The liberalisation of religious practice after the fall of the Soviet regime and the support by the Russian state to the Russian Orthodox Church have contributed to the enormous growth of the church economy. Controversies within and without the Church interrogate commercial and gifting practices. The relationship between the expansion of church commerce and the operation of moral boundaries, underlined by critical stances, has been determined by culture and history, with the post-Soviet transformation having played a key role in shaping popular notions of selflessness and profit-seeking. Moreover, as people participate in the church economy they mobilise perceptions of the differential moral valence of gift and commerce in order to communicate concerning the power of the Church, its controversial image, Russia’s social stratification, and to deploy ethics of equity and honesty.

“Weak ties”, a valuable aid in getting a job, are generally work ties. One reason for this feature is not that former colleagues increase one’s information but rather that they value the pursuit of past collaboration. We examine the consequence of the collaboration ties hypothesis in the financial industry labor market. In finance, the labor market values the assets that financial operatives take with them from one firm to another, such as knowledge, know-how and customers. Since assets are to a certain extent shared among co-workers, it is worth hiring business relations and former colleagues or moving in teams: this enables a better transfer of assets such as idiosyncratic work routines, distributed knowledge, or joint customers. To demonstrate our claims we rely on an online survey launched with eFinancialCareers.fr collected in September 2008 among French financial employees. This questionnaire shows that working at the core of financial markets favors the accumulation of key moveable assets on the one hand and of collaboration ties on the other. That is, collaboration ties and key moveable assets are strongly correlated. The moving of key assets, collaboration ties and notably the combination of those two dimensions all result in increased wages.

In many Indian villages, the Dalits (Scheduled Castes or former Untouchables) are victims of daily atrocities at the hands of the dominant castes. With respect to the 2006 murder of a family of Dalits by their village’s ruling caste, we show how the police, the medical profession, the courts, and the authorities combined to deny them justice and obstruct the enforcement of laws that are aimed at protecting them – with the involvement of many Dalit officials. In conclusion, it would seem that none of the options or strategies pursued by researchers or activists is likely to improve conditions for the Dalits in the near future: a caste system that is highly adapted to globalisation is far from disappearing; nor is the "practice of untouchability" prohibited by the Constitution (1950).

Informed by nearly six years of teaching experiences in high poverty schools of New York and Amsterdam, this ethnographic comparison examines the following question: Even though they often say they “know better”, why do so many teens from low income neighborhoods behave in aggressively disruptive ways that contribute to the further destruction of their own schools? This article suggests that the long dominant oppositional black culture approach to such questions related to life in distressed urban schools promotes overly mentalist and therefore superficial analyses. A more fully incarnated, collectively impassioned, relational, and processual way of thinking about the gradual socialization and immediate coping processes behind the further devastating of physically violent schools is offered. Interrogating the state and process that students in both settings referred to with terms like “coming hard”, this article brings to life the temporarily seductive yet ultimately maladaptive embodied stress responses of two male students effectively forced to sever visceral connections to themselves. Probing deep into how hardening was both habituated and situated on opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean can help us advance our grip on—and perhaps even our attempts to deal with—the ways in which teenagers’ feelings of empathy and abilities to “think straight” are crowded out during the moments that matter most in and around our worst schools.

Studies of xenophobia have focused either on socio-economic context that accentuates xenophobic attitudes or on perceptions of immigrants, namely symbolic and realistic threats as well as on social distance from immigrants. This study examines closely the relationship among various components of xenophobia and their contribution in the formation of particular xenophobic groups. The analysis identified four different xenophobic groups, i.e. a) The distant xenophobic group, b) The core xenophobic group, c) The subtle xenophobic group and d) The ambivalent xenophobic group. The groups’ profiles are synthesized through negative, neutral and positive properties of overall attitudes towards immigrants, perceived threats, political xenophobia, social distance, authoritarian attitudes and individual social characteristics. The survey results demonstrate that a multidimensional conceptualization of xenophobia is needed both at the level of objective social condition and of individual and collective perceptions.