Book
Handbook of the Sociology of Youth in BRICS Countries
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 life course is becoming more flexible and more amenable to personal adjustment for contemporary youth. The process and timing of entering adulthood is expanding due to longer education and the search for oneself. Young people in contemporary Russia do not rush to acquire social statuses that were once so desirable in Soviet times, i.e. that of a parent, employee, and family person. Today, prestige is based on acquiring a good education and career, processes on which they are betting (Blum et al., 2009: 158–159).
Young people also have very specific demands for quality: quality of life, quality of intimate relations, and quality of parenting. All of this has motivated young people to ceaselessly look for an appropriate job, home, partner, and to invest in their children, preferring quality to quantity.
Efficient family-planning tools have separated marital, reproductive, and sexual behavior, transforming these into three different spheres of self-fulfillment. All of these stages, now stretched out through time, reflect individual needs and perspectives. The increasing dispersal of timing of marital relations and childbearing reveals that young people are postponing important demographic events further and further.
Russians have only recently acquired the opportunity to efficiently manage the most prolific period of their lives — youth. They attempt to start planning their lives as early as possible and to construct it sequentially in a personally tailored way.
Russia has been reforming its political, economic and social sectors for more than 20 years now. During this time the social structure has changed significantly as have the institutes and the entire system of social relations. Russian people have changed as well – researchers frequently record processes that show dynamics of their consciousness, norms and values specifics; however, researchers often emphasize that the changes appear to be ambiguous and complicated. Russian youth is of special interest in this respect. Young Russians were and still are going through secondary socialization in conditions when their identities, norms and values are shaped during the period of ongoing country-wide transformations that overlap with the large-scale worldwide processes of globalization, international division of labor, emersion of new kinds of inequality and new risks. Besides, the country’s future will be largely determined by norms and values of today’s Russian youth, as they will set possible vectors of development that may be accepted by the population in the medium and long run.
Similarly, Western researchers have long been focusing their attention on the youth group, their changing values and attitudes as well as comparison of this group with the older generation to determine the cultural dynamics vector or explore it as an actor, for which manifestation of deviant practices is most typical. Problems of youth values and attitudes are obviously relevant to the BRIC countries as they raise the question of what transformations can be initiated by the change of values shared by the new generation, whose socialization was influenced by fundamentally different conditions vs. the older generation of their population. In this context there is no surprise that researchers from BRIC perform comparisons of different generations within the country’s population, including cross-country comparisons of generations’ value systems.
Analysis of youth identities, norms and values is an important research objective for Russia. To assess the country’s cultural dynamics vector and forecast development of modernization processes, it is essential to identify which changes in the young people reflect the processes typical for the cultural dynamics of the entire population and which relate only to young Russians; understand which changes bring the Russian youth close to the youth in other BRIC countries and which changes separate them. This chapter is trying to find the answers to these questions.
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. The alleviation of financial problems prompted the 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.
In Lieu of an Abstract
Youth in Russia has been undergoing massive dynamic changes in terms of marriage and sexuality over the past two decades. This is one of the main factors that determine the norms and trends in contemporary family evolution. These were caused both by universal processes common to all the developed countries, and the huge radical shifts are induced by reforms in the post-Soviet society. Among the most important changes are an increased age of first marriage, a growing divorce rate, an increasing number of single-parent families, a rising extended family ratio (i.e. married couples or mothers with children living with their parents or other relatives) and non-cohabitating married couples. We can identify some other trends, not only in behavior, but also in the perception Russians have of family and marriage (SDDR, 2010: 65–75)…
In March 2011 scholars met in Prague at the conference Interculturalism, Meaning and Identity. This event revitalised this important theme related to Diversity and Recognition. The terms 'interculturalism' and 'integration' are experiencing a renaissance. As the extent of human movement between nations increases attempts are made to balance cultural difference and social cohesion. In some contexts immigration and settlement policies are becoming more draconian in response. Because of this, interculturalism can take on many meanings. However, pivotal to the way interculturalism is understood is identification. As the relationship between nation, ethnicity and language becomes more complex so too do the ways in which people represent them selves. The cultural resources drawn on and the processes used to form identities are examined in this truly international collection. So too are the implications of these developments for how we theorise culture, meaning and identity.
The paper discusses how the russian labor market has been evolving over two decades of the transition. it starts with tracing key labor market indicators such as employment, unemployment, labor force participation, working hours, and real wages. Their dynamics indicate that the labor market tends to operate in a non-conventional fashion and far from the patterns expected initially. The authors argue that the current russian labor market represents a peculiar model that is different from what is observed in the rest of europe outside of the cis. having established this, they look at the institutional foundations that make this unconventional performance possible and proceed with discussing political economy and welfare implications. The findings are compared with the experience of other post-socialist countries.
