Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

What Does a “Thank you” Cost? Informal Exchange and the Case of “Brift” in Contemporary Russia

  • Published:
Qualitative Sociology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The following article addresses the complex nature of informal exchange in contemporary Russia. I borrow the term “brift” from Abel Polese in order to analyze a hybrid nature of informal transactions that have a ternary nature embodying bribery, gift-giving, and a mechanism of building social capital. While there exists a wealth of studies on informal exchange in Post-Soviet states and modern Russia, the question of how participants of the exchange make sense of the transactions and conditions of the exchange, how they morally and mentally estimate the value and price of the favors, and how they choose appropriate items for reciprocating for the favors still remains understudied. The study addresses this theoretical dilemma and provides a detailed investigation of the meaning-making process intrinsic to this type of informal transactions. The article provides analysis of the in-depth interviews with citizens of St. Petersburg and demonstrates the complexity of the cognitive work of calculating the right price and estimating the proper value and fitness of the items to be used in the brift transactions. This research generally points to the need for a greater sensitivity to intricacies of meaning, practice, and cognitive work that saturate informal exchange, and further calls for a wider acceptance of the concept of brift.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. I intentionally omitted younger participants since they are likely to have a very short or completely absent work experience and are also likely to be living with parents and having a high level of dependence on them. This, I predict, would be lowering the possibility of younger adults personally having to practice informal exchange and, instead, increasing the possibility of their parents having to solve the issues through their personal channels that are not well known to their children.

  2. Some example questions are: Were you ever in a situation where you felt like you had to use a bribe to get something done? Could you please walk me through the process of giving and taking a bribe? Could you please tell me more about that situation when you reciprocated a favor that the person has given you? What kind of services did that person provide and how did you reciprocate? How do you decide on the value of a thing that you give to a person who gave you a favor? How do you make sure that your present is not too cheap? Have there ever been situations when you later on understood that the thing that you gave to the person after the favor was too cheap or didn’t fit the receivers expectations? What do you think is the difference between a bribe and a present?

  3. Due to the persisting high rural-urban economic divide in Russia, I expect the brift exchange in rural areas to involve a narrower range of items and items of lower value than those used in the brift exchange in urban centers. Furthermore, we should expect the active usage of crops, fruit, and home-made preserves, grown and made by the participants of brift exchange on their plots of land and seasonal rural homes-dachas. A hint to that can be found in an excerpt from the interview with Mikhail in the third section of the paper.

  4. I expect that, among the representatives of upper class, brifts may turn into post-transaction gift exchanges that would lean closer to the concept of bribes and would have a much higher price (such as high-end gadgets or cars). We can with certainty say that brifts of that level will be used in exchange for major illegal favors involving high stakes, such as winning bids for providing products or services, construction work or restorations. In these situations, brifts would be mainly serving as convoluted bribes, not a mechanism of maintaining the relationship or building trust, thus becoming a more simplified type of informal exchange than that among people of lower economic class.

  5. It is quite interesting to see that the “chocolate bar” repeatedly appears in the interviews. Chocolate bars are generally considered to be small tokens of appreciation used in daily life, especially for women. We can find this tradition illustrated even in one of the Soviet movies Opasno Dlya Zhizni (1985) where a secretary of a local official would receive so many chocolate bars from the visitors that she would go to a local cafe and sell them back.

  6. You meet the person based on the looks; you say goodbye based on the intellect.

  7. Car brand manufactured in the Soviet Union and Russia. It is known in modern Russia as a poor person’s car.

  8. By “prices” Sasha means bribes.

  9. Four out of 20 respondents have been repeatedly receiving brifts due to their occupation, three of them continue receiving brifts today due to their current employment: a dentist, a train conductor, and the vice principal of a local school. The fourth participant, Mikhail, used to often receive brifts as a traffic policeman, but he lost that privilege because he got fired. Today he is self-employed, now he can only reminisce about the days when, as he proudly told me, he was “on the other side.” Essentially, the privilege of being brifts receiver is connected to the amount of power and perceived power that an individual can use for his own and for the brift-givers benefit, and it is closely connected to one’s social status and job.

