2007. Vol. 8. No. 3

Russia has two channels of integration into the world economy. While export capital increases in strategic industries internal consumer markets are actively developed by foreign capital. With help of self-constructed data base of 68 segments of food markets the authors analyze the dependencies between the share of foreign companies, market type, the level of concentration and economic growth. 

In this paper I try to take the term of embededness out of the framework of the common program assumption and to disclose how the embededness and network structure influence economic action. Basing on the existed theory and ethnographic analysis of the 23 clothes production companies I worked out the methodological scheme which depicts the details, functions and the sources of embededness. On the basis of this scheme I formulated and tested a list of hypotheses with the help of the data on network interactions of all the companies producing qualitative female clothes in the New-York sewing industry. It was found out that the embededness is the exchange system providing unique opportunities in comparison to the market and that firms organized as networks had better chances to survive than those who support casual market ties. However there is a pick of positive effect of embededness at a particular level after which it starts going down.

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the peculiarities of the consumer behavior of the representatives of the Russian middle class (on example of Saint-Petersburg). The authors focus on the role of individual consumer strategies in the production of remarkable socio-economic transformations and try to classify the specific characteristics of consumer behavior of post soviet middle class representatives. The first part of the paper determines the main definitions and analyzes consumer style under the conditions of post soviet economy as well as provides the hypotheses for the reasons of plan economy collapse. The second part is devoted to the analysis of the life style transformation and depicting of the peculiarities of consumer styles of Saint-Petersburg middle class under the market economy.  The third part considers the leisure activities of the middle class and everyday life consumption practices of the essential commodities. The authors conclude that the transition of consumer styles of post soviet middle class has not finished yet. At the end of the paper the authors give the link between the micro-level of individual consumer styles and the macro-level of national socio-economic transformation of the last 20 years

The goal of the paper is to identify the social and professional characteristics of employment that influence the processes of social stratification and construction of the middle class. The paper is focused on the stratified processes of employment under the conditions of unequal access to the educational, professional and power resources of the regional space. The author provides the theoretical and methodological analysis of social structure and empirical survey of professional aspects of social stratification.