2026. Vol. 27. No. 3

Microhistories of Technology: Making the World presents a multifaceted global history of technology and material culture, viewed through the lens of diversity. The microhistories presented in this book demonstrate that the spread of modern technology did not lead to the elimination of artisanal tools and production methods. Rather, the new often fruitfully coexisted with the old. The cultural encounters between the old and the new resulted in countless innovative solutions, many of which have remained unreported in the history of technology. By shedding light on the material culture of ordinary people across the globe—in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—Microhistories of Technology reveals how inventive individuals and groups shaped their own lives. Each chapter demonstrates how the persistent application of traditional, homemade, or hybrid technologies helped people maintain autonomy in a “globalized” world. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the introduction to the book “Sharpening Local Techniques in a Global Context,” in which Professor M.Heard reveals his understanding of the technology, discusses the research design, and defines the structure of the book.

The article examines the phenomenon of urban conflict using the case of the Novosibirsk agglomeration from 2022 to 2024. The observed multiplicity of actors and issues, as well as the persistence and interconnectedness of some urban conflicts in recent years, indicate not only a rise in their complexity but also a change in the nature of urban conflict and an increase in its impact on social and economic spaces, infrastructure, and the investment attractiveness of territories. The aim of the study is to identify the mechanisms that sustain conflictuality by analyzing the interconnectedness of conflicting agendas and actors. The theoretical foundations are M. Löw’s relational theory of space and N. Fligstein’s and D. McAdam’s theory of strategic action fields. The empirical basis consists of data from the Geo- Information Database of Conflicts of the Novosibirsk Agglomeration (N = 774 conflicts), supplemented by a content analysis of 3,070 mentions of conflicts on social media. Two-step cluster analysis and content analysis were used as methods. The results show that the thematic spaces of urban conflict are currently structured around two cores: hierarchical conflicts related to development projects, construction, and land use, and horizontal everyday conflicts focused on security, accessibility, and the protection of values. Infrastructures of conflict — including skilled actors, stable networked conflict communities, and the media channels that serve them — play a significant role in sustaining and scaling conflicts, as well as in maintaining conflictuality, both within individual strategic action fields and in the city’s public space as a whole. The results are applicable to urban studies, the management of urban conflicts, and the development of mechanisms for reconciling interests in the urban environment.

Housing precarity is a condition of instability and vulnerability in the housing sphere, which can manifest in various forms and affect people regardless of income level or social status. It encompasses situations in which housing is not safe, of adequate quality, or accessible in the long term, which are necessary for a full and secure life. This article analyzes housing precarity as a multidimensional socio-economic phenomenon influencing various aspects of people’s lives. Housing precarity is considered in the context of international research, with an emphasis on the fact that precarious living conditions go far beyond mere housing provision and encompass a wide range of issues: legal vulnerability, threat of eviction, overcrowding, poor housing quality, and limited access to infrastructure and social services. The article discusses various classifications and concepts (“precarious ownership,” “recursive precarity,” “hidden homelessness,” etc.), as well as the forms and dimensions of housing precarity (time, space, etc.). It is shown that precarities in different domains—housing, labor, legal—can intersect, mutually reinforcing and consolidating each other. The role of cohabitation practices and the “home culture of precarity” in the transformation of millennial everyday life is also highlighted. Special attention is given to socio-demographic groups most vulnerable to housing precarity and to the housing strategies they adopt to mitigate its effects. The conclusion emphasizes the need for a comprehensive approach combining housing, social, and economic policies to ensure housing security and reduce social vulnerability.

The review examines Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy’s The Ordinal Society (Harvard University Press, 2024), a book that offers a broad theoretical account of digital capitalism.
The book’s central argument is that contemporary society is increasingly organized through the measurement, sorting, and evaluative ordering of people, objects, and actions. This ordering becomes a fundamental principle of social coordination. The review discusses the book’s key concepts: the platform exfiltration of sociality, understood as the extraction of data from everyday social interactions; eigencapital as a new form of digital capital; and the “classification situation,” which produces social hierarchies at the bottom of which stands a newly disadvantaged class — the lumpenscoretariat.
The review also considers critical responses to the book published in international journals. These critiques argue that Fourcade and Healy may be too quick to present the processes they describe as totalizing; that they do not fully explain how eigencapital is converted into concrete advantages; and that they redescribe older forms of social inequality in the language of digital ordering. By turning to the Russian experience of digitalization, the review identifies an important limitation of the book. In Fourcade and Healy’s account, the production of a person’s digital “legibility” is largely tied to the market logic of platformization. The Russian case, by contrast, illustrates the intensification of algorithmic ordering through state-directed forms of digital control.
Overall, the review argues that a genuinely general theory of ordinal society remains to be developed. Building such a theory requires a comparative perspective that accounts for non-Western trajectories of digitalization, as well as an analysis that extends beyond economic domains to include interpersonal relations.