  10. I would like to point out that after Mikhail got fired (he refused to share with me the reason for getting fired) he started a new shift method job that puts him at work for a few weeks away from his family, while still allowing for spending weeks at a time at home. As a result of not needing to go to work 9 to 5 every day, nowadays Mikhail spends half a year at his dacha, where he and his family are growing a lot of fruits and vegetables, which explains his idea of using crops as brifts.

References

  • Akerstrom, Malin. 2014. Suspicious gifts: Bribery, morality, and professional ethics. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ashwin, Sarah, Irina Tartakovskaya, Marina Ilyina, and Tatyana Lytkina. 2013. Gendering reciprocity: Solving a puzzle of non reciprocation. Gender and Society 27 (3): 396–421.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bandelj, Nina. 2012. Relational work and economic sociology. Politics and Society 40 (2): 175–201.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blau, Peter M. 1986. Exchange and power in social life. New York: Transaction Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The forms of capital. In Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, ed. John Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clammer, John. 2012. Corruption, development, chaos and social disorganization: Sociological reflections on corruption and its social basis. In Corruption. Expanding the focus, eds. Manuhuia Barcham, Barry Hindess, and Peter Larmour, 113–132. Canberra: Australian National University E Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Denisova, Irina, Markus Eller, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. 2010. What do Russians think about transition? The Economics of Transition 18 (2): 249–280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The world of goods: Towards an anthropology of consumption. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Furnham, Adrian, and Michael Argyle. 1998. The psychology of money. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaag, Martin V., and Tom Snijders. 2003. Proposals for the measurement of individual social capital. In Creation and returns of social capital: A new research program, eds. Henk Flap and Beate Völker, 153–176. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gerber, Theodore P., and Sarah E. Mendelson. 2008. Public experiences of police violence and corruption in contemporary Russia: A case of predatory policing? Law & Society Review 42 (1): 1–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gilinskiy, Yakov. 2005. Corruption: Theory and Russian reality. In Policing corruption: International perspectives, eds. Rick Sarre, Dilip Das, and H.J. Albrecht, 157–167. Maryland: Lexington Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Godbout, Jacques T., and Alan Caille. 1998. World of the gift. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gorsira, Madelijne, Adrian Denkers, and Wim Huisman. 2018. Both sides of the coin: Motives for corruption among public officials and business employees. Journal of Business Ethics 151 (1): 179–194.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gouldner, Alvin W. 1960. The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review 25 (2): 161–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Granovetter, Mark. 2007. The social construction of corruption. In On capitalism, eds. Victor Nee and Richard Swedberd, 152–174. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, Elizabeth. 2007. Corruption. Development in Practice 17 (4/5): 672–678.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. The unmaking of soviet life: Everyday economies after socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Humphrey, Caroline. 2016. A new look at favours. In Economies of favour after socialism, eds. David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky, 50–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 2017. Shanghaied by the bureaucracy: Bribery and post-soviet officialdom in Russia and Mongolia. In Between morality and the law: Corruption, anthropology and comparative society, ed. Italo Pardo, 93–108. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnston, Michael. 2005. Syndromes of corruption: Wealth, power, and democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kollock, Peter. 1994. The emergence of exchange structures: An experimental study of uncertainty, commitment, and trust. The American Journal of Sociology 100 (2): 313–345.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Komter, Aafke E. 2005. Social solidarity and the gift. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kottak, Conrad Philip. 1970. Towards a comparative science of society. Comparative Studies in Society and History 12 (1): 92–109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kuchenkova, Anna Vladimirovna. 2017. Interpersonal trust in Russian society. Sociological Research 56 (1): 81–96.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lainer-Vos, Dan. 2013. The practical organization of moral transactions: Gift giving, market exchange, credit, and the making of diaspora bonds. Sociological Theory 31 (2): 145–167.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lawler, Edward J. 2001. An affect theory of social exchange. American Journal of Sociology 107 (2): 321–352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ledeneva, Alena V. 1997. Practices of exchange and networking in Russia. Soziale Welt 48: 151–170.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ledeneva, Alena V. 2006. How Russia really works: The informal practices that shaped post-soviet politics and business. London: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ledeneva, Alena V. 2009. From Russia with blat: Can informal networks help modernize Russia? Social Research 76 (1): 257–288.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ledeneva, Alena V., Roxana Bratu, and Philipp Köker. 2017. Corruption studies for the twenty-first century: Paradigm shifts and innovative approaches. The Slavonic and East European Review 95 (1): 1–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lonkila, Markku. 2011. Networks in the Russian market economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Malinovski, Bronislav. 2002. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mauss, Marcel. 2016. The gift. Expanded edition. Chicago: Hau Books.

