Social and Professional Adaptation: From Conceptualization To Measurement

Abstract

The article deals with the need to analyze social and professional adaptation under digital transformation in the labour market and the renewal of various professional activities resulted in developing new technology. The first part of the article considers the conceptual approaches to understanding the features of social and professional adaptation as an independent phenomenon, which have required the integration of conceptual developments in various branches of socio-humanitarian knowledge: sociology of adaptation, sociology of professions and social psychology. Based on the conceptual ideas presented, there defined social and professional adaptation, which is the inclusion of an actor in his profession through the formation of professional identity within the development of a professional role. This definition contains references to reconciling the internal needs of an actor in his professional self-realization and requiring the professional environment, which enunciates the interaction among the parties of adaptive relations in their professional sphere. Taking into account the adaptation situation, the features of social and professional adaptation are locally and globally analyzed and a clarification is made in the interpretation of «labour adaptation», which is similar in its content. The second part of the work enunciates the subjective and objective indicators of social and professional adaptation in the context of structural operationalization, which allows us to empirically study this phenomenon. The subjective indicators of social and professional adaptation are distinguished on the basis of an interpretive approach, according to which the effectiveness of adaptation should be studied through the self-assessment of an adaptor’s satisfaction with various aspects of his professional self-realization. The objective criteria of social and professional adaptation indentify the behavioural performance of an adaptation actor, which can acquire active and passive forms. The article introduces the general characteristics of methodological approaches to the analysis of social and professional adaptation in quantitative and qualitative research. The results are planned to be used in the future for a sociological study based on the developed conceptual and methodological framework.