Article
Stereotypes as Historical Accidents: Images of Social Class in Post-communist versus Capitalist Societies
Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism’s rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from post-communist countries (N = 2241), compared with 38 capitalist countries (N=4344), support the historical, socio-cultural rootedness of stereotypes. More positive stereotypes of the working class appear in post-communist countries, both compared with other social groups in the country and compared with working-class stereotypes in capitalist countries; post-communist countries also show more negative stereotypes of the upper class. We further explore whether communism’s ideological legacy reflects how societies infer groups’ stereotypic competence and warmth from structural status and competition. Post-communist societies show weaker status-competence relations and stronger (negative) competition-warmth relations; respectively, the lower meritocratic beliefs and higher priority of embeddedness as ideological legacies may shape these relationships.
Modern capitalism favors values that undermine our face-to-face bonds with friends and family members. Focusing on the post-communist world, and comparing it to more 'developed' societies, this book reveals the mixed effects of capitalist culture on interpersonal relationships. While most observers blame the egoism and asocial behavior found in new free-market societies on their communist pasts, this work shows how relationships are also threatened by the profit orientations and personal ambition unleashed by economic development. Successful people in societies as diverse as China, Russia, and Eastern Germany adjust to the market economy at a social cost, relaxing their morals in order to obtain success and succumbing to increased material temptations to exploit relationships for their own financial and professional gain. The capitalist personality is internally troubled as a result of this "sellout," but these qualms subside as it devalues intimate qualitative bonds with others. This book also shows that post-communists are similarly individualized as people living in Western societies. Capitalism may indeed favor values of independence, creativity, and self-expressiveness, but it also rewards self-centeredness, consumerism, and the stripping down of morality. As is the case in the West, capitalist culture fosters an internally conflicted and self-centered personality in post-communist societies.
-------------------------------------------------
The essay strives to explore the causes of the "absence of the people" (as a political category designating the agency of political action as something distinguishable from the demographic and ethnic readings of the "people") in the course of the post-communist transformations of Russia. By and large, these causes are portrayed as rooted in the specific version of capitalism that has taken hold of Russia as well as in the Soviet legacy of oppression it upholds, albeit in a modified form. The possibilities of the emergence of the people (in the aforesaid sense of the term) in the post-communist context of Russia are explored in the concluding section of the paper.
The article considers different variants of division of economic history into periods in a broad interdisciplinary context. Special attention has been paid to the influence of Enlightenment philosophy, evolutionary thinking , socialist ideology, human geography, agricultural economy, theories of economic growth, post-industrialism, world-system analysis. Author explicates heuristic significance of conceptions of such Russian theorists as A.Bogdanov, V. Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, N. Oganovsky for economic periodization of history and world-system approash.
According to interdisciplinary theory of architecture and sociology by A. Amin and N. Thrift, presented in their book Cities. Reimagining the Urban, the light sociality is the main way of individuals interaction in city space. In this context, consumption appears to be one of the basic forms of individuals self-expression on one hand, and on the other hand - one of the basic forms of urban communication. We deal with consumption in its general meaning - as a complex of all individuals consumption-related practices that are transparent in space of light sociality. Consumption practices become agents of light sociality, producing ambivalent encounters that emotionally affect individuals realizing those practices, and those who observe them. In this way consumption takes part in governmentality of the city spaces.
The results of research of different areas of personality of homeless men: values, life attitudes, activity, homelessness area is presents. The data indicate the presence of a number of characteristics inherent in varying degrees all homeless people. The data obtained can be used to build an effective program of psychological re-socialization of homeless people.
In 2006, Russia amended its competition law and added the concepts of ‘collective dominance’ and its abuse. This was seen as an attempt to address the common problem of ‘conscious parallelism’ among firms in concentrated industries. Critics feared that the enforcement of this provision would become tantamount to government regulation of prices. In this paper we examine the enforcement experience to date, looking especially closely at sanctions imposed on firms in the oil industry. Some difficulties and complications experienced in enforcement are analysed, and some alternative strategies for addressing anticompetitive behaviour in concentrated industries discussed.