The Status of a Professional in Russian Institutional Conditions: Definition Methodology Group Specifics

Abstract

Gaining the technological sovereignty is one of the main goals that the Russian Government is pursuing today. Under these conditions, the importance of professionals, who are “specialists of the highest qualification level” as defined by the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation, is growing. The information about dynamics, composition and specific features of the group of professionals in Russia is becoming more significant as well. However, professionals as a group are now poorly identified. Among the data on professionals available for a researcher, only two credible sources of information can be named – the employment statistics published by the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation and scientific publications devoted to them, and the date from The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey – Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE). Only abovementioned sources provide data in which structure professionals are separately identified. Therefore, we assume that currently available information about professionals is insufficient, contradictory, and partly quite controversial. This is mainly due to methodological and methodical challenges of the definition of the term “professional”. This article analyzes how the term “professional” is defined in Russian science and statistics. The author offers ways to overcome the vagueness associated with the use of the term “professional” by analyzing features of Russian institutional environment. In this article, the main approaches to the interpretation of the concept "professional" in social sciences are determined. The specific features of the classification of the term in the ISCO-08 and All-Russian Classification of Occupations are considered in the article. The solution proposed involves correcting the basic version of ISCO-08 in RLMS-HSE databases. The advantages of an adjusted version of ISCO-08 that can be used in research on socio-professional structure in general and with the focus on professionals are demonstrated in the article. The article also discusses how the share, composition, and characteristic features of the group of professionals change when the approach offered by the author is applied. The multidirectional dynamics in the share of professionals when different versions of ISCO-08 are used is demonstrated on the RLMS-HSE data from 2001–2021, and the conclusion is made about the specifics of the institutional environment in Russia which strongly affects the situation of this professional group.