2015. Vol. 16. No. 2

In his book Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World, Prof. Collier continues economic research on the poorest nations in the contemporary world. The author focuses on consequences of immigration flows from poor developing countries to rich developed ones. To study migration, Collier raises three questions: (1) why do migrants decide to move from one country to another? (2) does emigration benefit or harm people who decide not to leave their home country? (3) what impact do migrants produce on host country citizens? In his search for answers to these questions, Professor Collier summarizes original research and case studies.
Journal of Economic Sociology presents Chapter 1, “The Migration Taboo,” in which Professor Collier defines the research problem and argues that scholars tend to avoid migration issues related to movements of people from poorer countries to richer ones as a focal point of their research. The reason for such avoidance is that this topic is strongly associated with socially explosive issues related to nationalism and racism. However, the author points out one possible way to deal with migration issues, implying reconsideration of the key question for research on migration, namely — not to think of migration in terms of good or bad but to aim at defining the optimality of migration flows for both sending countries and receiving countries.

The article presents a comparative analysis of the internal structure and principles of the organization of volunteer associations in Russia and France from the perspective of the sociology of organizations. The theoretical framework of the study combines the concepts of the neo-institutionalist approach in economic sociology and the network approach to organizations. Data are drawn from a series of in-depth expert interviews with the leaders of socially-oriented volunteer organizations in France and Russia (14 interviews). The author also conducted analysis of legal documents and communication materials of volunteer associations in each of the countries studied (approximately 40 documents totaling over 200 pages of text).
It appears that the Russian and French volunteer sectors differ not only in structure and legal status of voluntary organizations, but also in the conceptual definition of volunteering. Drawing on empirical data, it was found that the French volunteer associations exist in a structured institutional environment, while Russian voluntary associations perform in a poorly structured, constantly changing environment, the main problem of which is the lack of cognitive and socio-political legitimacy. Thus, the French model of volunteering is more similar to the mechanism of institutional organizations, while Russian voluntary associations are more typical of networked organizations.
This research suggests a different vision of the nature of voluntary organizations and argues that it is impossible to ignore national characteristics in the development of social policy. Conclusions drawn from this research could be applied to the development of public policy regarding the non-profit sector in Russia.

Academic dishonesty (e.g. cheating and plagiarism) is a pervasive and serious problem, which may jeopardize the quality of Russian educational system. Elaboration and implementation of preventive measures requires valid and reliable data on the reasons for students using unethical and dishonest strategies while enrolled in university. Nonetheless, there is no research on factors of academic dishonesty among Russian students.
This article provides a review of foreign and Russian studies aimed at formulation of initial ideas about determinants and peculiarities of academic dishonesty, which may help formulate adequate hypotheses and research questions for the study of dishonest behavior among students of Russian universities.
The paper enumerates the most popular approaches to the study of academic fraud: an economic approach based on G. Becker’s economic theory on crime and an approach rooted in the theory of planned behavior developed by I. Ajzen. Moreover, it describes the advantages and disadvantages of the most frequently applied methods for measuring factual academic dishonesty: direct question survey method and the surreptitious method. Findings about Russian academic dishonesty are also introduced. The latter part is devoted to a description of two groups of possible factors: individual and contextual.

This review is devoted to a description and analysis of the book by Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. The author studied elements of communicative action basing on signaling theory. In part, he continues the tradition of symbolic interactionism elaborated by Goffman. But, at the same time, he extends the concept “symbol” and narrows down contextual frames to situations of uncertainty and limited trust between agents. Gambetta also refers to economic theory and game theory to analyze and interpret actions of agents in this context. This review aims at a theoretical systematization and generalization of key findings.
This review discusses several important issues that are essential to understand the main arguments and opinions of the book. First, Griaznova places the book into the context of Gambetta’s previous publications. In this respect it is regarded as a significant step in the development of his core ideas of the mutual dependence of the volume of social “investment” in communication with the level of uncertainty and risk. Next, the review analyses in detail the content of the work. In particular, signaling theory, signal types and their empirical indicators are examined in turn. In the conclusion, the review considers the contribution of this research to the understanding of communication practices. Analysis of communication between criminals has a number of obvious advantages, but researchers face limits in studying this topic. On the one hand, a researcher would have an opportunity to put a communicative act into the context of higher uncertainty and trace the relationship between the level of risk and the amount of “investment”. However, on the other hand, a researcher is limited in choice of data collection method.

