Professionals in a cold climate: responses to economic transformation in Russia[1]

Sarah Ashwin and Irina Popova

 

Wholesale economic transformations disrupt professional hierarchies and challenge professional identities. The economic transformation of Russia in the 1990s was no exception. In this article, we explore what shapes the adjustment of committed professionals to their new environment. This group can find it particularly difficult to adapt because, as Pavel Osinsky and Charles Mueller note in their discussion of Russian provincial specialists, ‘in times of social change … prior investments and commitments turn into liabilities’ (2004: 215). That is, although professional attachment implies a strong motivation to work, it is also likely to be associated with a reluctance to change occupation in the face of economic restructuring. Committed professionals are therefore an interesting group on which to focus an examination of the role of individual-level responses to change in Russia.

 

Advocates of neo-liberal reform in Russia were focused on macro-economic issues, and hence did not devote much attention to individual responses to change. The working assumption was that market signals would guide individuals through their new terrain, encouraging them to move from low productivity work in declining industries (perhaps through unemployment) into higher productivity employment in growth areas, pulled by the higher wages on offer in the latter. The adaptation of individuals thus depended on them responding to the market, which could be facilitated by active labour market policies focused on the supply-side, such as the provision of opportunities for re-training (Layard and Richter, 1997).[2] Although the dynamics of restructuring were beyond the control of individuals, as White, Gallie, Cheng and Tomlinson have noted, ‘supply-side analysis [of the labour market] has promoted the idea that even mass unemployment can be prolonged by individual behaviour’ (1994: 167). Thus, for example, in their discussion of the new Russian labour market, Layard and Richter stress that ‘the basic objective of an employment policy has to be to prevent the development of a dependency culture’ (1997: 162). Such ideas have been given concrete expression in the social policies which have accompanied neo-liberal economic programmes in the former Soviet bloc. These have restricted (‘targeted’) entitlement to benefits on the basis of means-testing and what Guy Standing calls ‘behaviour-testing’, thus resurrecting the nineteenth century distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor (2002: 46). Such policies are designed to secure the desired (‘active’) behaviour, and are based on an implicit assumption that individuals’ ability to survive transition is at least partially shaped by their choices and behaviour.

 

This emphasis on individual behaviour has been echoed in the work of some Russian sociologists, who have argued that, even in the face of economic collapse, individual activism is an important variable in explaining labour market outcomes (Naumova, 1995; Tikhonova, 1999).[3] Tikhonova has taken the most definite position, claiming that what she calls ‘social-psychological factors’ play a more important role in determining economic welfare than does ‘inclusion in market relations – the desire to be included in them determines not only the fact of ‘insertion’ into the life of New Russia, but also the depth of that inclusion [emphasis added]’ (1999: 111). She contrasts what she calls the ‘passive-paternalist’ consciousness to that of individualists with initiative, claiming that, as a result of their different psychological characteristics, the former remain in depressed areas of the economy, while the latter move into the new private sector (1999: 124). Tikhonova thus sees individuals as responsible for their own fate, with poverty being caused by dependency and passivity, rather than the reverse.

 

With the aim of scrutinising such views, we examine what role individual behaviour and attitude play in explaining the adaptation of committed professionals. Using data from an INTAS-funded longitudinal qualitative research project, we explore how far individual activism and flexibility (willingness to respond to market signals) explain the outcomes of our professionally-oriented respondents.  We begin with a discussion of our data, highlighting how we identified professional attachment and assessed outcomes, before moving on to analyse the extent to which individual professionals were able to shape their fates in a period of rapid change.

