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This paper contributes to an ongoing debate about the validity of interview data and the ways in which they are interpreted in the ‘interview society’. We understand the need for an extensive reliance on interviews and, at the same time, recognise the serious limitations that exist regarding access to the interviewee’s worldview, their motivations and orientations. A crucial problem in this regard and the main concern of our paper is how to interpret subjective accounts, such as arguments or everyday theories, interviewees hold about themselves. While ethnomethodologists suggest that the complete authorship for meaning depends on the interview setting, we argue that the interviewee’s practices of generating interview content are quite stable across various sequences that allows for a reconstruction of their agency dispositions based on interview transcripts. Taking Mannheim’s and Bourdieu’s idea of a formative or generative principle as a point of departure, we introduce the most recent variant of the documentary method of interpretation (DMI) that aims at the reconstruction of this principle’s manifestation (as an individual’s frame of orientation) and helps us then to understand everyday theories, subjective explanations and justifications presented by interviewees.

The paper analyzes how the self-regulatory institutions of two legal professions-attorneys-atlaw and in-house lawyers-developed in Poland and Russia from the second half of the 19th century until the collapse of state socialism at the beginning of the 1990s. These two countries constitute the most contrasting cases of socialist transformation in the region in terms of legal traditions and of the broader socio-political context. To adequately grasp the case differences it is necessary to include the formative period of the modern legal profession in the region. The comparative analysis uses the conceptual framework of the sociology of professions. It shows that (1) attorneys-at-law were able to preserve a certain degree of collective autonomy and self-regulation during most of the time; (2) institutional path dependencies reaching back into the pre-socialist past determine the degree of autonomy and self-regulation; (3) the discrepancy between both countries is particularly pronounced in the case of the occupational group of in-house lawyers; (4) the state-socialist regimes were, therefore, not as unifying and homogenizing as it is sometimes assumed.

Заработала система подачи заявок онлайн (online submission system) на международную конференцию по экономической социологии, которая пройдёт в Москве, в Высшей школе экономики, в октябре 2012 г. См. URL: http://esconf2012.hse.ru. Приглашаем подавать заявки! БЕНАМ Ли (Benham, Lee)-профессор экономики факультета экономики Вашингтонского университета (Сент-Луис, США).