Informal economic relations and organizations: everyday organizational life in Soviet and post-Soviet economies

Purpose This paper aims to identify the role of informal economic relations in the day-to-day working of organizations, thereby opening a way to theorizing and informed practice. We will present and discuss about the manifestation of informality in ‘everyday’ reality of Soviet and transformation economies. Informed by Cultural Theory and in particular the work of Gerald Mars, we are taking account ontologically and methodologically of Labor Process theory Design/methodology/approach Through presentation of ethnographic data of detailed accounts and case vignettes in production and retail in the Soviet period of the late 1970s and 1980s and from the construction sector in contemporary Russia, with a focus on the labor process, we inform and discuss key processes in the informal working of organizations. Findings In the Soviet system the informal economy co-existed in symbiosis with the formal command economy, implicitly adopting a ‘live and let live’ attitude. In addition, informal relations were essential to the working of work organizations, sustaining workers’ ‘negative control’ and bargaining power. Contemporary Russian capitalism, while embracing informal economic activities, a legacy of the Soviet period, advocates an ‘each to his own’ approach which retains the flexibility but not the bargaining space for employees. That facilitates exploitation, particularly of the most vulnerable workers, with dire consequences for the work process. Research limitations/implications The paper provides a platform for theorizing about the role and place of informal economic relations in organizations. Of importance to managerial practice, the paper informs on those aspects of the work routine that remain hidden from view and are often excluded from academic discourse. The social implications are profound, shedding light on central issues such as recruitment, income distribution, health & safety and ’deregulated forms of employment. Originality/value The paper examines economic behavior under different economic-political regimes demonstrating continuities and changes during a fundamental social-economic reorientation of an important regional economy, through close observation at the micro and meso-level of, respectively, the workplace, organizations and industry, outlining theoretical, practical and social implications

Observation of Enhanced Beaming from Photonic Crystal Waveguides

We report on the experimental observation of the beaming effect in photonic crystals enhanced via surface modes. We experimentally map the spatial field distribution of energy emitted from a subwavelength photonic crystal waveguide into free-space, rendering with crisp clarity the diffractionless beaming of energy. Our experimental data agree well with our numerical studies of the beaming enhancement in photonic crystals with modulated surfaces. Without loss of generality, we study the beaming effect in a photonic crystal scaled to microwave frequencies and demonstrate the technological capacity to deliver long-range, wavelength-scaled beaming of energy.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba

This paper outlines the mechanisms used to position the offspring of slave women and white men at various points within late nineteenth-century Cuba’s racial hierarchy. The reproductive choices available to these parents allowed for small, but significant, transformations to the existing patterns of race and challenged the social separation that typically under girded African slavery in the Americas. As white men mated with black and mulatta women, they were critical agents in the initial determination of their children’s status–as slave, free, mulatto, or even white. This definitional flexibility fostered an unintended corruption of the very meaning of whiteness. Similarly, through mating with white men, enslaved women exercised a degree of procreative choice, despite their subjugated condition. In acknowledging the range of rape, concubinage, and marriage exercised between slave women and white men, this paper highlights the important links between reproductive practices and the social construction of race

Stabilization of a Fabry-Perot interferometer using a suspension-point interferometer

A suspension-point interferometer (SPI) is an auxiliary interferometer for active vibration isolation, implemented at the suspension points of the mirrors of an interferometric gravitational wave detector. We constructed a prototype Fabry-Perot interferometer equipped with an SPI and observed vibration isolation in both the spectrum and transfer function. The noise spectrum of the main interferometer was reduced by 40 dB below 1 Hz. Transfer function measurements showed that the SPI also produced good vibration suppression above 1 Hz. These results indicate that SPI can improve both the sensitivity and the stability of the interferometer.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures; added discussion; to be published in Physics Letters