Institutions and Entrepreneurs: Cultural Evolution in the ‘De Novo ’ Market Sphere in Post-Soviet Ukraine

This dissertation examines the social origins, values orientations, moral beliefs, and behavioural strategies of a small sample of successful post-Soviet „de novo ‟ firm founders, and argues that entrepreneurial individuals such as those who are the subjects of research, have effected a transformation of the informal institutional framework of Ukraine‟s nascent market sphere. In contrast to the prevailing approach of the literature on post-Soviet transitions, instead of focusing exclusively on the effects of elite-led formal institutional change and reform policy implementation (or its lack), this dissertation presents an alternative „bottom-up ‟ perspective on Ukraine‟s development during the past decade. Framed within the paradigm of institutionalist sociology, analysis of the qualitative data- collected through a combination of in-depth interviewing and structured questionnaire inquiry- points to a need to re-evaluate the widely accepted portrayal of new firm start-ups as playing a largely peripheral role in the transition from state socialism. Firstly, the literature‟s universal equation of „de novo ‟ with „small ‟ with respect to post-Soviet firms is found to be outdated in the Ukrainian case. Furthermore, instead of reflecting a „homo sovieticus ‟ or „neo-patrimonial ‟ mentality, the moral beliefs an