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This article investigates the possibility of studying modern organizations with the feudal model. We introduce feudalism as an ideal type and explain why it is necessary for understanding organizations. The model synthesizes several perspectives on intra-organizational conflict. After defining the feudal model and tracing its theoretical roots, we review several empirical studies to identify the conditions under which feudal conflicts arise. These factors include decentralization, structural interdependence, uncertainty and informal power. The feudal model highlights several overlooked aspects of organizations, including personal relations, the manipulation of formal rules, bribery, corruption and sabotage. However, given the model's limitations, we propose a “segmented approach” to social analysis, which emphasizes the need for multiple models to explain any organization, past or present.

Looks at the reasons for the collapse of both regimes and considers the importance of repression with these developments. Contrasts the methods of Imperial Russia with the Bolsheviks looking at Court proceedings, prison conditions, education and propaganda in prison, exile and the secret police. Concludes that whilst social support is usually seen as essential for survival of a system, repression is not regarded as a positive element but can become the method for a system’s survival and stability.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge Cold War binaries, seeking a more nuanced understanding of popular experience of change in the Soviet Union’s last decades. This was a period of intensive modernization and rapid transformation in Soviet citizens’ everyday material environment, marked by the mass move to newly constructed housing and by changing relations with goods.

To probe popular experience and changing meanings, the paper turns to qualitative, subjective sources, drawing on oral history interviews (Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat, 2004-2007).

The paper finds that qualitative changes took place in Soviet popular consumer culture during the 1960s-1970s, as millions of people made home in new housing amid the widespread media circulation of authoritative images representing a desirable modern lifestyle and modernist aesthetic. Soviet people began to make aesthetic or semiotic distinctions between functionally identical goods and were concerned to find the right furniture to fit a desired lifestyle, aesthetic ideal and sense of self.

The problem is how to conceptualize the trajectory of change in ways that do justice to historical subjects’ experience and narratives, while avoiding uncritically reproducing Cold War binaries or perpetuating the normative status claimed by the postwar West in defining modernity and consumer culture.

The paper challenges dominant Cold War narratives, according to which Soviet popular relations with goods were encompassed by shortage and necessity. It advances understanding of the specific form of modern consumer culture, which, it argues, took shape in the USSR after Stalin.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the changes that have taken place in the Russian higher education sector over the last two decades. Specifically, it analyses such phenomena as corruption and politicization of Russian universities through the concept of “loyalty as rent”.

This paper is a synthesis of conceptual work and case study, developing and applying the concept of “loyalty as rent” to the case of Russian higher education. Rapidly developing segments of the Russian economy are known for sprawling informal economic relations. In such segments, illicit revenues may exceed legal income and political influence is considered an economic resource.

Informal approval of corrupt activities in colleges and universities in exchange for loyalty and compliance with the current political regime is commonplace in modern Russia. Political indoctrination of universities is advanced by the ruling political regime in Russia through informal means, while academic meritocracy is no longer honored. The ruling regime uses corruption in the universities to derive its rent not in money but in loyalty to the regime.

This paper argues that the widespread corruption in Russian universities may be used by the state in order to gain much needed political support of faculty and students.

Social policy, labour markets and industrial relations are closely linked, both empirically and conceptually, as described in the first part of the paper using examples drawn from the USA and Europe. The same issues are then explored in more detail for the Russian case. The latter half of the paper presents the results of a new survey of Russian heads of household in St Petersburg, Moscow and Voronezh. The households have been selected from among those unemployed, on forced leave, facing imminent redundancy, or recently re‐employed after unemployment. Interactions between these four labour market states, household labour market strategies, and their variations across the three cities are explored. Conclusions regarding the current mix of social policy, labour markets and industrial relations in Russia close the paper.