Life Risks and the Underclass in Russia

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Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Andreeva, E.I.; D.G. Bychkov; and O.A. Feoktistova. “O printsipe nuzhdaemosti pri realizatsii biudzhetnykh mer po sotsial’noi podderzhke naseleniia,” Finansy, 2016, No. 4, pp. 21–28; Maleva, T.M.; E.E. Grishina; and E.A. Tsatsura. “Regional’nye sistemy sotsial’noi zashchity: kak i zachem vvoditsia adresnost’,” Region: Ekonomika i Sotsiologiia, 2016, No. 4, pp. 153–175; Ovcharova, L.N., and E.A. Gorina. “Razvitie adresnoi sotsial’noi podderzhki nuzhdaiushchikhsia v Rossii: bar’ery i vozmozhnosti,” Voprosy ekonomiki, 2017, No. 3, pp. 5–21.

2. For example, the World Bank conference “From a Unified Registry to an Effective System of Social Protection: The Russian and International Experience” in 2016 and the Eighteenth April International Academic Conference on Problems of the Development of the Economy and Society in 2017.

3. Model’ dokhodnoi stratifikatsii rossiiskogo obhshestva: dinamika, faktory, mezhstranovye sravneniia. Tikhonova, N.E., et al. Ed. N.E. Tikhonova, doctor of sociology. Moscow, St.Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2018.

4. Slobodeniuk, E.D. “Institutsional’nye faktory formirovaniia zastoinoi bednosti v sovremennoi Rossii,” Journal of Institutional Studies (Zhurnal institutsional’nykh issledovanii), 2014, T. 6, No. 3.

5. Slobodeniuk, E.D. “Posledstviia krizisa 2015 goda: obednenie ili prekarizatsiia?” Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial’noi politiki, 2017, T. 15, No. 2.

6. We should note that, according to assessments by various research groups, more than half of Russian citizens are plagued by scarce resource availability and hence are, in general, vulnerable at a time of economic instability that typifies Russia (for more detail, see Tikhonova, N.E. Sotsial’naia struktura Rossii: teorii i real’nost’, pp. 331–332).

7. Stiglitz, J.; A.K. Sen; and J.P. Fitoussi. The Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress Revisited. Paris: Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 2009.

8. See Shkaratan, O.I.; S.A. Iniasevskii; and T.S. Liubimova. “Novyi srednii klass i informatsional’nye rabotniki na rossiiskom rynke truda,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 2008, No. 1, pp. 5–27; Tikhonova, N.E. Sotsial’naia struktura Rossii: teorii i real’nost’, pp. 162–245; Radaev, V.V., and O.I. Shkaratan. Sotsial’naia stratifikatsiia.

9. Weber, M. Economy and Society. G. Roth & S. Wittich, Eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, [1924] 1978.

10. For the sake of simplicity, in this article we refer to positive privilege as “life chances” and to negative privilege as “risks.”

11. We are referring here to a research group comprised of N.E. Tikhonova, V.A. Anikin, S.V. Mareeva, A.V. Karavai, Iu.P. Lezhnina, and the author of this article.

12. The Russian Monitoring Survey of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population (RLMS-HSE), conducted by the National Research University Higher School of Economics and Demoskop LLC with the participation of the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the RAS Institute of Sociology (RLMS-HSE survey websites: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/rlms and http://www.hse.ru/rlms).

13. For more detail on the survey “The Dynamics of the Social Transformation of Modern Russia in the Socioeconomic, Political, Sociocultural, and Ethnoreligious Contexts,” see the official website of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology: http//www.isras.ru.

14. The number of strata was determined by a two-step cluster analysis. The best result (measure of cohesion of the clusters 0.7) proved to be a division of the population into three large strata, with the boundaries of the middle stratum at values from –1 point to 2 points according to the LC&R index. For more detail on the results of the analysis, see Tikhonova, N.E. “Stratifikatsiia po zhiznennym shansam massovykh sloev sovremennogo rossiiskogo obshchestva,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 2018, T. 6, No. 6, pp. 53–58.

15. “Established entrepreneurs” for the purposes of the survey are defined as people who own and manage businesses and receive the associated income for more than 42 consecutive months (for more detail, see Verkhovskaia, O.R., et al. “Global’nyi monitoring predprinimatel’stva,” Rossiia 2016/2017. Otchet. URL: https://www.gemconsortium.org/country-profile/104–2017, pp. 11, 29).

