2017. Vol. 18. No. 5

The aim of the paper is to explore the connection between redistributive preferences and various indicators of social mobility across countries. In particular, it addresses the following set of questions: How are objective and subjective mobility related to redistributive preferences? How are redistributive preferences connected with mechanisms of mobility and feelings of fairness? The author uses large cross-country datasets from the ISSP to analyze connections between redistributive preferences and objective and subjective mobility on different levels (intra and between countries). Using regression analysis, the author finds that objective and subjective mobility influence redistributive preferences in different ways. Objective mobility has only weak effects on redistributive preferences, whereas the connection between subjective mobility and the demand for redistribution is much stronger and more stable. Cross-country analysis shows that the connection between redistributive preferences and subjective mobility is higher in transition economies than in developed countries. In addition, the author finds that preferences for redistribution are strongly linked to how transparent and fair mobility is. If people feel there is equality in opportunities, their demands for redistribution are significantly lower.

The book is devoted to globalization, which has dramatically changed in the 1990s, according to Richard Baldwin, mainly because of transformations in information and communication technology (ICT), resulting in a significant decrease in the costs of moving ideas. This shift indicated a new stage of development of globalization processes and caused a convergence of developed and developing states. This book includes five parts, which discuss the history of globalization, the economics of globalization, the states’ designs of a national policy, and forecasting its future.
The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the introduction to the book, in which the author presents the main idea of his manuscript. He justifies his new perspective on globalization, sequentially describing the processes that accelerate it, including the decreased costs of moving goods, decreased communication costs, and a reduction in moving people. Additionally, the author concludes how the presented changes in globalization affect national economies.

The article examines the social and professional composition of the State Duma of the sixth convocation. The purpose of the study is to identify and analyze the socio-professional categories that serve as sources of recruitment for the deputy corps. As a theoretical basis, a wide range of works by domestic and foreign authors devoted to recruiting the political elite was used. The method of investigation can be defined as a structuralbiographical analysis. The empirical basic research is a database, which includes biographical information about 532 parliamentarians who worked in the State Duma of the sixth convocation. The sources of data arranged in personal questionnaires and then processed statistically were websites of state bodies, commercial structures, and biographical Internet portals. The study showed that the political elite of the Russian Federation are substantially rooted in the structures of the political and administrative power of Soviet society: Among the deputies of the State Duma, the nomenclature experience is more common to a greater extent than for the administrative and economic elites of the country. The important trend in the post-Soviet career of deputies is political professionalization. A noticeable trend is the bureaucratization of the deputy corps, many of whom worked in the post-Soviet period in administrative structures. There is dynamic interlocking between the federal administrative and the political elites, especially at the level of the Duma leadership. Quite pronounced is the militarization of the political elite, although there are fewer people from the force structures than in the administrative elite. Business is a most important source of recruitment of the political elite outside the political and administrative structures. Although there are few descendants from large nationwide businesses, interlocking of the country’s economic and political elites does take place. Finally, some professional categories widely represented in the legislatures of a number of Western countries—lawyers and educators—are rather poorly presented in the Duma. The author concludes that these recruitment tendencies can, on the one hand, be related to the specifics of the political and economic organization of Russian society (the weakness of the parliament, “crony capitalism”, etc.), and, on the other hand, influence the political attitudes and behaviors of legislators (including their attitude regarding the Soviet past, the political regime, and the interests of various social groups).

The paper analyzes how the ways of conducting a survey in a major Russian city (landline and cell-phone surveys, and face-to-face customer interviews at local chain stores) influence the estimates of distribution of a number of important variables in the general population. We also analyze the influence of introducing demographic quotas regarding estimates. We argue that (a) age- and gender-related characters of lifestyle heavily influence accessibility via landline phones resulting in over-representation of retired women; (b) education and cultural capital strongly influence accessibility via cell phones; (c) the introduction of demographic quotas usually, but not always, leads to convergence of the results different types of surveys produce (a notable exception is income), but (d) the convergence does not guarantee increasing precision of estimates because the bias caused by intervention of a number of factors affecting accessibility to all types of surveys, such as cultural capital or the character of work conditions, may increase. We also notice that types of surveys not guaranteeing anonymity possibly present severe problems with the sincerity of the answers to politically sensitive questions, with the problems being minimal in the case of interviews at local chain stores, and that sample biases entailed by a survey type probably affect not only estimates of variables, but also of the strength of association between them.