 

The Data

 

Our data was collected in the context of a project designed to examine gender differences in employment strategies through longitudinal qualitative research which traced the labour market activity of specially selected groups of men and women through a consecutive series of semi-structured deep interviews. The four groups selected were defined by a series of distinct labour market transitions at the beginning of the research. Equal numbers of men and women (thirty in each group) were selected and were interviewed four times at six month intervals (1999-2001). The research on the four different groups was carried out in four separate cities. The groups chosen were: those confronting the labour market involuntarily as a result of the acute financial difficulties of their employer (in Moscow); new entrants to the labour market, who had just graduated from a university and a technical training institute (in Ul’yanovsk); those who were registered unemployed and seeking work through the state Employment Service (in Samara), and those whose incomes were so low that they qualified for state social assistance (in Syktyvkar). In Moscow, half the respondents were drawn from a failing industrial enterprise, and the other half from resource-starved academic institutes. The original sample of 240 was reduced to 191 by the final stage of research. For more details about the city samples see Ashwin (2005).

 

The interviews were conducted by the Russian research teams, and full transcripts were prepared (in Russian). At each stage of the research a common interview guide was used by all teams. The content varied slightly from interview to interview – for example, the first interview entailed a work history, while the last contained several questions asking respondents to reflect on the changes in their lives during the research period. But in each interview the two main blocks of questions concerned labour market behaviour, and issues related to the household (including budgeting and the domestic division of labour). In addition to the transcripts, some answers were formalised and recorded in SPSS. When referring to respondents we use a three number code: the first indicates the respondent’s city (1-4 beginning with Moscow, and continuing in the same order as above); the second is the respondent’s number, and the third indicates the stage of research from which information is drawn. Pseudonyms are used when respondents are named in case histories.

 

The selection of the professionally oriented sub-sample

 

 

Our sub-sample of professionally-oriented respondents is based on a prior analysis of work orientations carried out by the authors along with Irina Kozina and Elena Zhidkova (Ashwin, Kozina, Popova and Zhidkova, 2005). We determined our respondents’ work orientations by analysing their answers to a series of questions: ‘Would you work if you had the financial possibility of not working?’; ‘What does/did your work mean to you?’; ‘Why do you choose to stay in your current job?’; ‘What do you like/dislike about your work?’; ‘What sort of job are you looking for?’.  Aside from the first question, where respondents were asked to choose between pre-set responses,[4] all the questions were open-ended, and responses were recorded within the interview transcripts. The answers were then coded using ATLASti 4.1. We initially coded a broad range of motivations which emerged from the formulations of our respondents: money; breadwinning; profession; career; social interaction; social recognition; stability; convenience, and the desire not to work. Using the coding, the research team described and dissected each of these motivations, in an attempt to identify the underlying logic of respondents’ reported motivations. On the basis of this exercise, we concluded that the different motivations could be grouped into three main work orientations which were distinct and irreducible to one another. These were: a professional orientation to work; an instrumental orientation; and a social orientation to work.[5]

 

This article focuses on those with a strong commitment to their chosen profession, that is, a professional orientation to work. Profession here is defined broadly, in line with the Russian meaning of the word professiya, which can be translated as ‘profession’, but also as ‘occupation’.  This is quite distinct from the narrow Anglo-Saxon understanding of the word profession, which refers only to members of occupations enjoying high levels of autonomy and status, such as doctors, lawyers, clerics, and academics (Luksha, 2003: 62-3). In Russia, such professions are seen as being part of the ‘intellegentsia’ (Luksha, 2003: 77), but members of more lowly occupations are not denied the right to be seen as ‘professionals’. We have retained the Russian word because we think it reflects a social difference born of the Soviet experience: in the Russian context, a driver, just like a doctor, can have a sense of pride in his or her ‘profession’, and have a strong attachment to it.[6] In our definition, those with a professional orientation to work see their work as a means of self-realisation, and find it intrinsically rewarding and compelling. As will be seen, we found that professional attachment formed a key part of the identity of those with this work orientation.

 

The other two work orientations we identified are not discussed here. We saw those who regarded work primarily as a source of income as having instrumental orientation to work, while those with who valued work mainly for the company were seen as having a social orientation to work. For more details regarding our categorisation see Ashwin et al., 2005.

 

In this article, we include those committed professionals over the age of thirty at the time of our study. Young professionals are not included since they would have chosen their professional paths once economic reform had already been begun. They were therefore less likely to be trapped by redundant skills. This left a sample of 36, 20 men and 16 women.

