Despite the global recognition of social and economic costs of corruption, sociological understanding of its political causes remains very limited. Focusing on post-Soviet Ukraine, this talk explains the variation in the ordinary citizens’ participation in petty bureaucratic corruption in light of the country’s political trajectory in the post-transitional era. On the micro-level, I argue that Ukrainians’ decisions to carry out informal economic exchanges are influenced by organizational cultures of local bureaucracies. On the meso-level, I suggest that Ukrainian bureaucracies are fragmented into corruption-favorable and corruption-unfavorable sectors, which operate according to distinct institutional logics and cater to different clients. On the macro-level, I show that this bureaucratic fragmentation is a product of the country’s recent oscillation between the pro-Western and pro-Russian courses of political and economic development. The talk is based on several years of fieldwork, analysis of online discussion forums, local media, and a survey of Ukrainian university students.

Marina Zaloznaya is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Prior to joining Iowa’s faculty, Dr. Zaloznaya received her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University, a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and an undergraduate degree from Middlebury College. In her work, Dr. Zaloznaya applies ethnographic and comparative-historical methodologies to the topics of corruption, white-collar crime, and economic deviance. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript that focuses on macro-political roots of informal economic behavior of ordinary citizens in post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. Dr. Zaloznaya’s work has been featured in leading sociological, criminological, and socio-legal journals, including Law & Social Inquiry, Crime, Law, and Social Change, Comparative Sociology, Population and Development Review, and others. Dr. Zaloznaya teaches classes in sociology of white-collar crime, law & society, and global criminology.