Managing firms and families: work and values in a Russian city

Author
Daria Tereshina

Publisher
Berlin: LIT Verlag

Year of publication
2021

ISBN
978-1-80073-415-9

OPAC

Abstract
Drawing on an ethnographic enquiry into the small-scale private sector in the city of Smolensk, this dissertation investigates the moral dimensions of Russian petty capitalism. It situates the moral frameworks of businesspeople within the broader dynamics of local and global politico-economic restructurings by examining how changing ideas of personhood, understandings of moral responsibilities and obligations, and conceptions of work and labour are entangled in circuits of production and struggles for reproduction in present-day Russia. The dissertation argues that the moral frameworks of Russian entrepreneurs incorporate multiple discrete and conflicting values. It views such complexities in actual economic behaviour as responses to the local and global pressures that are generated by capitalism, thereby helping us to incorporate post-socialist developments into the larger processes of expansion and the accumulation of capital.