Jana Krupets visited Novosibirsk with the presentation based on CYS study "Labor and Consumption"
September 18-20, 2014. At all-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference "Sociology and sociological education in the context of social changes: the experience of Novosibirsk" was held. It dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the Department of Sociology at Faculty of Economics at the Novosibirsk State University.
Jana Krupets from the Centre for Youth Studies was invited for this significant event with presentation on the theme: "Youth and its work: searching for new/old meanings." Presentation was also dedicated to the project that recently has been provided by CYS named: "Youth Solidarity and generation of the XXI century: the value of labor and consumption" (supported by the fundamental research HSE program), it can be called the first major report on the work carried out during the year by our staff.
If we talk about the project, one of its goals was to find out what place does the life strategies of today's young people is taken by labor, and what career paths of today are formed in two generations of young people. We conducted a qualitative study of labor and collected biographical interviews with men and women from two age groups: 20-25 and 30-35 year olds, living and working at the moment in St. Petersburg.
The work itself, we consider as part of a biographical project of our informants and in the report I gave a particular attention for the analysis of the 4 cases (4 biographies) - says Jana. - I took two persons from each age group with the so-called "non-traditional" careers that doesn’t not fit into the logic of personal development and advancement within the organization or labor area. For example, our informant was a girl who, after finishing university, opened an online bakery and also engaged in fashion journalism, attending events from the world of fashion and highlighting them in her blog. Or, another example, a young man who came from the region, tried a bunch of different jobs ranging from bartender to PR manager, now he works in the HR-department of a large retail chain. And because of their narratives, I tried to reconstruct their career paths and to understand how young people assess those different paths of their lives.
And we have many examples like that. In fact, today's youth is committed to diversity in their career strategies. Sometimes the search of self becomes an aim itself, rather than the desire to find a safe job, and the process of switching jobs is the option for young professionals to understand the new rules and adapt to a new workplace. This is partly offsets the value they put in higher education. Also, many informants shared with us their thoughts about the most important things in the building of a career for them. It is the links from previous jobs that are giving them a degree of confidence in the ever-changing unstable world. Our goal in the study is to understand how young people with a new approach for the careers see their own future.