The objective of this paper is to outline and compare frameworks for studying post-Soviet transformations developed by social scientists from various disciplines in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. The objective is realized by means of quantitative content analysis of scholarly articles’ abstracts in ninety-four journals in eight (inter)disciplinary fields that covers the period of 2001-2015. This paper seeks to answer the question whether differences in the studies of the post-Soviet transformations are defined by country discourse or by the field of study. The research results suggest that there is a two-level mechanism, by which the societal context affects academia, in this case, social sciences and humanities. While general directions of scholarly attention are determined by societal differences, representations of post-Soviet transformations are framed through specific disciplinary lenses that combine both international and post-Soviet features.

The article looks at how Pierre Bourdieu’s fields theory and the theory of professionalism correlate in the analysis of legal communities. We demonstrate that even though Pierre Bourdieu criticized the notion of profession and called for it to be abandoned, his views regarding the legal field were in fact very close to the concept of professionalism. Based on a number of publications citing both these approaches we can conclude that today researchers hardly ever use both these approaches simultaneously. This means that combining these two methodological approaches has a lot of potential.

----------------------------------------------------