From ‘inheritance’ to individualization: disembedding working-class youth transitions in post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Despite the impoverishment of prospects for those employed in the industrial and agricultural sectors in post-Soviet Russia, young people in vocational education colleges continue to be trained for ‘poor work’ in traditional large-scale enterprises. This article draws upon qualitative, case-study research in exploring young people's subjective orientations to a route to adulthood that is at once available and yet unviable, as well as their orientations to new forms of education and service sector employment. The article highlights the disjuncture which has emerged between the collectivist, class-based identities and modalities young people construct around transitions into initial vocational education and training (IVET) colleges and the individualized, choice-based narratives they use to describe experiences of later transitions into work. This shift from ‘inheritance’ to ‘individualization’ mirrors that among working-class youth elsewhere in the world, for whom the principal dimension of ‘reflexivity’ in the late-modern context has been the individualized attribution of blame for ‘wrong choices’.

Keywords:

• social class
• identity
• individualization
• post-socialism
• transition
• vocational education and training (VET)

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Hilary Pilkington for comments on an earlier draft, and to the guest editors and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.