Life-course patterns of new working-class youth in Russia

Abstract

PurposeThis article aims to explore the dominant normative patterns that establish the timing and order of life events, determining the desirable life strategies for working-class youth in modern Russia.Design/methodology/approachExploring the interrelationship between new working-class studies and life-course studies, this research combines the consideration of life course as a structurally organised integrity with a phenomenological perspective on the study of life strategies. The empirical basis of research consists of a survey of 1532 young working-class representatives living in the Ural Federal District of Russia and biographical in-depth interviews with 31 of them.FindingsThe study resulted in persisting significance and values of traditional life-course structures while showing that the current social conditions do not allow for this life strategy to be fulfilled. Young workers choose adaptation and survival life strategies that restrict the realisation of their professional and cultural potential. The obtained data have confirmed the presence of some worldwide tendencies, such as the dispersion of events during transition to adulthood, a combination of schooling and full-time work and an earlier career start of working-class representatives.Originality/valueThe sequencing and timing of life-course events of Russian working-class youth is an original research topic. The present study proposes and substantiates the notion of the new working class and criteria for its definition.

The more‐than‐human production of material dis/advantage: A Russian case study

“…The data derive from interviews conducted during a major Russian Science Foundation‐funded research project (No 1‐7‐7‐820062) on the “new Russian working class” (Gavrilyuk 2021), which mapped the subject‐positions and lifestyles of contemporary Russian working‐class youth, and explored structural opportunities and constraints and the social inequalities and precariousness of contemporary Russian youth labour. This survey covered 1,534 workers aged 16–29 in the Ural Federal District of western Siberia, which was chosen for its strong industrial legacy, recent partial de‐industrialisation and growth of the service sector.…”

“…To pursue this aim, we adopt a morethan-human, new materialist, theoretical framing (Fox and Alldred 2017.;Coole and Frost 2010). We apply an associated ethological (Deleuze, 1988, p. 125) methodology to primary data on social advantage and disadvantage, gathered from young Russian workers during a larger study of the "new working class" in Russia (Gavrilyuk 2021). This ontology and methodology focuses not on macrolevel structuring forces but on assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 22) of different matter, and enables analysis of the affective micropolitics of events and interactions that occur in workplaces and more generally.…”

“…Social inequality in Russia has increased in recent years (Credit Suisse Research Institute 2018, p. 159), fuelled in part by the ascendancy of a small number of oligarchs who have acquired a substantial proportion of assets previously controlled by the Soviet state (Toshchenko 2018). According to the Bloomberg billionaires index, the 10 richest Russians added more to their wealth in 2017/18 than their equivalents in the USA or UK (Sazonov and Witzig 2018); while research for the larger study conducted by [Author 2: removed for anonymisation] found that 78 per cent of working-class Russians under 30 years earn less than 450 USD a month, and 37 per cent less than 300 USD (Gavrilyuk 2021). 1 Though a low-wage economy in comparison to most western nations, the trends toward deindustrialisation, neo-liberalisation, and social inequality in the contemporary Russian labour market and political economy reflects many trends in employment and social stratification seen elsewhere (Coburn 2004), suggesting that the findings of this more-than-human study are generalisable to other contemporary capitalist societies.…”

“…Social inequality in Russia has increased in recent years (Credit Suisse Research Institute 2018, p. 159), fuelled in part by the ascendancy of a small number of oligarchs who have acquired a substantial proportion of assets previously controlled by the Soviet state (Toshchenko 2018). According to the Bloomberg billionaires index, the 10 richest Russians added more to their wealth in 2017/18 than their equivalents in the USA or UK (Sazonov and Witzig 2018); while research for the larger study conducted by [Author 2: removed for anonymisation] found that 78 per cent of working‐class Russians under 30 years earn less than 450 USD a month, and 37 per cent less than 300 USD (Gavrilyuk 2021). 1…”