The Transition to Late Modernity and the Educational Trajectories of Russian Youth

• In Event: 228 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 13. Morality and Socialization

Abstract

Abstract. Growing uncertainty about the relationship between education and labor market success along with the sense that the rules of the game are changing are major problems faced by modern societies under the conditions of a globalizing economy and deep changes in institutional and cultural life. Transitional societies, however, probably experience these processes especially sharply, given the often abrupt shift between very different political and economic regimes. In contemporary Russia, institutional settings and lifestyles, typical of two quite different social and economic ‘formations’ – ‘early modern’ (Soviet-type industrial) and ‘late modern’ (post-industrial, globalizing) – seem to coexist. This fundamentally deepens the effects of existing economic, regional and locational disparities and education-labor market mismatch on the actual experiences of young people navigating through these systems. These paradigmatic differences, in turn, appear at two levels – institutional (economic and institutional logics in education and labor market), and individual (style of decision-making based on early modern and late modern types of identity, roughly, ‘planning mentality’ vs. reflexive project of the self). We propose that combinations of these two attributes acting at the two levels constitute four distinct patterns of educational trajectories. Importantly, two ‘consistent’ combinations (‘fits’), where type of individual agency corresponds to the institutional settings of the environment, are accompanied by more problematic and conflicted configurations, in which type of agency is out of alignment with the institutional milieu. We analyze these patterns of trajectories using the Russian longitudinal panel study ‘Trajectories in Education and Careers’.

Authors

• Dmitry Kurakin, National Research University Higher School of Economics

• David B. Bills, University of Iowa