Article
Между социальным и экономическим благом: конфликт проектов легитимации социального предпринимательства в России
The theoretical basis of work is the notion of legitimation as a complex mechanism of social approval of a new phenomenon taking place with the active participation of different social groups and structures, able to influence its final form. In the focus of the empirical analysis the representations of social entrepreneurship that main actors of its legitimacy in Russia have. Among them are: the state, foundations, NPOs and business. We assess the (in)consistency between their representations as well as the reflection of these representations in the characteristics of existing organizations of social entrepreneurship (social enterprises).
Business, government and NPOs are understood as external actors of social enterprise legitimation, as without their recognition the legitimation will not take place. In turn, social enterprises, regardless of whether they come from for-profit or non-profit sector, are seen as objects of legitimation, or as a new actor, not identical to any of the above. It is shown that the contradictions in the positions of key actors can lead to mutually exclusive projects of legitimation of a new phenomenon, so that they will undermine the cognitive and moral legitimacy of each other. The empirical data include the results of the authors survey of 202 social enterprises.
The Working Paper examines the peculiarities of the Russian model of corporate governance and control in the banking sector. The study relies upon theoretical as well as applied research of corporate governance in Russian commercial banks featuring different forms of ownership. We focus on real interests of all stakeholders, namely bank and stock market regulators, bank owners, investors, top managers and other insiders. The Anglo-American concept of corporate governance, based on agency theory and implying outside investors’ control over banks through stock market, is found to bear limited relevance. We suggest some ways of overcoming the gap between formal institutions of governance and the real life.
This book presents the results of public opinion surveys on participation in charitable activity in Russia. This includes volunteerism and donations, as well as surveys on attitudes towards issues related to interaction between the State and charity providers. These surveys were conducted by the Center for Civil Society Studies and the Non-profit Sector (State University — Higher School of Economics) within the framework of monitoring the status of civil society in Russia.
The data provided characterizes the environment for the development of charitable activity in Russia, the level of the Russian people’s participation in volunteer work and charitable donations, assessments of the interaction between the State and charitable organizations, and between Russian and foreign charitable organizations. This book will be of use to social and political scientists, economists, teachers and students of the social sciences, experts, and anyone interested in the status of charitable activity and civil society development in the Russian Federation.This book is about twenty-year's experience of privatization in different countries including Russia. The book also includes sestematozation of academic views at the problems of state failures and effectiveness of the state owership.
The purpose of this paper is to carefully assess the size of public sector within the Russian banking industry. We identify and classify at least 78 state-influenced banks. For the state-owned banks, we distinguish between those that are majority-owned by federal executive authorities or Central Bank of Russia, by sub-federal (regional and municipal) authorities, by state-owned enterprises and banks, and by "state corporations". We estimate their combined market share to have reached 56% of total assets by July 1, 2009. Banks indirectly owned by public capital are the fastest-growing group. Concentration is increasing within the public sector of the industry, with the top five state-controlled banking groups in possession of over 49% of assets. We observe a crowding out and erosion of domestic private capital, whose market share is shrinking from year to year. Several of the largest state-owned banks now constitute a de facto intermediate tier at the core of the banking system. We argue that the direction of ownership change in Russian banking is different from that in CEE countries.
National Research University – Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and author has been researching the leasing market of Russia for 18 years. Particular attention in the article presents the dynamics that characterizes the development of market in the country by value of new contracts, the largest leasing portfolios, calculated author of segmental structure of the leasing market and regional structure. This article presents the results of the econometric analysis of the relationship of the value of new contracts with the amount of advances, terms of contracts and lease rate per cent. Exploring the structure of financing of leasing operations, the author has developed a new approach to determining leverage leasing projects.
