Yoshiko Herrera's new monograph presents findings of a research project on institutional change in Russia's postcommunist state. The project builds on Herrera's earlier excellent research on regional economies in postcommunist Russia. Like the earlier work, this project goes against the grain of conventional political economy by emphasizing the subjectivity of economic analysis. Mirrors of the Economy elaborates a sociocultural explanation, directing attention to the identities and norms of state actors as the crucial determinant of institutional change. With this new work, Herrera reinforces her status as the leading constructivist expert on postcommunist political economy.

The book is organized around a case study of Goskomstat, the Russian state's main bureaucratic instrument for gathering and analyzing information about society and economy. The research question that connects theory and case study asks why Goskomstat bureaucrats carried out a rapid and successful bureaucratic reform in converting from the communist-era accounting system to the internationally recognized System of National Accounts. Given the negative impressions toward Russian bureaucracy in general and Goskomstat bureaucrats in particular, the readiness of Goskomstat to reform itself offers a genuine empirical puzzle, whose solution promises valuable analytical insight into processes of institutional change. Indeed, Herrera's study makes unique and important theoretical and empirical contributions to scholarship on the political economy of postcommunist transitions.

The explanatory variables are conditional norms and professional identity. While norms are often part of institutional analysis, Herrera introduces a more dynamic concept of “conditional norms.” In this case, Goskomstat economist-statisticians act in accordance with existing norms, but norms do not dictate behavior to actors in an unthinking manner; rather, actors have the capacity to determine the appropriate conditions for abiding by norms. The author's innovation here is to develop an “agent-centered approach to norms” (p. 53). But Goskomstat bureaucrats are not free agents; their behavior is constrained as an “identity group.” In this regard, she effectively demonstrates how Goskomstat actors not only understood their role through the cognitive prism of the Soviet bureaucrat but also saw themselves as part of an international scientific community of professional statisticians. It is in this capacity that they were so amenable to a radical transformation of the technical system used to take measure of the national economy.

The book is impressive in making a strong case for the importance of identity and norms to explain bureaucratic reform. Herrera convincingly shows that the impetus for reform of Goskomstat came from within, from Goskomstat bureaucrats themselves who “enthusiastically” and spontaneously took up the task of implementing a new system of economic accounting, because they embraced a “conditional norm.” The reforms were not the result of external changes—global norms or structural context—but changing “conditions” or “circumstances.” The employees embraced a notion that particular national accounting systems were best suited to particular types of economies. So once the type of economy changed, they were able to implement without too much difficulty a different type of accounting system. Rather than resist change, they adapted to it readily because of their commonly shared identity.

The competing cultural explanations for Goskomstat reform, economics, and politics are systematically considered throughout the text. Regarding economic explanations, it is repeatedly argued that the employees adopted a new system of national accounting without regard for material reward. However, the main motivations seem to be a sense of professional pride in one's work and the status concerns of being recognized as legitimate members of the international scientific community. The Goskomstat bureaucracy, however, was reduced in size by half in the 1990s. Unfortunately, we do not know much about the staff who defected rather than implement the reform. Regarding political explanations, Herrera persuasively shows that political pressure to manipulate statistics has been greatly reduced under the postcommunist political regime. The author further notes that there has been continuity in leadership at Goskomstat; therefore, reform cannot be attributed to the arrival of new actors with a new agenda for the organization. With the collapse of communism, Goskomstat emerged as a “relatively politically independent” bureaucracy. Certainly, it was much more independent than it had been under the old regime, but that does not necessarily mean that politics played only a “limited” role in reform. For example, we also learn that the whole-scale change and hurried implementation of the timetable came after the president, the prime minister, and the parliament publicly endorsed the transition to a new national accounting system. The author could have addressed a bit more the ways in which the transition created new external political pressures as well as economic opportunities.

A strong point of the book is the original and well-crafted case study of Goskomstat, the state statistical bureaucracy, built from primary sources—extensive interviews with personnel and exhaustive reading of Goskomstat professional journals. On its own, the case study offers one of the few in-depth empirical studies of an organizational component of the Russian state that has been produced in Western scholarship, which has tended to focus more attention on policy, parties and politics. Goskomstat is an important bureaucracy for state policymakers, and Russian and Western scholars are heavily dependent on its operations. Despite this, it is much maligned for its work and neglected as an object of study. Thus, Herrera's research should be welcomed for its systematic evaluation of performance and its inside look at how Goskomstat bureaucrats adapted to the challenges and adversities of a radically transformed environment.

The book presents a case of “successful” bureaucratic reform, a rapid and complete changeover in national accounting systems, as part of the larger process of postcommunist institutional change. To gauge success, the study relies heavily on the rating system of the United Nation's statistical office that oversees the compliance of individual states in the process of implementing global standards of statistical measurement of domestic economic activity. But these statistics are a bit limited in what they tell us. To be successful here is not necessarily an indicator of state capacity. The author argues that statistical accounting systems make society “legible” to the state. It is an apt metaphor. But does the new Russian state “see” society and the economy any better than the old Soviet state did? Meanwhile, given general impressions of obstructionist Soviet-trained bureaucrats, the reform was carried out under seemingly improbable circumstances. Perhaps, however, the institutional legacy of the old regime was not such an obstacle. The Soviet Union trained more economists than any other country in the world—maybe not trained in Adam Smith but educated and trained nonetheless. This extensive inheritance of human and bureaucratic capital could also help explain why Goskomstat could so quickly introduce a new system for measuring economic activity. It is a matter of readjusting state capacity, rather than of creating a state capacity.

The bottom line is that Herrera has provided a wonderful study of bureaucratic reform, institutional change, and state reformation under the peculiar conditions of postcommunism. Her constructivist take on economic “reality” provides a unique insight into postcommunist political economic development and a useful pause for rethinking implicitly well-entrenched scholarly assumptions. While it is suitable for graduate-level courses, it is probably too narrow for most undergraduate courses. The study will be of great interest to scholars of postcommunist transitions, comparative political economy, and institutional change.