The book Economy and State: A Sociological Perspective written by Nina Bandelj and Elizabeth Sowers opposes an economy-state dualism approach to economy-state embeddedness theories. Bandelj and Sowers follow Polanyi’s intellectual tradition and analyze the economy as instituted process focusing on the roles of the state. This book explores such fields of interest as property (the state’s role in capitalist and socialist economies), money (the state’s role in monetary policy, government spending, and taxation), labor (the state’s role in redistribution and employment), firms (the state’s role in business and industry governance), development (the state’s role in advancing economic prosperity), and international and global economy (the state’s role in managing the territorial boundaries of economic transactions). Markin argues that the institutional approach that Bandelj and Sowers chose as a core approach for their book is very fruitful for macro-analysis but it is not very appropriate for micro-analysis. In his review, Markin focuses on the roles of the state in turning land, labor and capital into “fictitious commodities” and the state’s role in the social construction of economic institutions. As Bandelj and Sowers do not provide a micro-analysis of state regulation of markets, Markin discusses these issues with help of the papers written by other scholars.

The conference “Interfaces between Legality and Illegality in Markets” was held on February, 5–6, 2015 at The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Organized by Prof. Jens Beckert (Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies) and Matías Dewey (Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), the conference explored two themes (1) socially contested boundaries between legality and illegality and (2) blurring boundaries between legal and illegal actions. The keynote speakers of the conference were Keith Hart (London School of Economics, UA), whose lecture opened the first day, and Peter Reuter (Maryland University, USA), whose speech closed the conference.
Organizers invited scholars from different disciplines including economic sociology, economic anthropology, legal studies, and criminology. Invited speakers included Kirsten Endres (the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Matías Dewey (the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Philippe Steiner (Paris-Sorbonne University), Nina Engwicht (the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Simon Mackenzie (Glasgow University), Annette Hübschle (the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Renate Mayntz (the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Vadim Radaev (Higher School of Economics), Paolo Campana (Oxford University), Boris Samuel (Sciences Po), Michael Levi (Cardiff University), and Ronen Palan (City University of London).

Prof. Mizruchi was interviewed by Igor Chirikov, senior research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. In the interview, Prof. Mizruchi was asked about the evolution of his research interests and peculiarities of his approach to teaching organizational theory. Prof. Mizruchi also described how he became acquainted with organizational sociology. Within his winding career trajectory from Statistical Analyst at Albert Einstein College of Medicine to Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, Mark Mizruchi has witnessed the development of both organizational theory and sociology of organizations and their division into institutionally separate subfields. Whether such fragmentation is methodologically important, it certainly affects the teaching process of organizational theories to students and the future of the whole field by shifting its research focus from broad and theoretical issues to more narrow and applied problems. In addition, Prof. Mizruchi shared the main ideas of his recent award-winning book (The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite) and details of the creative writing process. In the final part of the conversation, Prof. Mizruchi told the story of how the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizational Studies (ICOS) was established and how it influences research and teaching processes at the University of Michigan.

he present review is devoted to a rapidly developing area of marketing — relationship marketing. The authors suggest that the conceptual foundations of it are not currently well developed but forecast that it will transform into a discipline in the near future. They outline two approaches to the definition of relationship marketing and provide their own definition, emphasizing such aspects as collaboration, creation and enhancement of value for those who are involved in relationships. The authors trace the origins of relationship marketing, describing the importance of a range of factors that contribute to the increasing importance of relationship marketing today, such as the development of services, communication with the end consumer, etc. A section of this work examines the development of theoretical approaches: the authors argue that marketing originated in economics, which tended to ignore issues related to distribution systems. They also show that questions concerning relationship marketing were considered even before the term itself was introduced. In the final section, the authors touch upon the models that describe processes in relational marketing and analyze its components step-by-step. The authors highlight three core aspects of relational marketing: setting a purpose, choosing parties and program formation. In the conclusion the authors describe three possible levels of future studies in this area — the concept level, model level and process level — and specifics of each level are characterized.

This book review is devoted to the interdisciplinary volume Reconnecting Marketing to Markets edited by Luis Araujo (Lancaster University Management School), John Finch (Strathclyde University), and Hans Kjellberg (Stockholm School of Economics). The volume includes texts authored by scholars representing fields of academic marketing, economic sociology, science and technology studies, and economics. These collected texts aim to re-examine the historical link between markets and marketing and develop an integrative approach to connections between academic marketing, marketing management and markets with the help of the performativity argument.
In this review, Radaev discusses the relationship between the sociology of markets and academic marketing as neighbor research areas, which focus on studying markets, but he discusses how they ignore each others’ achievements. He notes that the interest in how markets really work integrates both economic sociology and academic marketing. Then, Radaev describes the general idea of the book — marketing produces markets — and points out its four conceptual premises. First, markets are practical outcomes of organizing efforts. Second, theories about markets are performative. Third, market exchanges require framing with considerable investment in material arrangements and measurement instruments. Fourth, market agents are hybrid collectives, involving material elements and non-human objects. Finally, Radaev briefly describes the content of the book, which covers various empirical research on branding, retailing, product qualifications and so forth.