In this chapter we aim to examine the discourses created and reproduced through the interaction between single mothers and representatives of social services. The analysis is based on twenty-six interviews with single mothers and six interviews with social workers conducted in 2001–2003, and six interviews with single mothers and three with social workers conducted in 2006 in the Saratov region in Russia, as well as official documents and the publications of other researchers. In our interviews with mothers, we focused on the issues of familial well-being and interactions with social services, while social workers were asked to discuss their experiences with clients. A short overview of statistics and social policy terminology prefaces a discussion of how mother-headed families and state social policy interrelate and affect each other. The subsequent sections contain analysis of the interviews with single mothers who, as the heads of low-income households, interact with the social service system. The analysis demonstrates that single mothers are frustrated by inadequate assistance and the impossibility of improving their life situations. The discussion goes on to show that social workers, who are used to interpreting complex issues in the life situations of single mothers as individual psychological peculiarities, tend to blame the victim, thus ignoring important social conditions and imposing on women a responsibility for problems that are societal in origin.
It is known that charity, as with any social institution that depends on both external and internal factors. In this article the author analyzes the relationship of charity and the level of development of such internal factors as trust. The analysis was conducted on a global level and at regional level in Russia. The resulting lack of relationship to regional level and its presence in the world say that in Russia at the moment there is no required number of relevant data, based on which one could draw a conclusion about the level of philanthropy.
In this article the author attempts to explain the events occurring in the country taking into account the specificity of the Ukrainian political culture. From the point of view of the author, a key player in the Ukrainian revolution in 2014 was the Ukrainian society itself, and any attempt to comment the situation of modern Ukraine, first of all, should take into account civil conditions of the society itself. Qualitative state of civil society in Ukraine outrun the quality of the ruling elite, which inevitably provokes new confrontations and conflicts.
The paper proposes a political and legal approach to conceptualizing modern democratic state as law-governed, social and secular. It defines legal, institutional, and socio-political characteristics of law-governed, social, and secular state.
During 1998-2010 the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (Moscow) has been surveying the results of activities of most leasing market operators in Russia, including all the largest ones. The results of the scheduled annual analysis undertaken by us to survey the activities of leasing companies in the Russia indicate that the year 2010 was successful for the leasing business. According to the Leaseurope, and author’s data, Russia occupies the 5th place in Europe after Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, French. In practice many Russian leasing companies have managed not only to copy but also successfully to adapt the experience of the countries with developed leasing industries. Despite the growth in new business, account must be taken of the quality of the leasing portfolio. It turned out that it just got a little better as compared with the previous year. The analysis showed that cost of loans taken for financing leasing operations, as well as the cost of the funds of a leasing company, the funds of the lessee, the use of factoring, promissory notes/exchange bills, securities and other instruments, depends on a variety of factors, including: financial independence of leasing companies; the risks associated with the sale of a leasing product; the security for the transaction; the terms of depreciation of leased property, the terms of credit contract and of leasing contracts; the currency of the leasing transaction; whether the funds are borrowed on the domestic or on the international capital market; the schemes for carrying out a leasing operation, etc. With each year there the number of Russian leasing companies that can obtain financing directly from foreign banks grows. There is a growth in the volume of credit operations with the involvement of the national agencies for insurance of export-import operations, e.g. from Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, the USA and other countries. Securitisation of leasing assets held at the junction of four financial tools – lending, leasing, factoring, securities issues. This innovative mechanism that requires subtle scientific and practical configuration achieves remarkable economic performance update, modernisation and re-equipment of enterprises. The author has developed a system of securitisation leasing asset pricing which is feasible through a set of equations that balance the interests of the participants. The article also examined the status of concentration of leasing market, its regional and sectoral structures.
This paper uses the banking industry case to show that the boundaries of public property in Russia are blurred. A messy state withdrawal in 1990s left publicly funded assets beyond direct reach of official state bodies. While we identify no less than 50 state-owned banks in a broad sense, the federal government and regional authorities directly control just 4 and 12 institutions, respectively. 31 banks are indirectly state-owned, and their combined share of state-owned banks’ total assets grew from 11% to over a quarter between 2001 and 2010. The state continues to bear financial responsibility for indirectly owned banks, while it does not benefit properly from their activity through dividends nor capitalization nor policy lending. Such banks tend to act as quasi private institutions with weak corporate governance. Influential insiders (top-managers, current and former civil servants) and cronies extract their rent from control over financial flows and occasional appropriation of parts of bank equity.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.
This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.