Beschreibung
The book is an outcome of a research project on pawnshops in
Saint Petersburg, which took place in 1999/2000 in
cooperation with the Center of Independent Social Research.
It relates to the function of pawnshops in the life
strategies of low-income households. The research
investigated different topics with various methods: a
reconstruction of the history of Russian pawnshops based on
secondary materials and government reports; a description of
the current pawnshop landscape in Saint Petersburg based
upon secondary material and own information; a questionnaire
of 100 pawnshop customers focusing on demographic data of
the respondents and their households, the living
conditions, the income situation, the importance of
pawnshops in their life strategies, the use of credit,
alternative sources of credit, defaults, and the like; five
pre-structured deep interviews of pawnshop customers who
already had lombard experience in Soviet times to work out
differences and similarities, as well as the psychological
component of pawning; open pre-structured interviews with
pawnshop directors on their companies’ business, their
target group and the pawnshop market; and finally a profile
of one successful private firm in the market and the
biography of its chairman. In addition to an institutional
analysis the book aims at a description of the milieu of
pawnshop customers, which is shaped by an ongoing crisis of
the Russian economy and society.
Heiko Schrader is an economist and
sociologist. His present
position is Professor for Sociology at the University of
Magdeburg and Visiting Professor for Social Anthropology at
the State University of Saint Petersburg. He published
extensively on development sociology and social
anthropology.
