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Purpose – The purpose of this essay is to look at the workplace of hostess clubs as moral projects and examine the constitution of morals in the marketplace “from below,” meaning from the perspective of workers. It focuses specifically on the experiences of Filipina hostesses, who constitute the majority of foreign hostesses in Japan. Specifically, it looks at their moral construction of commercial sex in the clubs where they work, which are usually Philippine clubs, meaning clubs that solely employ Filipino women.

Methodology/Approach – Ethnographic research in Philippine hostess clubs in Tokyo, Japan.

Findings – The analysis illustrates the emergence of three moral groupings among Filipina hostesses. They include moral prudes (those who view paid sex as immoral), moral rationalists (those who morally accept paid sex), and lastly moral in-betweeners (those who morally reject the direct purchase of sex but accept its indirect purchase). The case of hostess clubs shows us market activities – in this case, customer–hostess interactions – do not inevitably result in a hegemonic churning of a particular moral order, as the constitution of morals in the marketplace is not only a top-down process but depends on the actions from below, specifically the personal moral order of hostesses, the club culture (sex regimes), peer pressure, and employment status concerns.

Value – This essay provides concrete empirical evidence on an understudied group of migrant workers, and it advances our knowledge on the experiences of sex workers and their negotiation of moral views on commercial sex.

Purpose – This paper investigates the effects of founding, growth, decline, and merger on gender differences in managerial career mobility. These common events create and destroy many jobs, and so have big impacts on managers’ careers. We build on previous research to predict gender differences in job mobility after such events, and show that these gender differences are moderated by the positions managers occupy: level, firm size, and sex composition.

Methodology – We test our predictions using archival data on all 3,883 managerial employees in all 333 firms in the California savings and loan industry between 1975 and 1988. We conduct logistic-regression and event-history analyses.

Findings – Female managers are less likely than male managers to be hired when the set of jobs expands because of founding and growth, and more likely to exit when the set of jobs contracts because of decline and merger. These gender differences exist because relative to men, women occupy lower-level jobs, work in smaller firms, and work in firms with more women at all managerial ranks. The effects of all but one event (the growth of one's own employer) are moderated by managers’ positions.

Value of the paper – Our paper is the first to offer a large-scale test of gender differences in career trajectories in the wake of common organizational events. By showing that these market-shaping events affect male and female managers’ careers differently, and that these effects depend on the positions of male and female managers, we demonstrate economic sociology's potential for studying inequality.

Purpose – This chapter examines how the kollektiv, a form of workplace organization established in the Soviet Union, continues to shape cultural expectations of work in post-Soviet Russia.

Methodology/Approach – This chapter describes a workplace ethnography conducted in a college department in Novosibirsk, Russia in 1999–2000 and 2002, with follow-up trips in 2005–2006. Participant observation is combined with interviews of teachers and students in the department.

Findings – The kollektiv established in the Soviet Union has persisted in modified form in post-Soviet Russia. Instead of a means of Party control, the kollektiv became popularly associated with the group cohesion that arises from frequent social interaction. This sense of cohesion, accompanied by attendant habits of sharing holidays with work colleagues, has persisted to varying degrees among adults in Russia today. Furthermore, the structure of the kollektiv has been maintained for students in schools and colleges, so that new generations of Russian youth are raised to expect to work in cohesive small groups. Their behaviors and expectations contribute to the persistence of the kollektiv in Russian society in the present and near future.

Originality/Value of the paper – This chapter makes two unique contributions: (1) it adds a focus on white-collar work to the predominantly blue-collar and service occupations studied in Russia to date and (2) it presents workplace ethnography of academics, a group rarely studied ethnographically.

Purpose – We seek to understand under which conditions care work emerges from shadow economy and becomes visible, either within families or in a professional frame, both at a political level and at the micro level of social perceptions.

Methodology – We analyze the recent history of French social policies devoted to dependent people and we use a study describing the members of 91 French families confronted, in 2004, with one of their elderly members’ dependence.

Findings – The French State subsidizing compensation for daily difficulties of dependent people leads to a surprising parallel between the rise of specific jobs and the public recognition of family care work. When looking at family structures, there is a huge difference between multiple-members families and trapped kin, erasing gender effect in this latter case. Family care work becomes more visible when there exists a professional equivalent: cleaning, doing the laundry, or washing the dependent person. Thus, male family care work when existing, such as home repairs or administrative tasks, remains invisible.

