2019. Vol. 20. No. 2

The article presents the dynamics of the structure of budgets of Russian households, which differ in the ratio of the contributions of personal incomes and non-individual incomes. Economic relations are considered in matrimonial households in the macroeconomic and social context of the 1990–2010s. Calculations made on the data of the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Public Health of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (2004–2016) show that during this time the share of “double-income” spousal households increased to 82–83%; the amount of sole financial leadership in the family of both men and women was reduced, but due to the increase in the number of women who combine employment with receiving pensions, the share of families in which women’s incomes are higher than men’s increased. Macroeconomic conditions are reflected in the level of family budgets, and the worst situation was in 1996, which was not defined as crisis in public discourse: only in 45% of families did both spouses have incomes. A similar but less dire situation is observed in 1998: among married couples, 55% had two personal incomes. The declines in real income in 2008–2010 and 2014–2016 are designated as crises, but at the micro level, they had almost no effect on the basis of families with different types of budgets. The presence of only one personal income in the family budget significantly increases the risk of poverty, with the sole financial leadership of men in poor families accounting for 45–50% and with women’s financial leadership at about 70%. The transfer system is poorly insured families in which only a woman contributes to the family budget.

The objective of the paper is to reveal сross-country and gender differences in values and the actualization of three achievement motives across the world: namely, high earnings, career growth and interesting work. Achievement motivation contributes to improving the quality of work and thus contributes to both the growth of the welfare of the worker and the economic growth of the country. In previous studies, it was shown that the achievement motives are more widespread among men, and it is easier for men to put these motives into practice. At the same time, it is expected that in countries with high levels of individualism, GDP per capita and gender equality, women would show more interest toward work and thus have more desire to achieve. In our work, we have tested this hypothesis. The International Social Survey Program (2015) serves as a dataset, and the sample includes the employees. Multi-level logistic regression analysis showed that the motives for high income and career growth are more important for men, while the motive of interesting work is of higher significance for women. However, interesting work is more important for women in almost all countries, whereas higher importance of income and career motivation for men is observed only in some countries. At the same time, the motives for high income and a good career are more attractive to men than women, and there was no gender difference in the realization of the motive for interesting work. Contrary to the initial hypothesis, the gender gap, both in the importance of high income and career growth and in the success of their realization turned out to be higher in countries with high levels of individualism, GDP per capita and gender equality than in less wealthy countries with opposite characteristics. Thus, higher rates of individualism, economic well-being and gender equality do not necessarily lead to the like-mindedness of men and women in achievement motives and the equality of their opportunities in the labor market.

The outstanding German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck analyzes sources for recent fiscal, tax and economic crises, considering them as parts of the long-lasting neoliberal transformation of post-war capitalism, which started in the 1970s. Addressing the proposed crisis theories, the author discusses the subsequent contradictions and conflicts between states, governments, voters and capitalistic interests—a process of shifting the main attention from taxation through debt to budget consolidation within the European system of states. At the end of the study, he considers some perspectives on how social economic stability can be achieved again.
The Journal of Economic Sociology has published some excerpts from the first chapter, “From Legitimation Crisis to Fiscal Crisis,” in which the author briefly reviews the interconnections between the financial crisis, the crisis of the tax system, and the crisis of growth. The author explains why the stratagem of these interconnections refers to an impossible riddle for any anti-crisis management as well as for politicians. Finally, the author tries to find an answer to the question of why crisis theories of the 1970s, having claimed that a legitimation crisis was coming, turned out to be unprepared to face the social trends which rejected all their predictions.

The article sheds light on the circumstances preceding the enactment of explicit deposit insurance in Russia in December 2003. It may help to understand the subsequent performance of this institution. The author relies on available banking statistics as well as qualitative information of different natures. The formal deposit guarantee emerged in countries with advanced market economies and financial systems in the absence of state-owned banks. In Russia, a small group of politicians and experts started promoting deposit insurance since 1993. The main interest groups, such as core deposit-taking banks and their depositors, presented little demand for law in this domain. The advantages of an explicit scheme were unclear in the Russian context because the bulk of household deposits were kept in a state-owned savings bank. Material conditions were not mature in the 1990s: the government was financially weak, market economy institutions were missing, and the banking sector embraced many improper players. Deposit guarantee was incapable of addressing the main concern of the households, namely how to recover the savings lost due to hyperinflation in the early 1990s. The author assumes that the champions of deposit guarantee in Russia were driven by a combination of motivations: idealism and good intentions influenced by the experiences of the United States and other countries, or the “demonstration effect”; the desire to disrupt the monopoly of Sberbank and boost the competitiveness of privately-owned commercial banks in order to boost bank competition, just for the sake of it; and the search for a new field of activity for a certain clan of civil servants and politicians. The conclusion is that subjective factors were the ones underpinning the debate around deposit insurance law.