 

Categorisation of respondents by outcome

 

In order to analyse the implications of individual behaviour, we needed some means of judging the labour market ‘success’ of our respondents. We devised an index based on regional average wages and subsistence minima – so that the success of each respondent was judged in relation to the living standards of their region, and not by a common standard. Our categorisation was as follows:

 

·        Comfortable – those with an income above the average wage for their region.

·        Coping – those with an income below the average wage for their region, but above the regional subsistence minimum.

·        Poor – those with an income below their regional subsistence minimum, but in formal employment.

·        Excluded – the unemployed or economically inactive with an income below their regional subsistence minimum.

 

A more detailed account of this categorisation can be found in Ashwin (2005), but several points should be noted here. Income and employment are the two dimensions of our classification, although employment is only used as a criterion to separate the working ‘poor’ from our excluded category. Respondents were categorised according to their personal rather than household income, but their full income, rather than just their formal wage, was the basis for the assessment. In this way, secondary employment and other survival strategies could be taken into account.  It should be stressed, therefore, that although we used the regional average wage as our threshold for ‘comfort’, some of those in our comfortable category did not have an above-average wage from their main job, but a total income above the level of the regional average wage. The most common way of achieving this was through secondary employment. The decision to use average wage figures was pragmatic, since these were readily available at a regional level. Nevertheless, we consider that, even applied to total income, they provided a meaningful threshold separating those just above the poverty line from those enjoying relative comfort. The subsistence minimum, meanwhile, is a robust, if rather low, poverty line (for more details see Clarke, 2000). The subsistence minimum is sufficient for food and everyday necessities (housing, fuel, energy and communal services), but not for the repair or replacement of durable items including clothing, furniture, household equipment and so on.

 

Finally, our definition of ‘exclusion’ requires explanation. ‘Interpretations of the term “social exclusion” are legion’ (Burchardt, Le Grande and Piachaud, 2002: 30), but most include a number of dimensions beyond employment and income. For example, Burchardt et al. have recently developed a useful definition which includes four dimensions: consumption, which they operationalise using household income as a proxy; production, which they operationalise in terms of employment status; political engagement and social interaction (2002: 30-4). Our ‘excluded’ group are defined only according to the first two dimensions, but given that our research focused on employment rather than social exclusion per se, we consider this to be justified.

 

The limitation of our categorisation is that it is based on respondents’ situation at one arbitrary moment in time: the end of our research. Our ‘endpoint’ is a random moment, although our research can provide insight into how the respondents reached the level of prosperity or poverty they attained at this point. Of course, in some cases this position will be sustained, while in others it will not. The artificiality of our endpoint remains an unavoidable limitation of our approach, but we felt its benefits as a means of assessing our respondents’ labour market success outweighed its limitations.

 

Judged by this classification, the committed professionals examined in this article had a range of outcomes: ten were comfortable (four women, six men); thirteen were coping (five women, eight men); eight were poor (six women, two men) and five were excluded (one woman, four men).[7]

Individual activism: The key to success?

 

By definition, at the beginning of the research those in our sample of committed professionals were facing either unemployment or poverty, or were working in struggling organisations. They all faced the problem of how to combine economic survival with continued professional attachment. We first examine the extent to which their activism, outlook and flexibility can explain their outcomes. We then situate these factors in the context of the structural supports and constraints facing respondents in order to arrive at a balanced assessment of the role of individual action in explaining economic outcomes. This section explores the role of activism and outlook, while flexibility and the context of respondents’ behaviour are discussed in the following sections.

 

Our indicators of activism, designed to reflect the conditions of the Russian labour market, were: use of two or more channels of job search; moving in search of work; changing job; undertaking education or (re-)training; engaging in secondary employment, and entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, we assessed our respondents’ outlook through a qualitative analysis of their interviews. We focused in particular on respondents’ assessments of their ability to improve their situation. We found a sharp contrast between those who had a positive outlook and strong sense of efficacy, and those who had a negative assessment of the labour market and their own ability to improve their situation, with some gradation in between. For the purposes of this analysis, we have classified respondents’ outlooks as positive, negative or mixed. In practice, it did not prove difficult to categorise respondents in this way.