Research limitations – We analyze the case of France, with two major specificities: a universal State insurance system in a process of including the risk of dependence and a high unemployment rate. We exclude childcare from our study.

Originality of paper – Care studies have developed from two traditions: one emphasizing the ethics of care, and the other straddling between family economics and sociology of domestic work. The paper takes place within a third literature, raising the issue of care work as intimate work, dealing with the personal relationship between a caregiver and a care receiver.

The essays in this book are a study on how globalization, as one of the main driving forces in economics, international relations, and cultures, has affected politics in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. With the contributors paying particular attention to the changing nature of the interactions between various types of domestic institutions and international structures, this book attempts to interpret the process of economic, political, and cultural change in post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe as it transformed from a relatively isolated corner of the world into a globally interconnected community with a European identity, based on democratic values and liberal markets. While Central and Eastern Europe entered and engaged so clearly, deeply, and rapidly in the multiple channels of globalization, there is a lacunae of reflections on this notable change, and only a few, often very specialized scholarly texts provide an account of how this region fared during this profound and multidimensional transformation. The analyses in this volume bridge this gap in a methodologically novel manner by combining the time-tested area-studies focus of various case-study countries and policies with the cross-disciplinary interpretations of the new theories of globalization.

I am honored to present Volume 23 of Political Power and Social Theory. I do so amid tumultuous times. It is now spring 2012. Fiscal uncertainty and economic stagnation freeze the globe, racial division continues to plague political discourse in the United States (witness the case of Trayvon Martin), new social movements like Occupy proliferate and resurface while war, revolution, and political instability unsettle the Middle East. The essays in this volume do not directly address these specific issues but they do offer informed research and theoretical reflection on the larger themes the more specific issues invoke. Robin Archer's thoughts on revolution “Free Riding on Revolution” invites reflection in the wake of the revolutions that still grip the world's attention and perhaps, too, on the Occupy movement. Manali Desai's essay on the origins of neoliberalism in India offers some historical context to rising criticisms of neoliberalism around the world while also revealing the importance of national political parties in the formulation of globally circulating policies. Nitsan Chorev's essay on the World Health Organization illuminates how health programs are challenged and reformulated in response to political pressure from different parts of the world; an important observation given that international organizations face the prospect of dwindling revenues amid the current economic crisis.

The main objective of this paper is to justify the implementation of blockchain (BC) over the traditional method deployed in the supply chain (SC) after using the fuzzy–analytic network process (fuzzy-ANP) application. Over the past two decades, the overall product cost is affected by the SC at a global level. Organizations are working on their existing SC for improving their performance. BC technology is a newly emerging technology and magnetizes the attention of researchers and industrialists. This technology is still at the initial stage, and only little investigation is available in the literature and it has not been much investigated by researchers.

Literature and expert opinion interpretation in BC characteristics are further analyzed and modeled using fuzzy–interpretive structural modeling (fuzzy-ISM), fuzzy-MICMAC and fuzzy-ANP. The combined approach of both fuzzy-ISM and fuzzy-MICMAC is applied to identify the common drivers to integrate the BC technology in the light of efficient supply chain management (SCM).

Comparative analysis between traditional and BC-based supply chain (BCSC) using fuzzy-ANP is carried out, considering the common driving characteristics. The proposed integrated (combined) approach of fuzzy-ISM, fuzzy-MICMAC and Fuzzy-ANP found that integration of BC with SCM is better prioritized than traditional supply chain management (TSCM). The findings in the article endorse that the TSCM can be made efficient by integrating the BC technology considering five most driving characteristics, namely, data safety and decentralization, accessibility, documentation, data management and quality.

The current proposed research work identifies 12 characteristics after studying numerous literature reviews and having a discussion with SC experts with knowledge of BC. The integrated approach of fuzzy-ISM and fuzzy-MICMAC is implemented here. After that, fuzzy-ANP is used to give ranking among BCSCM and TSCM. The study carried out in this article motivates industries to implement BC in their SC system. It will reduce the transaction cost, documentation work, save time and eliminate human error at the national and international levels. The common characteristics identified in this proposed work would help in managerial decisions for the adoption of BC to ensure that the system becomes more transparent, easily traceable and finally improve the performance.