On April 14, 2026, the session ‘Non-Standard Forms of Consumption: The Role of Technology, Emotions, and Morality’ was held as part of the XXVI April International Academic Conference named after Evgeny Yasin. The session focused on forms of consumer behaviour that fall outside the conventional rational choice model, bringing together researchers from economic sociology, psychology, and institutional economics. Five presentations were delivered: a comparative analysis of non-standard consumption forms (V. V. Radaev); ethical consumption as an instrument of civic engagement (M. A. Shabanova); psychological mechanisms of nostalgic consumption (T. A. Nestik); conspicuous consumption through the institution of consumer credit (A. V. Vernikov, A. A. Kurysheva); and compulsive buying as a form of addiction (O. S. Deyneka). Three recurring conceptual tensions were identified: the question of the openness and boundaries of the non-standard consumption typology; the problem of analytical distinctions btween forms given their empirical overlap; and the contestation of the very concept of ‘non-standard’ in light of the plurality of rationalities in sociology.

The issue of urban-rural inequality is recognised as one of the most pressing and unresolved challenges, particularly in post-Soviet countries. This article examines territorial inequality in educational outcomes across seven post-Soviet countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Moldova, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. The study analyses how students’ PISA test scores vary by urban–rural location and investigates whether national educational policies, particularly school funding mechanisms and school network, have contributed to reducing or widening these disparities. Drawing on the generative theory of rurality, the study employs a mixed-methods design combining multilevel regression analysis of PISA 2009 and 2018 data with content analysis of national policy documents addressing post-Soviet educational reforms. The findings indicate a persistent and growing performance gap between urban and rural students, with the largest disparities observed in Moldova, Russia, and Lithuania. Rural location remains a statistically significant predictor of lower student achievement even after controlling for socio-economic and institutional variables. Estonia emerges as an exception, combining relatively high reading scores with a weak rurality gradient in 2018. The policy analysis suggests that per-capita and voucher-based funding mechanisms, together with large-scale school closures, have only weakly addressed the structural sources of rural disadvantage. The discussion highlights institutional and governance-related factors that may explain the limited effectiveness of these reforms and offers tentative recommendations concerning school funding design, teacher recruitment, and policy coordination in education. The article concludes by discussing study limitations and directions for future research.

This qualitative study examines how funding status mediates doctoral students’ perceptions and experiences of mandatory publication requirements in Russia, by comparing funded and self-funded doctoral students at a selective researchintensive university. Through 19 in-depth interviews, the research explores this understudied area. Although publication requirements were initially introduced to develop research skills, these institutional demands now function primarily to enhance university visibility, creating pressures that are strongly mediated by doctoral students’ financial circumstances. The study initially aimed to explore how funding shapes doctoral experiences more broadly. However, as the interviews progressed, participants consistently redirected the discussion toward publication experiences, revealing publication as the primary site where funding disparities are most acutely experienced. This emergent theme subsequently shaped the study’s analytical focus. The findings reveal a clear divide in experiences shaped by funding status. Funded doctoral students, despite receiving material support, describe intense psychological pressure and tensions between substantive dissertation work and institutional compliance demands. By contrast, self-funded doctoral students face persistent struggles for time and resources, as the necessity of external employment severely limits their ability to engage in both publication activities and dissertation writing. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the analysis conceptualises funding as a form of economic capital that shapes doctoral students’ positions within the academic field. Institutional support systems should therefore attend not only to funding levels but also to the broader material conditions of doctoral students’ lives, recognising that self-funded doctoral students require qualitatively distinct forms of support rather than simply greater quantities of existing support mechanisms.