Political Survival or Entrepreneurial Development? Observations on Russian Business Networks

Networks are hybrid forms between hierarchies and markets. The present article focuses on the structure of Russian business networks and their potential for integration into European business networks. In Russia, two competing types of networks can currently be identified: survival networks and entrepreneurial networks. In the latter, the main interests of the enterprise managers are to improve market performance and profits. But in the former, enterprise managers are involved in a large “rent-seeking” game, in which political and market power are the major means by which rents are extracted. Managers within survival networks evaluate both internal and external business relationships with reference to their effects on rent-extraction capacities. In Russia today, survival networks predominate and entrepreneurial networks are relatively few in number.