Dmitrii Zhikharevich is a Fall 2018 Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society, a sociologist and a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His training has been in the fields of economic sociology, science and technology studies (STS), and social theory. Dmitrii’s current research lies at the intersection of historical sociology, STS and sociology of finance.

In his thesis devoted to the history of U.S. venture capitalism in the 20^th century, Dmitrii investigates the social origins of the U.S. pioneering venture capitalists, tracing their roots to the “careerist” cohort of the middle classes, employed in and mobile through the hierarchies of private and public bureaucracies, mobilizing extensive archival and oral history sources.This focus allows a look at the venture capital industry in a larger historical-comparative context of the increasingly “developmental” trajectory of American state after the World War II, leading to the emergence of the large-scale government-funded “Big Science” research, as well as the infrastructure for its commercialization, and the very actors whose business is to turn new knowledge into marketable commodities. In the other part of the thesis, Dmitrii looks at the emergence and codification of the financial infrastructure on which contemporary venture capital is based: namely, the development of the regulatory and disclosure regime codified in the Security and Exchange Acts, mapping the controversies revealed in the Congressional deliberations around the introduction of the acts. As an attempt to reinstate the “trust in numbers” and imagine the market anew, these discussions deserve close attention from an STS-inspired perspective.

Before joining the LSE, Dmitrii completed the graduate programme in social theory at St Petersburg State University. In 2013-2015, he participated in the research project “Russian Computer Scientists at Home and Abroad” at the STS Center of the European University in St Petersburg, funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia, and led by Vincent Lepinay and Mario Biagioli.

PUBLICATIONS

Zhikharevich, Dmitrii. “Post-Soviet Ecosystems of IT”, From Russia with Codes: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times, edited by Mario Biagioli and Vincent Lepinay, Duke University Press (forthcoming 2018).