Values and Attitudes of Young Russians

A sense of "we" is part of any healthy group identity; a hypertrophied "us" vs "them" mentality is a negative.     

Eugenic Family Politics and Social Democrats: "Positive" Eugenics and Marriage Advice Bureaus

Abstract  During the first half of the twentieth century eugenics became a mainstream body of thinking and an approach to the solution of social problems across Europe and North America. Fears of degeneration and certain notions of heredity and fertility had produced widespread discourses regarding threats to the nation's health and its reproductive capacities. Governing nations' procreative activities shaped social policies and practices thus placing gender and sexuality at the centre of analysis. The article examines how eugenics became an axis of intervention in family and reproductive politics through discourses and practices of "positive" eugenics. The substantive focus here is on the eugenic content of premarital advice and family politics in Switzerland assessing the impact of the eugenics movement as well as the women's movement. The article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on comparative historical analyses of eugenics by contextualising Switzerland in a eugenic international.     

Leveraging symbolic capital: the use of blat networks across transnational spaces

In this article, we contribute to debates on how social networks sustain migrants' entrepreneurial activities. By reporting on 31 interviews with Eastern European migrants in the UK, we provide a critical lens on the tendency to assume that migrants have ready‐made social networks in the host country embedded in co‐ethnic communities. We extend this limited perspective by demonstrating how Eastern European migrants working in the UK transform blat social networks, formulated in the cultural and political contours of Soviet society, in their everyday lived experiences. Our findings highlight not only the monetarization of such networks but also the continuing embedded nature of trust existing within these networks, which cut across transnational spaces. We show how forms of social capital based on Russian language use and legacies of a shared Soviet past, are just as important as the role of ‘co‐ethnics’ and ‘co‐migrants’ in facilitating business development. In doing so, we present a more nuanced understanding of the role that symbolic capital plays in migrant entrepreneurial journeys and its multifaceted nature.     

Transnational migrant entrepreneurship,gender and family business

Despite increased academic attention paid to migration flows in Europe, the gendered nature of transnational migrant entrepreneurial journeys within the context of a family business remains under‐researched. We address this gap by investigating how transnational spaces allow women to challenge dominant ideas about their roles, and to claim legitimacy by opening branches of their family business abroad. With extensive longitudinal evidence collected over a seven‐year period, we showcase four biographical narratives of women operating transnational family businesses in the UK that had originated in Eastern Europe. Adopting this novel longitudinal approach, we provide insights into how these transnational migrant women entrepreneurs exercise individual agency to overcome structural constraints by developing strategies that prioritize their own business aspirations without fully sacrificing their family ties.