2014. Vol. 15. No. 3

Economic Sociology’s May issue includes the continuation of our conversation with Prof. Victor Nee held in October 2012. (See the March issue for the first half, Vol. 15. No 2. Pp. 11–21.) The interview was conducted by Alexander Kurakin, a senior lecturer at National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Here, Professor Nee re-emphasizes the importance of developing middle-range theories in order for economic sociology to progress by obtaining external validity. He cites some examples of this, including his recent research on the rise of capitalism in contemporary China that resulted in the book “Capitalism from Below” [Nee, Opper 2012], and the ongoing study of the knowledge economy in New York City. Both are empirical, evidence-based studies that rely on common conceptual frameworks that take into account the salience of the relationship between formal and informal institutions.
According to Nee, there is one more important condition contributing to the fruitful development of sociology; that is it should be open to intellectual trade with ally disciplines. In this context, immigration is mentioned as a field of inquiry where successful cooperation among economists, sociologists, demographers and representatives of other disciplines can be found. Within this research perspective, scholars communicate across disciplines, with an emphasis on the importance of revealed facts and regularities. The external validity of internal achievements serves as recognition of their significance for the behavioral sciences in general.

The research deals with the analysis of consumer expectations of Russian population, which are mediated by many socio-demographic characteristics: income, age, education, place of residence, sex, etc. The paper points up the influence on variable “age” because it is rather complex itself. First, actual age represents biological characteristics. Second, “age” represents a unique birth cohort in terms of socialization and formation of life experience. Finally, all ages feature influence by a time period effect that reflects the socio-political, economic, and informational phenomena of the macro environment. Solving the problem of “identification” (i. e. the separation of these three effects), which inevitably arises in case of cohort analysis, is based on theoretical views concerning the character of consumer expectations and the results of empirical testing. Its point is that the aggregated Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI) reflects the general socio-economic situation in a country at a certain time and allows us to use the CSI as a distillation of a specific time moment. The information base of research is the data of consumer survey although not the panel, but conducted over a 15-year period on the same methodology and sample. All 79 waves of cross-section data (from May 1996 to September 2009) were converted into a “quasi-longitudinal design”, the total sample of dataset was 182,507 respondents. The regression analysis demonstrates that belonging to a cohort actually determines significantly consumer sentiments. However, the nonlinear correlation describing such dependence showed that an increase of optimism/pessimism in respect for the economic and social development of the country happens non-uniformly from one cohort to another. In addition, the article attempts to implement approach to differentiation of generations, is not based on age differences, and the relationship with historical events. The research shows that an indicator such as the CSI could be one instrument for defining the time boundaries of the generations.

The book “The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature” written by Franco Moretti, the professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and the founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab, is devoted to the history of the bourgeois as a social class of the modern Western society. The bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature, is the subject of “The Bourgeois”. Addressing to some pieces of the Western literature, the author tries to scrutinize reasons of the bourgeois culture’s golden age and to reveal causes of its further fall. Moretti focuses not on real relationships between social groups but on legitimate cultural forms, which demonstrate peculiarities of the bourgeois and demarcate it from working and ruling classes. In addition, the author seeks an answer to the questions why the notion of bourgeois was being replaced with the concept of the middle class and why the bourgeois failed to resist political and cultural challenges of the modern Western society.
The journal of Economic Sociology publishes “Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions” from “The Bourgeois”. In the Introduction, Moretti formulates the problem of the study, defines key concepts and explains the applied methodology, demonstrating weaknesses and strengths of the formal analysis of literary prose for understanding the social history. In the Introduction, Moretti describes the book’s structure and sheds lights on the dark corners, which require additional research.

This article is based on the sample of 10 000 decisions of Russian criminal courts and series of expert interviews with judges, investigators, prosecutors and attorneys. In the text, I analyze the probability of pretrial detention and the influence of this decision on the following court behavior. Empirical data is the simple random sample from the decisions published on the websites of Russian district courts (the main level in the system of Russian criminal justice) during 2011. There are two groups of questions in the world scholarly discussion. The first group is bound up with the role of various strongly extralegal (like a gender and a race) and semi-extralegal (like a socioeconomic status and an educational level) characteristics of the defendant in the decision about pretrial detention or release. The second group deals with the effects of pretrial detention on other court decisions (dismissing of the case, the type of punishment and the length of incarceration). These questions are resolved in this article using regression models. The probability of pretrial detention in Russia is statistically significantly higher for unemployed defendants and defendants with informal criminal records. The fact of pretrial detention is closely associated with the probability of case dismissal. The defendants who are detained before trial have less probability of case dismissal. In addition, pretrial detention increases the probability of incarceration as a form of punishment. The linear influence of the pretrial detention on the length of incarceration is not statistically significant.

