Surrogacy - contracted gestation and birthing of babies for other people - is a multibillion-dollar global industry. Because it commodifies a practice that belongs to an intimate, "sacred" sphere of the family, and mixes babies and money, it offers a natural window into a theoretical problem of...

States collect and evaluate information about people to enact governance, simplifying social realities into representations. We examine the infrastructure of a Chinese municipal social credit system (SCS) that collects data of trustworthiness and produces a credit score for each of its citizens....

This article provides a glimpse into the formation of the post-state-socialist business elites in Hungary, Poland and Russia. We raise four interrelated questions. 1) What is the extent of the change on the top of business hierarchy? 2) What social groups predominate in the new business elite?...

Alya Guseva, Professor of Sociology at Boston University, was interviewed by Natalia Khalina, a Lecturer at the Higher School of Economics. The interview was conducted during the workshop “Consumption and Economic Crises: Post-Socialist Experiences” (Moscow, 9-10 October 2014) where A....

Surrogacy - contracted gestation and birthing of babies for other people - is a multibillion-dollar global industry. Because it commodifies a practice that belongs to an intimate, "sacred" sphere of the family, and mixes babies and money, it offers a natural window into a theoretical problem of...