The transfer of knowledge and skills is a key social process that supports the functioning of all social institutions, including the economy. Existing research shows that the participation of adults in education throughout their lives has noticeable consequences for wealth, social wellbeing, state of health and cognitive abilities. The learnability of adults provides an additional resource for the economy, which increases its resistance and adaptability during a crisis, allows institutional development and provides an increase of human capital during economic growth. In this paper, we analyze the involvement of adults in education and estimate the effectiveness of adult educational practices in Russia in comparison with OECD countries. The analysis is based on the data of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC). It is shown that adult learners in Russia demonstrate the same level of measured competences (in reading and math) as those who are not involved in any educational activities. The results are quite different for OECD countries. At the same time, we observe dissimilar models of participation of adults in education in Russia and OECD countries. In the latter countries, there is a “supportive” role of adult education, in which a learner has a strong career, income and social wellbeing, while in Russia a “crisis” model is common for those adults involved in formal education.

This book changed the views of the scientific community and ordinary Americans about the urban poor and won the author recognition among the left, closing the door to the camp of neo-liberals and earning him a promotion to an academic position at Harvard University. However, the main effect was that this book and others by S. Venkatesh, written in the style of the new ethnography, raise the degree of public, scientific and political discussion about racial discrimination and what kind of model of American capitalism was acquired by the end of the twentieth century. Showing the close relationship between social exclusion, poverty and crime, Gang Leader for the Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets reveals the hypocrisy of the slogans about equality of opportunity and the perfection of American capitalism. Why does social policy fail in American cities? How exactly does the institutional structure of the capitalist economy and American democracy contribute to the social exclusion of the black population? Why did the mass construction of the ghetto not solve any of the problems that were designated by the initiators of the American project? Asking these and other questions, the author comes to disappointing conclusions. The combination of structural restrictions and cultural experience leads to the fact that ghetto residents develop social relations, follow those behaviors that marginalize their neighborhoods and nullify the chances of success for present and future generations. Formally, this work is difficult to attribute to a scientific monograph. However, researchers of a broad humanitarian profile should pay attention to it. In addition to a rich description of a closed community, the book gives a deep understanding of what constitutes ethnographic and narrative turns in modern-day sociology. This book review begins with a description of the genre’s originality and the differences between the presented book and classical academic studies. Then, we discuss how, due to the rejection of the academic mainstream, S. Venkatesh demonstrates the productivity of innovative ethnography in studies of marginality. To acquaint the Russian audience with the enormous contribution that sociologist S. Venkatesh made to the development of modern Western ethnography, his first and, so far, only book translated into Russian is compared with his earlier monograph. It is carried out in strict accordance with the academic canon and contains a deep analysis of the socioeconomic deprivation of black ghettos within the context of the American model of neoliberal capitalism. The text of this article concludes with a discussion about how Gang Leader for the Day simultaneously reflects an ethnographic and narrative turn that occurred in the social sciences in the final quarter of the last century.

The conference “Digitalization of Society and the Future of Christianity” was held at St. Tikhon's Orthodox Humanitarian University. Digital technologies are now rapidly becoming a part of society, exerting an active influence on social processes. Different researchers describe this transformation of social reality in different ways, such as “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” (Klaus Schwab) or “technological singularity” (Ray Kurzweil). However, we must focus not just on the “sum of technologies” but, above all, on how these changes morph our perception of society and how they affect the economy and politics. The development of digitalization has its advantages — for example, an increase in productivity — and risks, such as the reduction of jobs for both workers and highly qualified employees.
At the same time, there exists another important question: how can we assess digitalization from a spiritual and moral point of view? How does it affect the individual and suppress his or her freedom? In a recent interview, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia noted the danger of gadgets that“provide not just access to personal information but its use.” The danger of using personal data, noted by Patriarch Kirill, is only one aspect of digitalization. Attempts to use biometrics, the development of robotics, 3D printing, augmented reality and several other technologies raise further questions.
The conference also touched upon the development of legislative initiatives in relation to the process of digitalization. We discussed the development of draft laws relating to a number of modern digital technologies as well as the creation of a favorable legal environment for our country to gain a competitive advantage in the international digital market.
The international conference “Digitalization of Society and the Future of Christianity” will be held annually at St. Tikhon's Orthodox Humanitarian University.

