Gavin Kitching

The development of Agrarian capitalism in Russia 1991–97: Some observations from fieldwork

This analysis reports the first results of fieldwork carried out in the mixed grain and dairy farming areas of northern and central European Russia in the summers of 1996 and 1997. The survey data collected show, predictably, a massive decline in output and investment on all farms — whether former state and collective farms or the new family farms. The effects of the agrarian slump are not equally distributed, however. A minority of the former state and collective farms in particular are surviving and restructuring in and through the present crisis. This article describes and analyses this restructuring process and considers some of its possible implications for the future and for the development prospects of an agrarian capitalism in Russia.

‘Old’ Football and the ‘New’ Codes: Some Thoughts on the ‘Origins of Football’ Debate and Suggestions for Further Research

A close reading of recent contributions to the ‘origins of football’ debate suggests that there is now more consensus among scholars about the broad sequence of events than is rhetorically allowed. However, this consensus itself rests on some shared conceptual and methodological illusions. These include: a continual naivety about the use of the name ‘football’ in the primary source materials; asystematic underestimation of forms of play (and a collateral overestimation of the importance of rules and codifications) in the development of football; and, above all, a widely shared, and very dubious, conviction that the pursuit of the historical origins of football is a meaningful activity. This article analyses each ofthese illusions in turn and suggests some methodological and substantive alternatives to them. These alternatives sum to the conclusion that the origin of both modern football codes is a far more remarkable and many-sided story than has been appreciated, even in the very best research to date. Moreover, it is a story whose many dimensions and implications go well beyond the borders of Britain, and indeed beyond the history of ‘soccer’ or ‘rugby’ alone.

‘From Time Immemorial’: The Alnwick Shrovetide Football Match and the Continuous Remaking of Tradition 1828–1890

There is a widespread belief in the Northumberland county town of Alnwick that its Shrovetide football match dates from ‘time immemorial’. In fact, it dates from the mid-eighteenth century. Moreover, it has changed constantly over its 260 year history, in a paradigm case of the invention, and continual reinvention, of tradition, and would almost certainly not have survived to the present had it not done so. The article uses a mass of Victorian newspaper sources to illustrate how media perceptions and evaluations of the match changed over the nineteenth century, and how, in particular, both the match itself and perceptions of it were transformed by the emergence of ‘modern’ rugby and soccer in Northumberland from the 1880s onward. The article concludes with some reflections on popular perceptions of the match in contemporary Alnwick. It suggests that those perceptions perfectly exemplify the post-modern devaluation of history through its reduction to a kind of hackneyed pastiche.

The Concept of Sebestoimost’ in Russian Farm Accounting: A Very Unmagical Mystery Tour

This article examines the use of the concept of sebestoimost’ - production cost -on large-scale commercial farms (former collective and state farms)in European Russia. This examination is based on ?eldwork carried out by the author and some Russian colleagues in 1996 and 1997. This concept and the accounting magnitudes it generates are of no utility now, and should be abandoned as an actual impediment to effective farm management in current market conditions. But the manipulation of sebestoimost’ magnitudes in the Soviet period served, it appears, very important functions for farm chairmen and directors. In uncovering the mystery of those functions, an important revisionist hypothesis concerning the inef ?ciencies, or alleged inef?ciencies, of Soviet agriculture emerges. The data cited in this article are too scanty to prove the hypothesis, but are certainly suf ?cient to suggest that it warrants further investigation.

The Trouble with Theory: Some elucidations

© 2009 The Author Journal compilation

Book Reviews : Status Influences in Third World Labor Markets: Caste, Gender and Cusiom: Edited by James G. Scoville. International Industrial Relations Association, with de Gruyter, Berlin, 1991, viii + 329 pp, DM 150 (hardback)

This volume derives from the work of an International Industrial Relations Association study group on Third World labour markets and appears, from the introduction and conclusions, to have been preceded by at least one conference (in Quebec in 1988) and to have been followed by another (in Sydney in 1992). Like virtually all such compilations, it suffers somewhat from the failure of its various contributors to keep their eye strictly on the ball, so that the reader gleans a lot of interesting information and analysis on almost every aspect of Third World labour markets in several different parts of the world and at different times, but it is sometimes rather difficult to decide where the volume as a whole is going, or indeed whether it is going anywhere. Professor Scoville tries his best to give the volume coherence through his own introduction and conclusion and through his most interesting and (at least to this reviewer) analytically original ’formal model of a caste economy’ (see later), but I do not think it can be said that he succeeds. This is a book