Russian neoliberal: The entrepreneurial ethic and the spirit of "true careerism"

Russian Review

Volumn 62, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 72-90

  Yurchak, Alexei ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0141840355     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9434.00264     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Olga Kryshtanovskaya quoted in Caroline Humphrey, "The Villas of the 'New Russians': A Sketch of Consumption and Cultural Identity in Post-Soviet Landscapes," Focaal 30/31 (1997): 85
2. Kar'era, 2000, no 2:1
3. Kar'era, 1999, no. 12:1
4. Argumenty i fakty 44 (1996): 6 (results published by the Sector for the Studies of Elites, Moscow Sociological Institute)
5. Goskomstat Rossii, Zhenshchiny i muzhchiny Rossii: Kratkii statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1997), 67
6. The analysis of changing cultural dynamics among generations - "cohort analysis" - has occupied a prominent position in anthropology, especially during the past two decades. By focusing on the temporal dimension, this approach fits well with current anthropological views of culture as dynamic, contested, and nonhomogenous. As many recent anthropological studies have argued, "coming of age at particular moments creates telling fault lines through which meaning is transformed." See Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley, 1999), 22
7. Judy Hilkey, Character as Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, 1977), 1
8. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, England, 1991)
9. Colin Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, 1991), 42, 44-45
10. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Essence of neoliberalism," Le Monde diplomatique (December 1998) (see http://www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/12/ 08bourdieu)
11. Gordon, "Governmental Rationality," 44
12. See also Nikolas Rose, "Governing Enterprising Individuals," in his Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge, England, 1998), 153
13. and Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the Self, ed. L. H. Martin et al. (London, 1988)
14. Katherine Verdery makes a similar point discussing the prominence of discourse over practice during the postrevolutionary period: the Bolshevik government had little time for its project of revolutionizing consciousness and treated language as the "ultimate means of production" of the Communist world and subject ("Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the 'Transition,'" American Ethnologist 18, no. 3 (1991): 430)
15. Foucault describes his method in the study of the "genealogy of morality" as follows: "In order to get a better understanding of what is punished and why, I wanted to ask the question: how does one punish? This was the same procedure as I had used when dealing with madness; rather than asking what, in a given period, is regarded as sanity or insanity, as mental illness or normal behavior, I wanted to ask how these divisions are operated. It's a method which seems to me to yield, I wouldn't say the maximum of possible illumination, but at least a fairly fruitful kind of intelligibility" ("Questions of Method," in The Foucault Effect, 74)
16. As part of my research project, in 1994-95, I joined a private advertising agency in St. Petersburg as a copywriter. This work put me in contact with a large number of businesses and entrepreneurs in the city. I conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty-six entrepreneurs, some of whom I interviewed repeatedly over the course of six years, from 1994 to 1999. I also conducted participant-observation research in several small businesses. See Alexei Yurchak, "Entrepreneurial Governmentality in Post-Socialist Russia: A Cultural Investigation of Business Practices," in The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia, ed. Victoria Bonnell and Thomas Gold (Armonk, NY, 2002)
17. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London, 1974)
18. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1983), 44-78
19. Stuart Hall, "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Champaign, 1988), 51-52
20. Hall, "The Toad in the Garden," 51
21. John Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA, 1975)
22. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA, 1991)
23. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York, 1997)
24. idem, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York, 1993)
25. Butler, Excitable Speech, 142
26. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 67-69
27. On all these levels the discourse of private business, advertising, and mass media has shifted in the direction of "linguistic commodification. " See my "Privatize Your Name: Symbolic Work in a Post-Soviet Linguistic Market," Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, no. 3 (2000)
28. and my "The Grammar of Consumption" (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 2000)
29. For a discussion of the shift to "flexible" advertising see my "Po sledam zhenskogo obraza: Simvolicheskaia rabota novogo reklamnogo diskursa," in Zhenshchina i vizual'nye znaki, ed. Anna Al'chuk (Moscow, 2000)
30. "Nike, Inc., Annual Meeting of Shareholders" (23 September 1998): 3
31. See http://www.nikebiz.com/media/n_whatever.shtml
32. See this ad in OM (December 1999)
33. We may think of this symbolic power of the gaze in terms of Jacques Lacan's theory of the "gaze" and its "trace" ("The Gaze as Object Petit a," in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis [New York, 1998]), 74-75). For a discussion of this topic see my "Po sledam zhenskogo obraza."
34. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, 1988)
35. Yurchak, "The Grammar of Consumption."
36. Dmitrii Simakov et al., "Kapital'noe stroitel'stvo," Kar'era, 2000, no. 2
37. Ingebora Adomaite, "Kar'era - eto tsena cheloveka," Kar'era, 1998, no. 8
38. Ol'ga Kazanskaia, "Ekonomicheskoe chudo," Kar'era, 1998, no. 3
39. Margarita Ozerova, "My za tsenoi ne postoim," Kar'era, 2000, no. 2
40. See Sergei Ushakin, "Vidimost' muzhestvennosti," Russkii zhurnal (15 December 1997)
41. Denis Morozov, "Trusardi," Kar'era, 2000, no. 2
42. idem, "Utomlennye solntsem," Kar'era, 2000, no. 6
43. and idem, "Sukhoi zakon," Kar'era, 2000, no. 5
44. Irina Builova, "S chuvstvom glubokogo neudovletvoreniia," Kar'era, 2000, no. 1
45. Nikolai, top manager, quoted in Builova, "S chuvstvom glubokogo neudovletvoreniia."
46. Adomaite, "Kar'era - eto tsena cheloveka" (emphasis added)
47. Viktor Gavrikov, "Brak s biznesmenom: Priiatnoe s poleznym," Kar'era, 1998, no. 6 (emphasis added)
48. Gail Kligman and Susan Gal, The Politics of Gender After Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, 2000)
49. "15 samykh zavidnykh zhenikhov Rossii," Kar'era, 1998, no. 1
50. "Semeinoe zoloto," Profil' 28 (2000)
51. Author's interview
52. Gavrikov, "Brak s biznesmenom."
53. Steven Shark, "Boss, est' liubov'," Kar'era, 2000, no. 3
54. Steven Shark, "Kak ulozhit' shefa v postel'," Kar'era, 1999, no. 6
55. Shark, "Boss, est' liubov'."
56. Builova, "S chuvstvom glubokogo neudovletvoreniia."
57. Interview with psychologist Mikhail Lobkovskii, "Zhenskoe schast'e: Sem'ia ili rabota," Profil' 25 (2000)
58. Ol'ga Kazanskaia, "Zhenskie dela," Kar'era, 2000, no. 3
59. Ingebora Adomaite, "Konkor, eshche Konkor," Profil' 14 (2000)
60. Adomaite, "Konkor, eshche Konkor."
61. Liudmila Lunina, "Mesto pechati izmenit' nel'zia," Kar'era, 2000, no. 7-8
62. Nelli Aleksandrova, "Osnovnoi Instinkt," Kar'era, 2000, no. 3
63. Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984): 52-92
64. Anne Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago, 1994), 150
65. Irina Builova, "Pro zhizn' ia vse ponial, kogda zanialsia biznesom," Kar'era, 1998, no. 6