantee as form of trustworthy action. The main focus is given to the determination of the factors (socio-cultural, institutional and socio-psychological), which may impact the individual decision about the guarantee. The main idea of the survey is that the decision to become a warrantor is influenced by the situational conditions (for example, the assessment of trust to the contractor, past experience, objective conditions and etc.), as well as by individual’s own resources that characterize the peculiarities of perception of his/her own social position. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of socio-psychological capital of potential warrantor (social optimism, security feeling and etc.) on the readiness to act trustfully. Relying on the theoretical conceptions stated in the first part the secondary data analysis was done. The data was collected from the Novosibirsk monitoring poll. 

The aim of the study is to analyse the strategies of job seeking in Russian labour market in the context of using social networks as a way of job seeking that is to consider how the strategies of job seeking are constructed around the social networks. The 9-13th waves of RLMS (1998-2004) are used as a database.