Article
Потребительское поведение средних слоев в условиях кризиса
Based on the data of national representative surveys carried out by IS RAS in 2014-2016, the author presents analysis of consumption specifics in middle-income groups in times of current economic crisis. It is shown that although in modern Russian society middle income groups make up the majority of population, they cannot be directly correlated with the middle class defined in class theory framework. Middle-income groups are heterogeneous in different aspects, including their consumption specifics. Their standard of living remains quite modest, although it is significantly higher than the “survival standard”. New economic conditions led to widespread economy practices among them - primarily on consumption, followed by economy on hobbies and vacations. Economy practices also seriously affected middle-income strata investments in human capital – usage of paid educational and health services (this type of economy was more widespread among lower middle-income group than higher). Although representatives of the middle- income strata are quite actively using paid medical services (and relatively rarely – paid educational services), the reason for this more often lies in inaccessibility of free analogues rather than in search for the higher quality. Process of durables renewal in middle strata during the crisis was not as active, but their standard set of durable goods still widened over the past two years - primarily due to the relatively complex technological durables that they are gradually transferred from the category of innovation goods to the extended standard. In this regard, the upper middle income group successfully performs the function of the innovative consumer.
Youth are, by definition, the future. This book brings initial analyses to bear on youth in the five BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which are home to nearly half of the world's youth. Very little is known about these youth outside of their own countries since the mainstream views on "youth" and "youth culture" are derived from the available literature on youth in the industrialized West, which is home to a small part of the world's youth. This book aims to help fill in this gap.
The handbook examines the state of youth, their past, present and permits the development of insights about future. The BRICS countries have all engaged in development processes and some remarkable improvements in young people's lives over recent decades are documented. However, the chapters also show that these gains can be undermined by instabilities, poor decisions and external factors in those countries. Periods of economic growth, political progress, cultural opening up and subsequent reversals rearticulate differently in each society. The future of youth is sharply impacted by recent transformations of economic, political and social realities. As new opportunities emerge and the influence of tradition on youth's lifestyles weakens and as their norms and values change, the youth enter into conflict with dominant expectations and power structures.
The topics covered in the book include politics, education, health, employment, leisure, Internet, identities, inequalities and demographics. The chapters provide original insights into the development of the BRICS countries, and place the varied mechanisms of youth development in context. This handbook serves as a reference to those who are interested in having a better understanding of today's youth. Readers will become acquainted with many issues that are faced today by young people and understand that through fertile dialogues and cooperation, youth can play a role in shaping the future of the world.
The monograph is devoted to analysis of social stratification in Russian society. Models of its social structures constructed within the modern approaches to stratification (neo-Weberian, neo-Marxist, resource-based, ect.) are characterized and compared, and the approaches themselves are summarized as well. Empirical base for the analysis is the data of nationwide sociological researches carried out by IS RAS in 1994-2013
Gastronomic consumption practices are one of the main ways of forming the corporeal human identity, a marker of his/her cultural and social status. Specificity of food as a material medium of symbols and signs, which are assimilate d at the level of the most direct corporeal experience, determines its consumption as a complex system of communication links. Today, the practice of food consumption in the form of fast food is especially relevant and registers new forms and ways of communication, not only gastronomic, but also reflecting power and new gender relations. It can be argued that it is in the form of fast food (Mac-food) the symbolic content of food overcame and absorbed its physical and technical aspects.
Along with the fast growing economy, the term «BRICs» was coined to represent the newly emerging countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. The enhanced economy in these countries has largely improved peoples life; at the same time, it has also strongly influenced the transformation of social structure, norms and values. However, as the worlds attention centers on their economic development at the micro level, the social changes at the micro level have often been neglected, and a specific comparative study of these four countries is even more rare. This handbooks contributing authors are leading sociologists in the four countries. They fill the gap in existing literature and examine specifically the changes in each society from the perspective of social stratification, with topics covering the main social classes, the inequality of education and income, and the different styles of consumption as well as the class consciousness and values. Under every topic, it gathers articles from authors of each country. Such a comparative study could not only help us achieve a better understanding of the economic growth and social development in these countries, but also lead us to unveil the mystery of how these emerging powers with dramatic differences in history, geography, culture, language, religion and politics could share a common will and take joint action. In general, the handbook takes a unique perspective to show readers that it is the profound social structural changes in these countries that determine their future, and to a large extent, will shape the socio-economic landscape of the future world.
