Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia

The book "Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia" by Alya Guseva explores the emergence of credit card market in Russia and discusses how the demand for absolutely new product is created. The research is based on interviews and archival data collected in two series in Moscow (Russia): from 1998 to1999 and from 2003 to 2005. The author finds out that the socialist legacies shaped the Russian credit card market development. This path-dependence of the Russian market resulted in non-trivial solutions discovered by the market actors trying to cope with uncertainty and complementarity as two critical factors. Social networks play an important role here as well. The journal "Economic Sociology" publishes the book's first chapter suggesting theoretical foundations for the empirical research.