Between exchange and reciprocity: Matching workers with jobs in a local Russian labor market

Revisiting Polanyi's concept of economy as an instituted process, this dissertation explores the ways in which the interplay between market forces, the state, and social relations shapes the allocation of labor in a local Russian labor market. The linked employer-employee data on hiring practices of organizations and individuals come from the survey of a two-stage stratified clustered probability sample of 93 organizations and 1,143 hires carried out in 1999 in the large industrial city of Samara. Two-level hierarchical logit models estimate the effects of labor market structures---formal private intermediaries, the Federal Employment Service, and social networks---on the proliferation of exchange, redistribution, and reciprocity in hiring. The analysis shows that the state-controlled mechanism of administrative job assignments collapsed in the early 1990s. The basic elements of exchange at the individual level appear in a limited portion of hires. Only 28% of workers and 45% of employers pursue alternative jobs and job candidates, 10% of hires are made through bargaining between an employer and employee. Employers expand the scope of job candidates through their own networks but barely use the networks of their employees for the same purpose. The Federal Employment Service provides alternative job opportunities for the registered unemployed only while private employment agencies and mass media serve wider segments of the labor force. Employers get their alternatives from both the Federal Employment Service and state-independent market intermediaries 63% of hires involve reciprocity. History of previous economic exchanges between the worker and her hiring contacts increases the likelihood of a favor in hiring through the self-reinforcing mechanism of restricted reciprocity. Generalized reciprocity is sustained primarily by relatively dense networks which reinforce the social norm of reciprocity and simultaneously undermine market exchange by limiting the scope of opportunities available to a worker and making wage bargaining between workers and employers slightly less likely. The dissertation shows that exchange and reciprocity closely interact in the Russian labor market complementarities and tensions between them make institutional creativity and sensitivity to the social aspects of seemingly purely economic phenomena crucial for more effective post-socialist transformation.