عنوان

Minding their own business :

Number

TLets707657

Title Proper

Minding their own business :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Kennedy, John

Title Proper by Another Author

an ethnographic study of entrepreneurship in Putin's Russia

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Birmingham

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2017

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Birmingham

Text preceding or following the note

2017

Text of Note

Russian entrepreneurs have long faced considerable difficulties. While much is known about what these difficulties are, less is known about how entrepreneurs respond to them, what it is like to be an entrepreneur under these circumstances and why they bother in the first place. In this thesis I address these questions by conducting a multi-sited ethnography within three small Siberian enterprises, observing the directors as they conduct their everyday business. I find that these entrepreneurs all resent their vulnerable position in the political economy but that they have developed a capacity to survive or thrive in spite of the obstacles and threats they encounter. This capacity, I argue, is less a consequence of their commercial acumen than their understanding of what can be achieved given their particular circumstances, their knowledge that business-state relations take an informal, personalised form, and their preparedness to resist predatory outsiders. This leads me to reconsider the meaning of entrepreneurship in the Russian context. Furthermore, my informants' agency presents a challenge to the idea in predominant political economic theories that the Russian state dominates the private sector. I therefore reconceptualise business-state relations using Douglass C. North et al's Limited Access Order theory in combination with my empirical materials. This provides a more accurate theory that accepts the pre-eminent role of the state in the political economy while accommodating the agency displayed by my informants.

DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics

HD Industries. Land use. Labor

HT Communities. Classes. Races

HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism

Kennedy, John

University of Birmingham

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y