The article corresponds to Nikolai Babich’s detailed remarks about the paper “Criticism of the Survey Approach for Analyzing the Mutual Similarity in the Appearance of Consumer Products Within One Product Category,” published in the Journal of Economic Sociology (2018, vol. 19, no 2, pp. 86–117). The author outlines the basic problems of the current sociological expert evaluation in Russia and proposes options for methodological work aimed at adopting experience from the established contractual procedure for the verification of scientific truth.
This article presents some criticism of methods and procedures applied in the field of sociological expert evaluation which turned out to be closed and non-public in Russia. This sociological field has some notable features, including uncritical attitudes toward what and how expert evaluations are produced, uncertainty in the usage of methods, ignorance of international research experience and the non-transparency of methodology and tools.
For solving the mentioned problems which the Russian sociological expertise meets, Dmitry Rogozin proposes that sociologists be more active in three directions: 1) conducting a cognitive analysis of survey toolkits embedded in court practice; 2) reconstructing experimental plans with an analysis of applied samplings; and 3) organizing institutional reviews of sociological expert evaluations.

The article is a rejoinder to Nikolai Babich’s polemical response to our paper “Criticism of the survey approach for analyzing the mutual similarity in the appearance of consumer products within one product category”, published in the Journal of Economic Sociology (2018, vol. 19, no 2, pp. 86–117). Babich named his article “Methodological Reflection in a Pith Helmet” (Journal of Economic Sociology 2019, vol. 20, no 1, pp. 188–196) having thus drawn analogy between scientific criticism and colonial approach that white European colonialists practiced towards the aboriginal population of overseas territories and towards their social institutions. Our replica disputes the validity of using the “Aboriginal” label to the current state of the industry of sociological expertise in Russia as well as the validity of using the complementary term “Colonialist” to designate the colleagues trying to criticize the established research and discursive practices. We also point on the need for more active use of theoretical baggage of classical and modern sociology and sociology of language in the study of visual signs, call for the intensification of scientific dispute based on Mertonian organized skepticism.
We develop our criticism in two planes. On the one hand, an attempt is made to deconstruct the colonialist argument as a special case of ad hominem arguments prohibited in the scientific debate. On the other hand, through the prism of these arguments, we once again reconstruct the logic of our approach to the study of similarities and differences in the appearance of FMCG products, based on proven and/or conventional positions of sociological science and sociology of language.

Bruce G. Carruthers, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University was interviewed by Mayya Shmidt, master’s student at Stockholm University, during his visit to the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study based in Uppsala.
During the first part of the conversation, Bruce Carruthers reflects upon the structural differences between European and North American academic settings and between sociological departments and business schools, considering graduate training and further ascending up the career ladder. He elaborates on his current research, a historical study of credit and credit decision-making in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but he also works on corporate social responsibility and taxation and the adoption of “business like” characteristics by US museums. Carruthers points out that working at a bunch of intersections between different branches of sociology allows him to be intellectually inclusive in his work. He shares his personal recipe for economic sociology. According to him, a good economic sociologist has to be curious about the economy and willing to do additional work and go beyond his or her sociological training to become knowledgeable in economic phenomena. Taking advantage of communication with colleagues from other fields of knowledge may also contribute to a good practice of conducting an economic sociological study.
Speculating about the future of credit relations, Carruthers suggests that dystopian sci-fi TV shows pose some relevant issues to credit scoring. The combination of how widely the information can circulate and what the individual scores are based on provoke governmentality fears about ratings and rankings. As he puts it, the developing Chinese social credit system, which involves almost no privacy in relation to the State, may be nerve-racking if it gets full expression—quite the opposite future Carruthers predicts for the peer-to-peer platforms that promised to challenge the financial market. Once the promotional hype is over, as he points out, big financial institutions will likely take over the successful platforms, and tech platforms could do the business of intermediation may pop up.
With respect to promising topics in sociology, Carruthers recommends directing our attention toward the incorporation of big data into research and the expansion of big data analysis skills, as the future of economic sociological research lies therein.