Review of methodological approaches to the analysis of the transformation of the agricultural labor market in modern Russia

Abstract

The article provides an overview and generalization of Russian studies of the transformation of the agricultural labor market in the post-Soviet period. Researchers of the Russian countryside reflect the obtained results in publications mainly describing the problems associated with the Russian countryside and the agricultural labor market. This is, first of all, the destruction of the rural infrastructure, poverty, unemployment, the interaction of old and new production entities (agricultural enterprises, peasant farms, private household plots and agricultural holdings), the loss of communication between villagers and agricultural enterprises, the villagers models of social adaptation and labor behavior. These processes served as a methodological support for the analysis and empirical evidence of how consciously villagers have been changing social and labor practices under the pressure of institutional transformations and agricultural modernization. Based on the choice of rational behavioral models in the labor market, they transformed the social structure of the village under the pressure of the market economy values, new rules, norms and institutional requirements. Modern processes in the agro-industrial field in the context of the property transformation contributed to the formation of a new agrarian structure, constructed by new subjects. The new and old production subjects interact in a multi-structured economy. They are important “players” in the institutional field of the agricultural sector, thus influencing the social and structural processes in the labor market. This determined a new configuration of the social rural groups employed in the formal and informal sectors.