This article addresses the questions, What do children in urban areas do on Saturdays? What type of organizational resources do they have access to? Does this vary by social class? Using diary data on children’s activities on Saturdays in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area, the authors describe the different types of venues (households, businesses, public space, associations, charities, congregations, and government/tribal agencies) that served different types of children. They find that the likelihood of using a charity or business rather than a government or tribal provider increased with family income. Also, the likelihood of using a congregation or a government facility rather than business, charity, or household increased with being Hispanic. The authors discuss implications for the urban division of labor on Saturdays and offer research questions that need further investigation.
According to interdisciplinary theory of architecture and sociology by A. Amin and N. Thrift, presented in their book Cities. Reimagining the Urban, the light sociality is the main way of individuals interaction in city space. In this context, consumption appears to be one of the basic forms of individuals self-expression on one hand, and on the other hand - one of the basic forms of urban communication. We deal with consumption in its general meaning - as a complex of all individuals consumption-related practices that are transparent in space of light sociality. Consumption practices become agents of light sociality, producing ambivalent encounters that emotionally affect individuals realizing those practices, and those who observe them. In this way consumption takes part in governmentality of the city spaces.
The goal of this chapter is to provide empirical evidence of the effect of differential migration strategies on poverty in Nepal. We model the effect of remittances and work migration on consumption of households with a migrants. Using the cross-sectional sample of the nationally representative Nepal Living Standart Survey of 2004, we estimate a model of household migration decisions jointly with the consumption equations by the method of full information maximum likelihood (FIML) with instrumental variables. The method takes into account unobserved household characteristics that could simultaneously affect household migration decisions and household income. We simulate counterfactual expenditure distributions to determine the effect of work-related migration on the levels of aggregate poverty and inequality in Nepal. While most of the recent papers on the effect of migration on inequality and poverty have controlled for heterogeneity and selection in terms of unobserved characteristics, to the best of our knowledge this is the first study using FIML to estimate the trivariate selection model in this context. The novelty of the study resides on separating different effects of domestic and international migration on household welfare.
The purpose of this study was to investigate consumption patterns and their association with the lifestyle characteristics of Russian households. The research based on the data of Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey – HSE (RLMS–HSE) was collected between 1992 and 2008. Over this period total household expenditure on food increased by 40%, while total expenditure on durables more than tripled. Consequently, the share of food expenditure dropped from 72.6% to 45% whereas the non-food expenditure share grew up from 27.4% to 55%. By 2008 the gap in consumption standards between rich and poor households had widened since well off families completely dominated in volume of non-food expenditure, services and leisure expenditure and savings. Meanwhile we can state that consumption depended heavily not only on a total household income but also on a household type and on the phase of its life circle, for example, the data clearly show that young families, single-parent families and pensioners saved up less than other families as their expenses constantly exceeded their incomes in 2008. Moreover, the level of durables consumption varied over the type of settlement. The factor analysis (the method of Principal components, Varimax rotation with Kaiser Normalization) let us define the groups of durables that differentiate the households by consumption patterns. These groups are likely to associate with highly “modernised” urban lifestyle, moderately “modernised” lifestyle, and rural lifestyle.
The paper observes the main patterns of youth consumption and leisure in contemporary Russia. It relies on the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of HSE, a set of nationally representative household-based surveys which includes data collected from 1994 to 2013. The data shows that by 2010 the level of youth consumption has risen along with the households’ overall income and expenditure. Since financial problems were alleviated, there was a redistribution of time between work and leisure, so youth turned to the active cultural consumption, including non-entertainment services. However, the total increase in products and services consumed went hand in hand with the rise of differentiation in the availability of durables, patterns of consumption and leisure practices.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.