Social Fields' Boundaries Elaboration and Challenging in the Context of Businessmen-State Agents Interactions. Entrepreneurial Field Formation in Post-Soviet Russia

The paper proposes to apprehend the question of field’s boundaries elaboration and challenging through the analysis of businessmen-state agents relations in post soviet Russia. The transition from planned economy to the market economy led to the formation of new entrepreneurial field, which meant the displacement of the administrative field’s boundaries. The specific logic of the administrative field which was guiding previously the economic actor’s behavior during the soviet period had to give way to a new market based logic born with the formation of a new differentiated space struggling for it’s relative autonomy. In the 2000s the two fields coexist, but their boundaries continue to be actively elaborated and challenged in the context of struggles for power between two types of actors : businessmen and state agents. Our analysis proposes to pay attention to the struggles for emancipation led by businessmen (the empirical data gathered concerns small and medium enterprises) and their defense strategies against the state agents attacks (in the context of corruption and extortion practiced by state agents). It proposes also to pay attention to the strategies of the state agents leading to the expansion of the specific redistributive logic of the administrative field in prejudice of the authority of the entrepreneurial field’s logic. The empirical research is based on in-depth interviews with businessmen and state agents (the representatives of executive power of tree different levels : local, regional and federal interacting with businessmen in the context of the exercise of the control and authorization powers), observation, work on archives and on the local press in one town situated in Moscow region. The attention was specifically paid to the trajectories of the two types of actors and their circulation between the administrative and the entrepreneurial fields since the start of economic transition.