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Рабочие в современных социологических исследованиях: российский контекст
For many years, the working class has been an object of interest for Russian sociology. In Soviet sociology, a lot of
research has been devoted to workers and industrial sociology. The point of attention of sociologists moved towards the
study of labor relations and the protest movement in enterprises in the 1990s. Then the workers stopped being in the
center of attention of sociology, but now interest in the working class is returning. This article is a form of analytical
reflection on the research agenda for the study of workers by Russian sociologists. The analysis is based on publications
on the research of Russian workers in the leading Russian sociological journals. Workers are considered as a social and
professional group that is in a status crisis as an archaic social class that lost in the course of market reforms and represents
an obstacle to modernization. Russian authors point to the return of the significant role of industrial workers
against the background of a focus on the technological breakthrough of the Russian economy. An analysis of publications
also shows that in recent years, researchers have found it difficult to access enterprises to study workers in their
work environment, which affects the understanding of the situation of industrial workers in Russia. Workers have become
a popular and convenient object of study as a statistical artifact present in sociological data bases, but sometimes
this data speaks little of the real situation of the industrial working class. The article emphasizes the growing interest of
Russian sociologists to workers and new approaches to their study, including the biographical method and the included
observation.