Motives Driving the Creation of Professional and Business Associations: Evidence from Russia

ABSTRACT

Our knowledge of associations is scarce, requiring a multidisciplinary approach that has been rarely used to investigate this multifaceted phenomenon that cuts across the confines of a single discipline. This study investigates the motives that drive the founding of associations in the Russian context, analyzing original data and applying a mixed-methods research design. An empirical typology of motives is developed to obtain a more accurate range of time- and value-driven motives beyond what is currently understood. The findings shed light on the complexity and multidimensionality of the motivational factors driving the establishment of associations in a transitional context.

KEYWORDS:

• Motives
• founding
• professional and business associations
• Russia

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to reviewers, panelists, and discussants for their comments and suggestions, which helped to significantly revise and improve the article. Special acknowledgement goes to reviewers of this journal for helpful suggestions to further improve the article.

Notes

^1. In this article, motive is understood very broadly as any desire, interest, or inclination.

^2. Since empirical data used in this article arise from a larger research project, and further details about the research design can be found in Ivanova (2015).

^3. Each interview quotation is marked with the number of the expert interview (EI), the stakeholder group that the respondent represents—Leadership (L), Member (M), Scholar (S), and Government Relations (GR)—and the number of the line where the quotation starts in the transcript. All interview translations from Russian to English were made by the author.