  • McMann, Kelly M. 2014. Corruption as a last resort: Adapting to the market in Central Asia. New York: Cornell University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, William L., Ase B. Grodeland, and Tatyana Koshechkina. 2001. A culture of corruption? Coping with government in post-communist Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Molm, Linda D. 2003. Theoretical comparisons of forms of exchange. Sociological Theory 21 (1): 1–17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Molm, Linda D. 2006. The social exchange framework. In Contemporary social psychological theories, ed. Peter J. Burke, 24–45. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Molm, Linda D., Nobuyuki Takahashi, and Gretchen Peterson. 2000. Risk and trust in social exchange: An experimental test of a classical proposition. American Journal of Sociology 105 (5): 1396–1427.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Molm, Linda D., Gretchen Peterson, and Nobuyuki Takahashi. 2003. In the eye of the beholder: Procedural justice in social exchange. American Sociological Review 68: 128–152.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morris, Jeremy, and Abel Polese. 2016. Informal health and education sector payments in Russian and Ukrainian cities: Structuring welfare from below. European Urban and Regional Studies 23 (3): 481–496.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Narayan Deepa, Raj Patel, Kai Schafft, Anne Rademacher, and Sarah Koch-Schulte. 2000. Voices of the Poor. Can Anyone Hear Us? World Bank. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Oka, Natsuko. 2015. Informal payments and connections in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Central Asian Survey 34 (3): 330–340.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oka, Natsuko. 2019. Grades and degrees for sale: Understanding informal exchanges in Kazakhstan’s education sector. Problems of Post-Communism 66 (5): 329–341.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Patico, Jennifer. 2002. Chocolate and cognac: Gifts and the recognition of social worlds in post-soviet Russia. Ethnos 67 (3): 345–368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Polese, Abel. 2008. If I receive it, it is a gift; if I demand it, then it is a bribe: On the local meaning of economic transactions of post-Soviet Ukraine. Anthropology in Action 15 (3): 47–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Polese, Abel. 2014. Informal payments in Ukrainian hospitals: On the boundary between informal payments, gifts, and bribes. Anthropological Forum 24 (4): 381–395.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Raiklin, Ernest. 2009. Continuity in Russian corruption through changing societal forms. The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies 34 (4): 399–463.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reisinger, William M., Marina Zaloznaya, Vicki L. Hesli, and Claypool. 2017. Does everyday corruption affect how Russians view their political leadership? Post-Soviet Affairs 33 (4): 255–275.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reisinger, William M., Marina Zaloznaya, Vicki L. Hesli, and Claypool. 2020. Popular legal attitudes and the political order: Comparative evidence from Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. Europe-Asia Studies 73 (1): 1–24.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ridgeway, Cecilia. 1997. Interaction and the conservation of gender inequality: Considering employment. American Sociological Review 62: 218–235.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rimskii, Vladimir. 2013. Bribery as a norm for citizens settling problems in government and budget-funded organizations. Russian Social Science Review 54 (6): 23–39.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rivkin-Fish, Michele. 2005. Bribes, gifts and unofficial payments: Rethinking corruption in post-Soviet Russian health care. In Corruption: Anthropological perspectives, eds. Dieter Haller and Cris Shore, 47–64. London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rose, Richard, and Caryn Peiffer. 2019. Understanding corruption in different contexts. In Public policy research in the global south: A cross country perspective, ed. Heike M. Grimm, 27–42. Berlin: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rose-Ackerman, Susan. 1999. Political corruption and democracy. Connecticut Journal of International Law 14 (2): 363–378.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwartz, Barry. 1967. The social psychology of the gift. American Journal of Sociology 73 (1): 1–11.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shlapentokh, Vladimir. 2006. Trust in public institutions in Russia: The lowest in the world. Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39 (2): 153–174.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Daniel J. 2007. A culture of corruption: Everyday deception and popular discontent in Nigeria. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stan, Sabina. 2012. Neither commodities nor gifts: Post-socialist informal exchanges in the Romanian healthcare system. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (1): 65–82.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Steidlmeier, Paul. 1999. Gift giving, bribery and corruption: Ethical management of business relationships in China. Journal of Business Ethics 20: 121–132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stepurko, Tetiana, Pavlova Milena, Gryga Irena, Gaál Peter, and Groot Wim. 2017. Patterns of informal patient payments in Bulgaria, Hungary and Ukraine: A comparison across countries, years and type of services. Health Policy and Planning 32 (4): 453–466.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tavits, Margit. 2010. Why do people engage in corruption? The case of Estonia. Social Forces 88 (3): 1257–1279.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Temple, Paul, and Georgy Petrov. 2004. Corruption in higher education: Some findings from the states of the former Soviet Union. Higher Education Management and Policy 16 (1): 83–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Torsello, Davide. 2015. Corruption as social exchange: The view from anthropology. In Debates of corruption and integrity. Perspectives from Europe and the US, eds. Peter Hardi, Paul M. Heywood, and Davide Torsello, 159–183. Hampshire: Palgrave Mcmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Unger, Donald G., and Douglas R. Powell. 1980. Supporting families under stress: The role of social networks. Family Relations 29: 566–574.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Urinboyev, Rustam. 2019. Everyday corruption and social norms in post-soviet Uzbekistan. The program on governance and local development at Gothenburg. Working Paper No 19: 1–32.

