Russian entrepreneurs have long faced considerable difficulties. While much is known about what these difficulties are, less is known about how entrepreneurs respond to them, what it is like to be an entrepreneur under these circumstances and why they bother in the first place. In this thesis I address these questions by conducting a multi-sited ethnography within three small Siberian enterprises, observing the directors as they conduct their everyday business. I find that these entrepreneurs all resent their vulnerable position in the political economy but that they have developed a capacity to survive or thrive in spite of the obstacles and threats they encounter. This capacity, I argue, is less a consequence of their commercial acumen than their understanding of what can be achieved given their particular circumstances, their knowledge that business-state relations take an informal, personalised form, and their preparedness to resist predatory outsiders. This leads me to reconsider the meaning of entrepreneurship in the Russian context. Furthermore, my informants’ agency presents a challenge to the idea in predominant political economic theories that the Russian state dominates the private sector. I therefore reconceptualise business-state relations using Douglass C. North et al’s Limited Access Order theory in combination with my empirical materials. This provides a more accurate theory that accepts the pre-eminent role of the state in the political economy while accommodating the agency displayed by my informants.

This thesis examines the evolution of Russia’s internal and external security perceptions from 2000-2008. Drawing on social constructivist ontology, it argues that the Putin regime’s articulation of security priorities evolved in relation to its reconceptualisation of Russian state identity from a ‘weak’ to a ‘strong’ state. To trace this evolutionary relationship between state identity and security perceptions, official discourse on Chechnya is examined. In this way, Russian narrative constructions of the process of securitisation and desecuritisation of Chechnya, and the role that this discourse played within the articulation of state identity and security priorities are investigated. The thesis suggests that the initial securitisation and subsequent desecuritisation of Chechnya are best understood within the Putin regime’s discursive construction of state building and changing security priorities, rather than as a reflection of shifting material conditions. The thesis concludes that analysis of individual security policies should take into account that the narrative construction of these policies shape, and are shaped by, the multifaceted and evolutionary meta-narratives of Russian state and security identity. Moreover, it is argued that Russian security policy should be studied as a subject in its own right, investigating both internal and external security issues, rather than being subsumed within a broader foreign policy analysis.

The acquisition and maintenance of human capital are considered key drivers of productivity and economic growth. However, recent literature shows that in the case of Russia, this relationship is not obvious, which raises a question concerning the nature of human capital accumulation, despite the significant expansion of tertiary education in this country. The existing literature, much of it relying on a theory of market imperfections, tends to explain low incidences of training by the lack of employer incentives to invest in the human capital of their employees. This dissertation adds to this view confirming the negative role of ‘bad’ jobs and social origins in obstructing employees from skills development in BRIC-like countries. Skills training in Russia is constrained by stratifying occupational forces comprising jobs with low requirements to skills development, which conserves the working population in generic labour. This reveals the phenomenon of skills polarisation ‘at the bottom’ in a late-industrial country, thus, contributing to the growing critique of the knowledge society theory. For those few workers who occupy ‘good’ jobs, skills training is strongly linked to personal-specific traits, such as qualifications and computer and language skills; and this is common in both Russia and India. However, in contrast to Russia, India is still forming their knowledge society. This is confirmed by the statistically significant impact of socio-demographic origins (e.g. age, household size, marital status, and religion) on the incidence of training, which reveals a crucial role of ascription in human capital acquisition in contemporary India. The present thesis contributes to the growing literature on structural prerequisites for successful advancement and the contradictory development of the BRIC countries.

This thesis focuses on the developments in the Soviet top-elite dynamics from 1981 to 1991. It claims that a careful examination of particular characteristics of the Soviet nomenklatura as a form of top-elite can give us important hints on how the intra-nomenklatura tensions that had been accumulating since its inception aggravated in the last decade of the USSR and contributed substantially to the Union&rsquo / s drive to the end. Hence, the main argument of this thesis is that when the Soviet top-elite lost its confidence on the elite-preserving capacity of Gorbachev, it started searching for alternatives, one of the most notable of which was the market economy option advocated by Boris Yeltsin at that time. This shift in the preferences of the Soviet nomenklatura played a considerable role in the dissolution process.

