Adaptation as 'selling out'? Capitalism and the commodification of values in post-communist Russia and Eastern Germany

Swader draws on comparative qualitative interviews conducted with successful businessmen, managers, and entrepreneurs and their fathers in Moscow, Russia, and Leipzig, Germany in 2005 and 2006. He describes how economically successful persons--entrepreneurs, managers, and businessmen--adopted enhanced profit orientations and moral flexibility in order to ensure success at work, and how these shifts spill over into non-work spheres. These value changes are observed in value conflicts between fathers and sons, between the present and the past, and between work and other spheres, such as the family.