Un nou factor a fost adus constant în prim-plan în cadrul analizei şi proiectării politicii de învăţământ superior. Acest factor se referă la perspectivele demografice, deoarece acestea includ probleme legate de demografia în sine, cât şi la alte subiecte cu o referinţă mai largă, cum ar fi fluxurile de migraţie şi ciclurile de viaţă ale persoanelor, în această perioadă de modernitate. Sunt instituţiile de învăţământ superior din Europa pregătite în mod adecvat pentru a reacţiona la schimbările demografice fără precedent? Cum pot ele răspunde cel mai bine la astfel de provocări, în contextul evoluţiilor regionale, cum ar fi Procesul de la Bologna? Care sunt bunele practici de urmat? Publicat în cadrul seriei “Învăţământ Superior pentru o societate a cunoaşterii” a UNESCO-CEPES, acest volum oferă câteva reflecţii şi analize, şi ridică o serie de preocupări legate de astfel de anchete de actualitate. Volumul beneficiază de contribuţiile unei echipe multidisciplinare internaţionale de experţi şi prezintă studii de caz naţionale din ţări ca Estonia, Germania, Polonia, România, Suedia, Federaţia Rusă, Turcia şi Marea Britanie, precum şi studii tematice referitoare la migraţie şi la ciclurile de viaţă. Cea mai mare parte a datelor prezentate în lucrare sunt foarte recente, şi analiza ar putea avea impact asupra politicii de învăţământ superior. Acest volum se adresează tuturor celor interesaţi şi preocupaţi despre schimbările demografice actuale din Europa şi despre impactul acestora asupra învăţământului superior.
Apart from the public sphere and the norms set by society, the private sphere plays an important role in the lives of the disabled, including the personal experience of disability at a micro level: in their families, everyday routines and romantic relationships. In this chapter, issues of family structure are considered using a narrative analysis of interviews with women who use wheelchairs. Various cultural, social, economic and political determinants effect the formation of certain types of family structure and attitudes towards family life. At the same time, they interrelate with biographical factors that reinforce or weaken the limits of freedom and private life. Using narrative analysis, I demonstrate what role family plays in constructing the identity of a person with a disability, and how family members act as coauthors of individual biographies. This can be seen in those dilemmas of family life associated with the feelings, sexuality and emotional stability at the micro-level of the life experience and identification of women with disabilities.
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.
In this paper the public-private wage gap is estimated by means both of the OLS and the quantile regression, which will provide a more complex picture of the distribution of the public-private sector wage gap. The author finds the existence of significant public-private wage gap (about 30%) considering both observable and unobservable characteristics of workers and jobs. Using the decomposition based on quantile regression helps to answer the question about the nature of the wage differences. The author comes to the conclusion that the main reason for the gap is the institutional mechanisms of public sector wages in Russia. The analysis is based on the data from Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) 2000-2010.
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.
In this chapter we aim to examine the discourses created and reproduced through the interaction between single mothers and representatives of social services. The analysis is based on twenty-six interviews with single mothers and six interviews with social workers conducted in 2001–2003, and six interviews with single mothers and three with social workers conducted in 2006 in the Saratov region in Russia, as well as official documents and the publications of other researchers. In our interviews with mothers, we focused on the issues of familial well-being and interactions with social services, while social workers were asked to discuss their experiences with clients. A short overview of statistics and social policy terminology prefaces a discussion of how mother-headed families and state social policy interrelate and affect each other. The subsequent sections contain analysis of the interviews with single mothers who, as the heads of low-income households, interact with the social service system. The analysis demonstrates that single mothers are frustrated by inadequate assistance and the impossibility of improving their life situations. The discussion goes on to show that social workers, who are used to interpreting complex issues in the life situations of single mothers as individual psychological peculiarities, tend to blame the victim, thus ignoring important social conditions and imposing on women a responsibility for problems that are societal in origin.
In the article the international experience of management of employment in the public sector is shown, corresponding numerical calculations are given, the thought on possibility of its use in Russia is stated. The author believes that transfer of some functions into outsourcing in frameworks of the policy of the new public management (NPM) can be one of directions of perfection of the management of employment efficiency and payment in the public sector. Simultaneously he expresses his conviction that reduction of the number of the occupied should not be mechanical, but the thought over and gradual process assuming simultaneous increase of efficiency of activity in the sphere of the public management.
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.