The purpose of the current research was to study the financial management practices of non-cash money in modern Moscow households. Particular attention to non-cash money is determined by the hypothesis that, in the era of an electronic economy, when money becomes more and more abstract and invisible, financial management practices (i.e., the ways people control and distribute their resources) could change [Pahl 1999 a].
The goal of the research was achieved through the deployment of qualitative sociological methods: 20 semi-structured interviews were held with partners living together for more than half a year (married or cohabiting); therefore, 10 households were included in the final sample. The subsequent data analysis led to the following conclusions: The peculiarities of managing non-cash money in a household are determined by reproducing habitual patterns in new formats using new ways, services, and opportunities with which people are provided in an electronic economy. These new formats can be very unique with respect to reproducing household financial allocative systems (provided by Pahl and Vogler), the ways financial power is allocated, and the schemes for accessing partners’ finances and regulations in an electronic economy and in terms of meanings ascribed to the distribution of new money forms.

The book Property, Predation and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine, written by Stanislav Markus, promotes the alternative concept of property rights, which explains the vulnerability of private business and property rights in developing economies on the basis of two cases—Russia and Ukraine. The author not only explores the transformation of the core fields of a contemporary economical system within the post-communist states, but also analyzes modern capitalism, focusing on the categories of current interest—threats to property rights, predation of private property, and strategies of protection. The type of property-right threats referred to by Markus as “agent predation” is characterized by the absence of the state as a powerful center, which no longer produces main threats toward business. Moreover, the state in transit economies still own the limited capacity to create the institutional design of capitalism. The main argument of the book is that the state is not the only actor able to protect property rights. Sakaeva discusses critical approaches toward the state-centric framework, increasingly relied on by scholars of property rights in developing states. Sakaeva focuses on the definition, stages, reasons, and consequences of agent predation in post-Soviet capitalism and its common features of and differences from other types of property rights threats. The review also explores resources and methods of protection used by private owners against low-level nonstate aggressors.

Ashley Mears is an associate professor in the Sociology Department and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University. In her studies, Dr. Mears focuses on the nexus of culture and markets. In her teaching and research, she generally explores how people assign value to things and focuses on how gender, race, and class in equities inform the production and evolution of culture. Dr. Mears’ first book, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model (2011) was widely recognized not only in academic circles, but also with popular readers. The book is devoted to sociological inquiry into the fashion-model business. Modeling is a specific kind of market in which careers depend on judgments about individual appearance. Based on ethnographic work and interviews, the book uncovers how the modeling industry produces value from female bodies and beauty. The review of «Pricing Beauty» was published in the Journal of Economic Sociology in 2014 (15 (5): 113–122). Her current research is focused on how the VIP leisure and party scene operates as a global market. Based on ethnographic observations and a series of interviews, Dr. Mears examines how elites use different repertoires of symbols, values, and practices to signal status among each other. In the following interview, Dr. Mears speaks about current changes in the fashion industry, the new politics of diversity, and feminist research practices and methodology. She also reveals details from her upcoming new book. Dr. Mears was interviewed by Tamara Kusimova, a research assistant and a sociology master’s student at the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology in Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

Thomas Widlok is Professor for African Studies and Chair for the Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne, Germany. In his latest book, Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing, Widlok addresses the rich pool of ethnographical material from hunter-gather societies to corporate shareholding to return sharing to anthropological analysis. The book is novel in its theoretical stance because it depicts the contemporary state of the anthropological agenda compared to mainstream economic anthropology. Widlok departs from the assumption that sharing is muchmore than a gift exchange theory and thus aims to theorize sharing in a unique manner. Thus, sharing is theorized as taking advantage of what is valued and taking opportunities for letting go. The major insights of the book are based on theoretical premises of the gift exchange theory. By rephrasing the well-known Mauss schema, Widlok suggests that “sharing creates and maintains social bonds through the opportunity to request, the opportunity to respond and the opportunity to renounce” (p. 79).