Alya Guseva

Alya Guseva is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University. She has been studying Russia’s emerging market for credit cards for more than 10 years. She is the author of Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia (Stanford 2008), the first and only in-depth book-length account of the trials and tribulations of Russia’s market from its inception in the late 1980s to the present. More recently, she was engaged in a comparative multi-country study of emerging credit card markets in East and Central Europe and Asia, and is currently working on a book that reports the result of this project. Both projects draw on diverse factors that shape the developmental trajectories of markets, such as state power, national culture, social networks, supply and demand, competition, technological standards and “socialist legacies” (the continuous significance of some socialist-era practices and arrangements). Alya holds a Ph. D. in Sociology (2002) from the University of California, San Diego.