The Life Course of the New Working-Class Youth: The Reality and Normative Patterns

The subject domain of the study is life patterns and strategies of the Russian new working-class youth. Exploring the relationship between the new working-class studies and life course studies, this research combines the consideration of a life course as a structurally organized integrity with a phenomenological perspective on the study of life strategies. The notion of the “new working class” and the criteria for its definition have been proposed and substantiated. Biographical indepth interviews of 31 young working-class representatives and a mass poll of 1532 respondents were used to focus on the implementation of class normative patterns and to determine their consistency with individual life strategies and with means by which these patterns are constructed and legitimized in the context of the structural strengths and constraints of society with an extremely high degree of social inequalities and the precarity of youth labour. To disclose the dominant normative patterns that structure the life course of the Russian working-class youth as the main research question of this article, the author considered the main life course trajectories (education, family and career) and sought to measure and understand the following aspects: normative temporal limitations and the preferred sequence of the main role transitions (finishing education, full-time job, first career promotion, marriage, having a first child); the correlation between the real and preferable time and sequence of role transitions; the preservation of traditional class distinctions within life course normative patterns or their inversion, differentiation or displacing by other patterns and values during the period of emerging adulthood. The study has shown the remaining significance and value of the traditional life course structures while current social conditions (wages, mortgage rate, the access to higher education and its quality, the interrelation between education and market requirements, etc.) do not allow to fulfil this life strategy any longer. The trendy normative patterns of the middle-class youth (refusal from institutional education, freelance jobs) are used as tools legitimating the existing class barriers, lack of access to education, fundamental lack of trust to major social institutions. Due to these reasons, young workers choose the adaptation and survival life strategies which restrict their professional and cultural potential realization and create a negative social mood.

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