16. For more detail, see Rabochaia sila, zaniatost’ i bezrabotitsa v Rossii (po rezul’tatam vyborochnykh obsledovanii rabochei sily). 2018: Stat. sb. Rosstat. Moscow, 2018, p. 42.

17. The stratification division based on the Life Chances & Risks index is positively correlated with a proclivity for entrepreneurial activity. The correlation of the variables “the respondent is an owner/co-owner of a business” and “the respondent believes that he/she engages in entrepreneurial activity” with belonging to the strata is significant at a 99 percent level; the Spearman correlation coefficient is 0.135 and 0.117, respectively.

18. For example, the share of those who identify themselves as entrepreneurs within the lower stratum is only 0.4 percent (as opposed to 2.3 and 7.2 percent in the middle and upper strata); the share of owners/co-owners of the business at which they are employed is 0.5 percent (as opposed to 1.8 and 6.9 percent in the middle and upper strata); and the share of those who believe that they engage in in entrepreneurial activity at work is 1.9 percent (as opposed to 4.3 and 9.5 percent in the middle and upper strata).

19. There are two exceptions: a larger share of persons with chronic joint diseases among representatives of the lower stratum (17.2 percent, as opposed to 12.2 and 10.2 percent in the middle and upper strata), which is partly due to the physical nature of their work activities, and a smaller share with chronic eye diseases, which conversely are characteristic of representatives of the upper stratum in view of their different type of work activities.

20. Of these, 96.6 percent were not officially hired pursuant to the RF Labor Code.

21. Given the brevity of the names of the occupational classes used at the first level of the ISCO-08 classification, we have indicated in parentheses typical occupations that they cover at the third and fourth levels (for a detailed description of the classification, see the official website: https://www.hse.ru/rlms/classif/isco).

22. Although both the official English-language ISCO website and the Russian-language ISCO website cited by the author use the term “group” to classify occupations, the author uses the term “class.” To be faithful to the original text, this translation uses “class” as well.—Trans.

23. Anikin, V.A. “Professional’naia struktura naseleniia i tip ekonomicheskogo razvitiia strany,” Terra economicus, 2013, T. 11, No. 2.

24. While the term “Little Russia” has historically been applied to the eastern, Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, in this context it refers to the rural areas of Russia as a whole.—Trans.

25. It is worth noting that the largest share of persons who deliberately abandoned their job search is not in the lower but in the middle stratum (18.5 percent, whereas the figures for the lower and upper strata are 13.2 and 10.9 percent).

26. The share of nonworking able-bodied persons who have not had work experience in their lives is the largest in the middle stratum (34.8 percent, as opposed to 24.2 and 14.7 percent in the lower and upper strata). A close look at the group of those who have not had work experience shows that persons who have refused to work are mostly concentrated in the middle stratum—37.2 percent (as opposed to 10.4 and 20.0 percent in the lower and upper strata, respectively). This is also an argument in favor of the fairly high degree of economic activity of representatives of the lower stratum.

27. In order to analyze social action and the type of thinking, we used the data set from round three of the monitoring survey of the RAS Institute of Sociology (October 2015, sample size of 4,000 respondents).

28. A study that focused on an analysis of forms of socioeconomic adaptation by representatives of the strata in question arrived at similar conclusions (for more detail see Karavai, A.V. “Osnovnye modeli sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi adaptatsii v raznykh stratakh rossiiskogo obshchestva,” Terra economicus, 2018 (in press)).

29. The correlation is significant at a 99 percent confidence level.

30. The dominance of risks over chances in life has little to do with a low standard of living or living in poverty. Other researchers arrive at similar results: When a group of people living in poverty is defined according to various approaches, there is a variation among the groups of poor people in terms of income, deprivation, and subjective perception, and when the class structure was defined in 2008–2009 a quarter of the employed people, due to their ambiguous situation, could not be assigned to any class and were defined by researchers as being in marginal class positions (for more detail, see Tikhonova, N.E. Nizhshii klass v sotsial’noi strukture rossiiskogo obshchestva,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 2011, No. 5, pp. 24–35; Ovcharova, L.N. “Teoretiko-metodologicheskie voprosy opredeleniia i izmereniia bednosti,” SPERO. Sotsial’naia politika: ekspertiza, rekomendatsii, obzory, 2012, No. 16, pp. 15–38). The methodological difficulties that come up time after time in research projects highlight a significant feature of Russian society—the presence of a host of factors that that interfere with the natural meritocratic mechanisms of the development of status affiliation and bring about a decomposition of statuses on a mass scale, among which the key one is inequalities by region of residence, type of community, and sector in which a person is employed.