Vadim Radaev and Zoya Kotelnikova, eds. The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy: Cases from Russia and Beyond. London: UCL Press, 2022

Abstract

The book The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy: Cases from Russia and Beyond is an edited volume and is published as a part of the UCL FRINGE series, edited by Alena Ledeneva and Peter Zusi. Ambivalence here is a methodological perspective through which the contributors to the volume analyze the relation between power and economy. In the preface to the volume, Ledeneva presents the roots of the ambivalence as a concept. She shows that ambivalence was first introduced in psychology, where it was taken as contradictory affective orientations within the same person (Bleuler [1911] 1950). Then, it was borrowed by sociologists (e.g., Merton 1976), who imply that ambivalence is embedded in social and power relations and thus it might be a fruitful unit of sociological analysis. Nowadays the concept is widely used by sociologists (Arribas-Ayllon and Bartlett 2014; Carolan 2010; Hillcoat-Nallétamby and Phillips 2011).

Text in English