In this paper I’d like to sum up the results of the research project which was carried out in 1997-1999 by the Centre of Independent Sociological Studies with the support of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation). The research had several focal points, the most important being entrepreneurial networks in migrant (I deliberately avoid the term “ethnic”) communities in Russia. In Europe and North America this sort of studies have already become a well established tradition, but the peculiarities of Russian society and its transitions call for several changes to be made in general theoretic conclusions of western sociologists.

Our research is based on two case studies, designed as long term participant observations in the studied milieus. The gained material was later supplemented by problem-oriented interviews with the respondents. I want to emphasize that the above mentioned research procedure has been worked out by our group in the course of many previous projects. We did our best to understand our informants so that we can adequately describe the rules regulating their activity and the life of their milieu. As a rule, usual interviews (not to speak of the formal surveys and questionnaires!) do not give a clear understanding of the milieu in question and its internal rules (if it is not the researcher’s own big city intelligentsia milieu). Instead, researchers have an illusion of understanding and ascribe their own meanings and senses to the words of the informants. As a result artificial facts are fabricated. For this reason our research was primarily founded on the classical participant observation. Our choice of the target group (Azerbaijani green grocery traders at the farmers’ market and Armenians engaged in shoe production and shoe repair business) reflected the presumed stereotypes widespread among sociologist as well as among lay people. Although we never stop to emphasize that not to be trapped by any of the existing scientific preconceptions researchers should try to avoid all sorts of assumptions and preliminary knowledge. In this case, however, we had to start from somewhere.

Our cautiousness towards ethnic identity and the role it plays in the choice of life strategies is explained by our previous experience in studying ethnicity and ethnic communities. We regard ethnicity as the process of group identity formation by means of ascribing certain features to community members and to the others. It is a typical construct and can’t be described in “material” or cultural terms. At the same time the implied concept of broad communities becomes the ground for collective action. (More on this topic can be found in our book “Konstruirovanie, 1998). As a consequence, we hold that ethnic group is not a stable entity, to which an individual can objectively “belong” or not “belong”. Under certain conditions individual ethnic identity is likely to become particularly actualized and to start playing a major role in defining individual social activity. In most cases, however, ethnic identity is formal and doesn’t affect individual daily practices. Besides, there are quite a few people who have no ethnic identity at all.

Most research projects start by assuming that a particular social network has a certain ethnic meaning, and proceed by looking for content indications, thus describing an ethnic community which has been predefined in advance. The majority of researchers drew their conclusions from statistical data and survey results. Thus the research objects and their boundaries were pre-determined and dealt with as statistical groups. In contrast, we tried to find out whether a person belonged to this or that ethnic group, since the boundaries of these groups are in most cases completely indefinite. The weaker the identity indicator, the further from the existing ideal code (“a real Armenian is the one who”...), the more difficult it is to define whether or not the individual belongs to a certain ethnic group, the vaguer its boundaries. Another weak point of the ethno-sociological studies is that in most cases they concentrate mainly on the attitudes of the informants and not on their real behavior. The cultural gap that exists between informants and sociologists makes it extremely difficult to interpret the responses of the interviewees in general, but even if we ignore this problem, we still will be speaking only about their attitudes. At the same time attitudes do not always correspond directly to behavior. (Armenians, for example, are always eager to speak about Armenian solidarity, but as we have discovered during our research, it is not always present in their everyday practices.)

We did not assume our informants to be Armenian or Azerbaijani though in most cases that was how the dominant culture representatives perceived them. From the objective point of view they were Armenian and Azerbaijani migrants. But it was for us to discover whether these people used ethnic categories to identify both themselves or their business (or any other social network) partners. Thus we did not relate such issues as trust and solidarity in migrant networks to ethnicity, as it is often done in other studies. And only now that our study is finished are we ready to discuss this question.

Drawing on our understanding of the Soviet society, which, of course, is far from complete, we can describe the starting point of our analyses as follows: In the big cities of the pre-reform Russia (the USSR) there were no, and probably couldn’t be any, ethnic economic networks. There is no doubt that enormous groups of migrants felt marginal, but the routs of their integration into society were regulated and organized by the state, these routs by no means being ethnic.

