Where Do Time and All the Money Go? Consumer Strategies of Two Urban Youth Generations Employed in Different Fields

Economics and Sociology. 2016. Vol. 9. No. 4. P. 176–190.

Омельченко Е. Л., Андреева Ю. В., Ариф Э. М., Svyatoslav Polyakov

The article focuses on consumer strategies of ‘ordinary’ Russian urban youth during a crisis. The authors cover the debate on youth consumer strategies, pointing out subcultural, problematized and lifestyle vectors of research. The article describes consumption trends, in particular ‘conscious consumption’. The main focus is on the intergenerational differences of urban young people’s strategies of consumption. The empirical basis of the research consists of sixty semi-structured interviews conducted with two generations of young people in St. Petersburg, aged 20–25 and 30–35, from different fields of employment: employed in the private sector, in budget-funded organizations and the self-employed. The study shows that the economic crisis put the young people from the two generations into the unequal risk conditions that is neutralized by the sources of different strategies. The way out of this crisis  happens to be a private matter and depends on the ongoing efforts to maximize the efficiency of expense planning by the thirty-year-olds and attempts to save their ‘own money’ by the twenty-year olds.

Ключевые слова: Russia, employment, consumption, youth, Social and Economic Stratification

ПУБЛИКАЦИЯ ПОДГОТОВЛЕНА ПО РЕЗУЛЬТАТАМ ПРОЕКТА: Работа и потребление в жизни российской молодежи: сравнительный анализ сельского и городского опыта (2015)