The article argues that economic sociologists underestimate the problem of consumers’ price perception in their studies while it may be used as an effective key to the social orders of modern markets. Sociological studies of consumers’ price perception are very few and mostly performed at the theoretical level so the author makes an attempt to draw colleagues’ attention to the results of price perception research undertaken within marketing science and overviews its results in the light of sociological tasks. It is assumed that the problem of price perception is a ground for fruitful cooperation between these two disciplines. At the same time, the main message of the work has nothing to do with the discourse on interdisciplinarity. It is focused on the social base of consumers’ price perception and price behavior. The primary objective of the article is to shed light on the social contexts relevant for perception and interpretation of market prices by social actors.
Overviewed literature enables to state that the perception of price and pricing behavior (defined as the set of possible decisions about price which depends on the way a consumer perceives and interprets it) is modulated by the social position of the individual. The main distinction lies between economizing practices driven by the budget constraints and consumers’ cognitive ability and aspiration to manage price behavior rationally. It is shown that internal standards used by consumers for estimation current prices are shaped within social interaction beyond the market, especially through the everyday storytelling. The relationship between social value and market prices of goods are in the center of the paper. The author claims the inseparability of the monetary value from the socially constructed image of the goods and underlines the price-quality dilemma as an urgent issue for the contemporary economy with its non-stop process of qualification and requalification of market commodities. Talk about price perception can not pass by the problem of social meanings of different price levels and, especially, by the social nature of discounted prices. The last goes hand in hand with market price fairness as it is seen by consumers. Thus, the section devoted to this problem logically follows. Conclusive part of the paper is devoted to the possible research questions for the future studies of consumers’ price perception, which appear when we build bridges between marketing and sociological research.

Today it makes little sense to ask a question, why social scholars are interested in China’s economy as far as the answer is obvious. The growth rate of Chinese economy and duration of its growth period are stunning. It is likely that in the nearest future China will outrun USA in terms of GDP and become the largest economy in the world. Moreover, China has made a huge progress in GDP per capita. But this is not the only reason for the great interest in China. Chinese communist party is still in power. By the standards of the Western democracies, China remains to be an authoritarian state. Taken together, those statements make a paradox: how could communists produce so huge economic growth? Recent history of socialist countries seems to show that it is impossible. Though the Soviet Union sometimes demonstrated fast growth, it couldn’t keep the pace for a long period. In Chinese case, we face a more fundamental phenomenon than just mobilization of a country in order to achieve vital objectives (usually with high costs).
“Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China” by Viktor Nee and Sonja Opper suggests the answer for this question [Nee, Opper 2012].

The round table “Current State and Prospects of the Social and Market Research in Russia” was held April 4, 2014 as a part of the XV April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, HSE (Moscow). Two main presentations were made by Sergey Protsenko (South-Russian Research Center “Factor”; Association of Regional Sociological Centers “Group 7/89”) and Andrey Yakovlev (Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, HSE; Association of Russian Economic Think Tanks (ARETT)). The round table chaired by Alexander Chepurenko (dean of the Faculty of Sociology, HSE) was also attended by Vasily Tokarev (Center “ANALYST”, Volgograd), Vladimir Zvonovsky (Social surveys fund, Samara), Alexander Demidov (GFK, Moscow), Oleg Dembo (“O+K”, international research association ESOMAR, St. Petersburg), Igor Zadorin (ZIRCON, Moscow), Stepan Lvov (Russian Public Opinion Research Center, Moscow), Vadim Radaev (Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, HSE, Moscow), etc.
The main subject of the round table was the changes in the structure and development trends in the Russian sociological research market. Paradoxically, today sociological research industry in Russia remains poorly studied, despite the fact that its members are engaged in active exploration of other markets and services. As Alexander Chepurenko noted “The cobbler always wears the worst shoes.” This statement perfectly reflects the current situation of Russian sociologists who have little to say about the market size and the composition of members as well as about the general idea of the major problems faced by Russian research companies nowadays. The article represents the current state and main types of participants of Russian market for sociological research, describes the main trends as well as the key issues, challenges and solutions in the industry and provides the market prospects in the near future.

Economic Sociology’s May issue includes the continuation of our conversation with Prof. Victor Nee held in October 2012. (See the March issue for the first half, Vol. 15. No 2. Pp. 11–21.) The interview was conducted by Alexander Kurakin, a senior lecturer at National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Here, Professor Nee re-emphasizes the importance of developing middle-range theories in order for economic sociology to progress by obtaining external validity. He cites some examples of this, including his recent research on the rise of capitalism in contemporary China that resulted in the book “Capitalism from Below” [Nee, Opper 2012], and the ongoing study of the knowledge economy in New York City. Both are empirical, evidence-based studies that rely on common conceptual frameworks that take into account the salience of the relationship between formal and informal institutions.
According to Nee, there is one more important condition contributing to the fruitful development of sociology; that is it should be open to intellectual trade with ally disciplines. In this context, immigration is mentioned as a field of inquiry where successful cooperation among economists, sociologists, demographers and representatives of other disciplines can be found. Within this research perspective, scholars communicate across disciplines, with an emphasis on the importance of revealed facts and regularities. The external validity of internal achievements serves as recognition of their significance for the behavioral sciences in general.