There were two objective reasons for the emergence of ethnic entrepreneurship. First of all the reforms opened the market space for private initiative. Every citizen of the ex-Soviet Union experienced quick social changes. The old system of references fell apart, the previous economic strategies failed and the old norms and values did not work any more. Under these conditions people lost their sense of stability, the familiar picture of the world fell apart. To some extent we might say that all the population experienced a migrant complex - everyone turned out to be an emigrant in one’s own country. New market opportunities (entrepreneurship) multiplied by the need to look for new coping skills resulted in the enormous outburst of entrepreneurial activity.

This activity, however, did not have any special ethnic colors. In Russia ethnic constructing has certain peculiarities, which are due to: 1. the existence of a strong Soviet identity; 2. the liquidation of ethnic communities in big Russian cities in the 30-ies, and the destruction of the mechanism by which ethnicity is passed down to the next generation in the process of socialization; 3. peculiarities of the current transition of the Soviet society. The previous national policy carried out by the state and aimed at the formation of the unified Soviet “ethnicity” turned out to be rather successful. At present the residents of big Russian cities whose passports state that they are Armenians, Jews or Azerbaijanis engage in the entrepreneurial process not as the representatives of their ethnic groups (and again, their own ethnic identity is of not much importance) but as “Russians” (or Russian citizens).

For this reason it is extremely difficult to interpret the data collected by Radajev (Radajev, 1993) in his Moscow study where he states that the entrepreneurial activity among non-Russian, and especially among the Jews and the people from the Caucasus, (Armenians first of all) is higher than among ethnic Russians. All his respondents were Moscow residents and belonged to the dominant urban culture, their formal ethnicity, most probably, did not play any role, so they would hardly be motivated towards any ethnic solidarity, and it would be difficult to discover any ethnic networking. For the same reason it is unlikely that any social network (including Mafia) could be identified as ethnic without some special research. In other words, I insist that when determining the “ethnicity “ of any social (economic) network formed nowadays by the post-Soviet people we should not rely on the official ethnicity ascribed to them by the Soviet State.

Another reason for ethnic enrepreneurship is the mass migration from the ex-Soviet republics caused by wars, ethnic conflicts and economic difficulties which most of these areas suffer. The most numerous migration of the post-Soviet period was registered in the end of the 80-ies from Azerbaijan and Armenia. Masses of refugees who managed “to catch hold “ on a big Russian city stimulated further chain migration. As a result, the number of migrants from these republics in St. Petersburg grew several times.

These refugees and forced migrants had to face all the traditional refugee problems well described by social scientists from Chicago school. The state was unable to take on the responsibility for their integration. Cultural differences between these people and the dominant majority of a big city were easy to notice. In this case, however, the cultural gap was not so much due to their ethnicity but rather to the discrepancy between urban and rural cultures. This latter difference has always been present in Soviet and post-Soviet societies and has been so big that in the two Russian capitals rural population might be regarded as a specific ethnic group.

These are the conditions under which migrant networks are being formed. They take care of the newly arrived, help them to settle down, find a job and share the experience, which might be useful. In contrast with Soviet times new migrants have the opportunity to integrate into the society through ethnic communities avoiding all the hardships of individual integration. Thus the prototype of a community emerges. It primarily attracts recent migrants, and it would seem that these are the people who having a resource of ethnic solidarity should have created ethnic niches in economy. In fact, ethnic networks do appear, but there are many reasons to insist that their functioning are not directly linked with ethnicity. The results of our research show that in the studied migrant milieu ethnic solidarity is either absent completely or is, indeed, very limited. These facts are confirmed in the works of German researches (Erichsen, 1988; Heckmann, 1993). On these grounds we believe that most of American explanatory models of reactive cultural context, reactive ethnicity, resource theory of ethnic entrepreneurship, which focuses on ethnic solidarity as the main resource, should be reconsidered.

Under current historical conditions the cultural tradition of ethnic entrepreneurship research dating back to Max Weber is obviously out-of-date. Another factor at work here is globalization: societies come to be more and more alike, some cultural patterns of the migrant groups are similar to those of the hosting society, we can’t explain everything by their pre-migration experience, and sometimes it is hard to define what was present before and what was acquired after the migration. This is especially true in Russia since if we ignore the effects of the specific Soviet modernization and its national policy it is extremely difficult to interpret adequately the collected material.

In Russian cities there is one extremely interesting feature in the development of social networks which might appear ethnic at first sight. Most of the time within the same ethnic minority population two very different parallel communities are formed quite often not having any connection with each other.

