2012. Vol. 13. No. 3

Based on «Monitoring of Financial Behaviour and Trust to Financial Institutions» (HSE, 2011) the paper is devoted to budgetary management in Russian households. The research seeks answers to a number of questions which the author considers important: how financial decisions are made, how the budget is managed, what gender roles within the family are. The sampling design ensures Russian-wide representation of the adult population (over 18) by gender, age, education level and type of settlement and covers some of the RF Federal Districts. The aggregate size of the sample is 1600 people. The research findings show a diversity of Russian practices in budgetary management. However, joint/partial pool, indicating equal participation of husband and wife in budgetary management, has become a dominant system. Although the joint budgetary management does not imply that spouses are equally dominant in their household relationships. The article discusses the reasons why men and women perceive an existing budgetary management system in a different way, and reveals factors which allow attributing the households to different types of budgetary management. Key factors determining a choice of a budgetary management type include per capita income, gender, and length of marriage, wife’s level of education, and the type of budgetary management practiced by the respondents’ parents. The impact of the last factor is related to gender of the household members.

In his book Albert Hirshman (b. 1915), a famous American economist, reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests — so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice — was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. 

The journal «Economic Sociology» publishes an excerpt from the first part «How the Interests are Called upon to Counteract the Passions» of this volume in which Hirshman discusses how a new paradigm indicating the interests as main drivers of human behavior was developed.  

Certain types of human capital (knowledge, skills, and competences) can bring some advantages (or disadvantages) to an actor and her/his counterparts. In social settings where participants are guided by distinct and opposite interests there is a premise for qualifying human capital as negative or positive depending on whether its owner damages or benefits the others. In this paper, a notion of human metacapital required for the management of human capital of other people is developed. This metacapital can be positive or negative depending on its contribution to accumulation of capital. Positive human metacapital contributes to the formation of positive human capital and impedes to the formation of negative one, and negative metacapital — vice versa.      

Interactions of owners of human metacapitals are considered as the games with human capital. The paper introduces formal statements depicting constructivity–destructivity of actors (organizers and recipients) teaching strategies, effectiveness of these strategies, etc. 

The author distinguishes three negative strategies for human capital management: non-participation in teaching (avoiding teaching), active counteraction to teaching, «Trojan» teaching. All these strategies are conducted at micro-, meso-, and macro levels.  

In general, the development of positive and negative teaching strategies is considered as a part of special activity devoted to formation and institutionalization of different types of human capital and metacapital.

The article is devoted to the election of businessmen into regional legislatures. Transition from business to politics without withdrawing the entrepreneurial activity is considered as a rationalized behavior of economic actors. The author supposes that mandate of a legislator serves as an effective tool for pursuing business interests. Legislature Assembly of Saint-Petersburg is a case for studying opportunities and resources which are available to business people becoming its memebers.  The study demonstrates the barriers faced by entrepreneurs pursuing their interests through accumulation of political, administrative, and other resources. The author focuses on the scale of the business people elections to regional legislatures of North-Western Federal Okrug. The research findings show that a new political status presents a «window of opportunities», widening entrepreneurs capacities to optimize their market positions. At the same time, limitations of these opportunities are examined.

The article reviews main statements of the influential institutional perspectives, including new institutional economic theory presented by O.Williamson and D. North; new institutionalism in economic sociology developed by organizational theorists (P. DiMaggio, W. Powell, etc.) and sociologists of markets (M. Granovetter, N. Fligstein, etc.) in the USA; and economics of conventions (L. Boltanski and L. Thevenout) in Europe. This analytical review includes a discussion of major similarities and differences of new institutional approaches in economics and sociology.