2008. Vol. 9. No. 4

The paper shows that counterfeiting includes substantively different elements: pirate products, grey import and imitations, which rely on different logics of economic reasonability and social legitimization. These summands infringe upon consumers’ interests to a certain degree what makes them selective ally of authorities in the fight with counterfeiting. The author describes the specifics of these three main parts of counterfeiting business from the participants’ structure point of view as well as stimulus and restrictions of their business activity. 

Production and consumption of the counterfeit products became the world problem today. This increase of economic crime has a lot of reasons. But the more interesting is that the possessors of the trade marks have rather controversial position towards the pirate production and are not always ready to defend their rights actively. We will try to answer this question of why it happens so and we will analyze several types of behavior of the possessors towards counterfeit

The authors consider the transformation of capitalism that related to the transition from material goods production towards the signs production, related to the watering out of the big social structures and their displacement by information and communication structures, transformation of the economy into the space of cognitive and esthetic reflexivity.

The focus of the paper is on the project model of constant forest use as a business strategy of transnational corporation “Stora Enso”.  It was shown how the corporation used the strategic partnership with the Foundation of wild nature in order to build good relations to all the interested parts: local population, state authorities, other companies and scientific society. The paper discloses that the corporation played the role of guide for global rules to the locality: through the certification of forest management and through the spreading its own corporate policy to the branch company. Theoretical analysis is based on the assumptions of institutional isomorphism. The study demonstrates that experience spreading on other companies of this corporation in Russia  (mimical isomorphism) faced obstacles sue to the instability of the institutional background of Russian regions during the long term period of economic reforms in Russia. 

The author tries to describe methodological basis for economic behavior relying on the economic theory and economic sociology assumptions. The author formulates the development tendencies for the methodology of economic behavior research. The paper discusses the following questions: the loss of leading positions in the structure of socio-economic knowledge by the economic imperialism; confirmation for the pluralism of approaches towards the description of economic behavior; setting up of social epistemology.