One of them is usually the above mentioned self-organizing new migrant network based primarily on economic relations. The other is a sort of middle class club for those who have been living in the city for a long time and are well integrated into the urban community. These people have turned their ethnicity into a hobby and sometimes even into a profession and have monopolized the public space claiming to represent their ethnic group in general. Quite often this respectable community distances itself from its old compatriots, and the everyday practices and occupational structure of its members are not different from those of the other educated city residents. But it is in this milieu that the real ethnic networks emerge on the grounds of cultivating and exploiting of the ethnic capital (ethnic entrepreneurship). If we try to describe this situation by means of a usual explanatory model it may seem paradoxical: Migrant networks are not ethnic while the respectable citizens construct new ethnicity and organize “ethnic” community, including ethnic economic networks.

It may happen that in the course of the market reform “ethno-economic” processes in Russia will begin to resemble those which we observe in the West. If Russia becomes a hosting country the migrant economic niches of the people from the foreign countries not belonging to the ex-Soviet republics (first of all from China) will develop. But in view of what was said above, the nearest future will hardly witness any substantial community building by our ex-compatriots from the CIS. To sum up I would like to present several points for discussion.

1. Immigrant economy in Russia is not ethnic. Ethnicity is ascribed to it by researchers and by the representatives of the dominant majority. As a rule, migrant network participants do not regard the world in ethnic categories, and ethnicity does not play any significant role in their integration strategies. Economic networks are not constructed around ethnicity but rather to meet the criteria of the market: they aim to maximize the profits while minimizing the risk (level of trust, opportunities for control). Moral standards of this sphere imply that relatives and compatriots do have some advantage over the others, but they are not extended to the representatives of the same ethnic group.

This state of things is the result of the profound influence of the Soviet socialization under the condition when all the mechanisms for the transmission of traditional values were destroyed. The state indoctrinated the same rules for all the players on the territory of the country while at the same time proclaiming diversity. Diversity being promoted in public sphere, the real everyday practices of people became more and more universal. Actually, the differences between ex-Soviet people are so insignificant (they have even been members of one party!) that they do not have enough incentive to start constructing their peculiarity.

2. We can’t rule out that in principle ethnic economy does exist. At the same time when we examine the studies which are usually referred to as the proof of its existence we see that ethnicity was ascribed to the informants (respondents) in advance. We should be extremely careful using the concept of “ethnicity” in this sort of discussion in general. It is possible to imagine, though, that under certain conditions while pursuing their political interests the community elite may run any social relations ethnic. If at a certain point the immigrant community elite needs ethnic resource the economy will become ethnic. This is why it is possible that we can speak of ethnic economy in the USA, less so in Europe, but in Russia it is something to be discovered while studying Chinese, Vietnamese or Afghan communities.

3. The existence of economic links between the representatives of the “parallel community” who have long integrated into the dominant society can not serve as the proof of ethnic economy, since for them solidarity is determined by the needs of the market and not by ethnicity. At the same time it is not impossible that under certain conditions economic and social capital of ethnic professionals from “centers for national culture” may be joined by cheap immigrant labor (of their “compatriots”). Then the severe exploitation of the newcomers may wear a disguise of ethnic solidarity, and we may be able to observe the real case of ethnic economy.

4. Ethno-social studies in the post-Soviet space provide us with new material which is extremely helpful in understanding the difficulties caused by the use of ethnic categories in the description of social and economic processes. As soon as the researcher takes off the “ethnic” glasses it becomes clear that the majority of the studied processes can well be explained outside the concept of ethnicity.

I would go even further by expecting that the development of the society and of social science will encourage us to give up on using ethnic categories (the same way as we gave up using the concept of “race”). It is crucial to understand that any emphasis on ethnicity escalates social tension. Public discussion of any social issues in terms of ethnic problems inevitably brings about racism

Erichsen, R.. (1988) Selbstaendige Erwerbstaetigkeit von Auslaendern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland am Beispiel der Tuerken // Informationsdienst Auslaenderarbeit. N. 3. S. 21-27

Heckmann, F. (1991) Ethnische Kolanien // Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie. N. 3. S. 25-41

Konstruirovanie (1998) etnichnosti: formirovanie etnicheskikh obschin Sankt-Peterburga/ V.Voronkov, I. Oswald (red.). SPb: Dmitrii Bulanin

Radaev, V.V. (1993) Etnicheskoe predprinimatelstvo: mirovoi opyt i Rossiya // Politicheskie issledovaniya. ¹ 5. Ñ. 79-87