  • Werner, Cynthia. 2000. Gifts, bribes, and development in Post-soviet Kazakhstan. Human Organization 59 (1): 11–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woolcock, Michael. 2000. Managing risk, shocks, and opportunity in developing economies: The role of social capital. In Dimensions of development, ed. Gustav Ranis, 197–212. New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zaloznaya, Marina. 2012. Organizational cultures as agents of differential association: Explaining the variation in bribery practices in Ukrainian universities. Crime, Law, and Social Change 58 (3): 295–320.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zaloznaya, Marina. 2014. The social psychology of corruption: Why it does not exist and why it should. Sociology Compass 8 (2): 187–202.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zaloznaya, Marina. 2017. The politics of bureaucratic corruption in post-transitional Eastern Europe. Cambridge University Press.

  • Zaloznaya, Marina, Vicki L. Hesli Claypool, and William M. Reisinger. 2018. Pathways to corruption: Institutional context and citizen participation in bureaucratic corruption. Social Forces 96 (4): 1875–1904.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zelizer, Vivian A. 1994. The social meaning of money. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This paper and the research behind it would not have been possible without the exceptional guidance and support of my academic advisor Dr. Matthew Norton. I would also like to thank Dr. Light, Dr. York, Dr. Otis, and Dr. Vasquez-Tokos for their valuable suggestions on theory, field work, and data presentation. Many thanks to my Sociology colleagues and my husband for their patience with reading and rereading the early drafts of this article. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Qualitative Sociology for their thoughtful and valuable comments that helped immensely to improve the final manuscript. I dedicate this first article of mine to my parents who always helped me in all things great and small.

Funding

This work was partially supported by the University of Oregon Department of Sociology Award for Data Collection and Presentation (2018), as well as Department of Sociology’s Small Grants Award (2017).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liudmila Listrovaya.

Ethics declarations

Conflicts of Interest/Competing Interests

No conflicts of interests were identified.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Listrovaya, L. What Does a “Thank you” Cost? Informal Exchange and the Case of “Brift” in Contemporary Russia. Qual Sociol 44, 479–505 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09485-0

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09485-0

Keywords

Navigation