Die vorschulischen mathematischen Kompetenzen von Kindern stellen eine wichtige Einflussgröße für spätere Schulleistungen dar. Aufgrund der wiederkehrend bescheinigten, niedrigen Qualität der mathematischen Förderung in Kindertageseinrichtungen ist ein Bedarf an geeigneten Professionalisierungsmaßnahmen vorhanden. Hieran knüpft die vorliegende Dissertation an: 1. wird der Einfluss von kombinierten Interventionsmaßnahmen zur alltagsintegrierten mathematischen Förderung (Fortbildung und darauf aufbauendem Coaching) gegenüber der alleinigen Fortbildung auf Fachkraft- und Kindebene untersucht. Die Kinder der Coachinggruppe zeigen signifikant bessere Ergebnisse im Inhaltsbereich Zahlen und Mengen als die der Fortbildungsgruppe. Interventionsunabhängige Gruppenunterschiede auf Kindebene können mithilfe hierarchischer Analysen auf Unterschiede bei den Fachkräften bezüglich des Fachwissens, der kognitiven Aktivierung sowie der Interaktionsqualität zurückgeführt werden. Der direkte Gruppenvergleich zeigt keine signifikanten Unterschiede; das zusätzliche Coaching entfaltet nur auf individueller Ebene Wirkung. 2. untersucht die Arbeit Erkenntnisse zur mathematischen Förderpraxis der Fachkräfte sowie zur Rezeption des Coachings. Die Datenerfassung fand als teilnehmende Beobachtung statt; die Auswertung erfolgte mithilfe eines selbstentwickelten prozessual-strukturellen Analyseverfahrens in Anlehnung an die dokumentarische Methode. Die Befunde zeigen eine eingeschränkte mathematische Förderpraxis in den Kindergärten, die überwiegend in standardisierten Situationen stattfindet, während mathematische Förderpotenziale von Alltagssituationen oft ungenutzt bleiben. Das Coaching ist geeignet, die Kompetenzen der Fachkräfte zu verbessern; dem stehen jedoch personelle und strukturelle Gründe entgegen. Implikationen werden auf den Ebenen der Forschung, der Professionalisierung, der praxisbezogenen Rahmenbedingungen und der praktischen Arbeit benannt sowie Forschungsdesiderata formuliert. / The preschool competence of children in mathematics is an important factor for their school performance. Due to the recurrently measured low quality of mathematical support in kindergarten, there is an urgent need for professional training. In this thesis two research questions are examined: The 1. question investigates the influence of combined intervention measures for mathematical support in everyday life (further training and additional coaching), compared to sole further training, on the skills of the kindergarten teachers and the mathematical skills of the children. The children of the coaching group score better than the further training group in the content area numbers and quantities. In the context of hierarchical analysis, the group differences at child level can be traced back to differences at teachers‘ level in mathematical content knowledge, cognitive activation and mathematical interactive support. But no significant differences are found between the groups of the teachers; the additional coaching only improves individual facets of professional competence. The 2. question analyzes the mathematical support practice of kindergarten teachers and their reception of a mathematical coaching. The data was gained by means of a participatory observation. The evaluation was carried out using a self-developed process-structural analysis method based on the documentary method. The findings show that mathematical support practice in kindergartens is restricted to selected aspects of mathematical process and content standards, which predominantly takes place in standardized situations, while the mathematical support potential of everyday situations often remains unused. Coaching is suitable for improving the skills of the kindergarten teachers, but there are personal and structural obstacles. Implications are named at the levels of research, professionalization, practical framework conditions and practical work, and research desiderata are formulated.