WORKING CLASS IN THE CURRENT SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES: RUSSIAN CONTEXT

Abstract

For many years, the working class has been an object of interest for Russian sociology. In Soviet sociology, a lot of research has been devoted to workers and industrial sociology. The point of attention of sociologists moved towards the study of labor relations and the protest movement in enterprises in the 1990s. Then the workers stopped being in the center of attention of sociology, but now interest in the working class is returning. This article is a form of analytical reflection on the research agenda for the study of workers by Russian sociologists. The analysis is based on publications on the research of Russian workers in the leading Russian sociological journals. Workers are considered as a social and professional group that is in a status crisis as an archaic social class that lost in the course of market reforms and represents an obstacle to modernization. Russian authors point to the return of the significant role of industrial workers against the background of a focus on the technological breakthrough of the Russian economy. An analysis of publications also shows that in recent years, researchers have found it difficult to access enterprises to study workers in their work environment, which affects the understanding of the situation of industrial workers in Russia. Workers have become a popular and convenient object of study as a statistical artifact present in sociological data bases, but sometimes this data speaks little of the real situation of the industrial working class. The article emphasizes the growing interest of Russian sociologists to workers and new approaches to their study, including the biographical method and the included observation.