 

Our initial findings using our indicators of activism and outlook are quite striking. If we take the extremes of our distribution with regard to outcomes – the comfortable and the excluded – we see a clear pattern. Respondents who ended up in our comfortable category were more active than their excluded counterparts and also notably more positive in outlook. First, in terms of activism, all of those who ended up in the comfortable category engaged in some form of labour market activism during the research, and most engaged in several (the mean was 2.6).  Meanwhile, two out of five in the excluded category were completely inactive in the labour market, while another was practically so (he went on a training course paid for by the Employment Service, but with no intention of using the skills he acquired). The other two respondents, however, were no less active than their comfortable counterparts.

 

Our findings in terms of outlook are even more arresting. The vast majority of our comfortable respondents had ‘positive’ attitudes, and none were ‘negative’ about their chances in the labour market. They shared a strong sense of personal efficacy, a belief that through their own effort they could succeed in the midst of economic chaos, as the following examples reveal. Andrei (1-20, b. 1953), a deputy director of a biochemical institute, which he claimed was ‘slowly dying’ for lack of funds (1-20-4), had nonetheless used it as a base to set up a successful biotechnology firm, and a centre of innovation, which brought him a handsome income (about which he spoke with satisfaction, but refused to disclose). He explained his prosperity in the following terms:

 

 

[My success] is all because of my personal energy. If I left it for three or five months – everything would fall apart. There isn’t a team, people who could replace me. That is, if I step aside everything would collapse – in a month, in six months, it’s just a question of time…. It’s simply because of [my] energy. While my health allows. [1-20-3]

 

Another academic director, Anatoli (1-16, b. 1948), who ‘constantly’ wrote grant applications in order to secure funds for his laboratory had a similar sense of his own centrality: ‘Everything depends on me’ (1-16-4). While not arrogant, he had a grounded sense of purpose and possibility which induced him to persevere in his efforts to secure funding. Meanwhile, Lydia (4-09, b. 1968), who by the end of the research had established a successful station café, had a similar sense of her own potential. During the first interview, when she was registered poor and jobless, she asserted that ‘you always need to take the situation into your own hands’ (4-09-1). The role of individual activism in securing success was a recurrent theme in her reflections. As she stated in her final interview, ‘All the same, you’ve got to have the desire to improve yourself, to do something in life, the children are growing up, it’s necessary to do it, and not wait for someone to put something in your lap’ (4-09-4). Finally, even those in this category who experienced setbacks tended to not to let these dent their confidence. This can be seen in the reaction of Arkadii (3-42, b. 1957), an unemployed philosopher working on a book on Hegel, to his failure to get a job at the local university. He did not allow this rejection to diminish his self-belief and explained that the philosophy faculty to which he sought entry was ‘very weak’. For this reason, hiring him would be a ‘very risky’ experiment, which would likely result in an exodus of students from the courses of other lecturers, because the students ‘understandably would start to pay more attention to Hegel, to speak like Hegel, to expound his point of view’ (3-42-3).

 

These comments contrast sharply with those of our excluded respondents. They emphasise the impossibility, rather than possibility, of improvement, and highlight the barriers that face them. The following comments, the first from a 54 year old unemployed woman, and the remaining two from unemployed men, illustrate this point:

 

I want to say that there’s only one conclusion, that a woman of my age, specifically a woman, will never get a job. There’s not a chance of it [emphasis added]. (3-39-3)

 

Of course I want to get a job in my profession, but who will hire me now, in my 49^th year? (3-23-3)

 

And strictly speaking I haven’t got much choice – I’m 55 and who really needs me? It already doesn’t depend on me [emphasis added]. I turn up somewhere [to a potential employer], and the reason why I don’t hurry there is because I already know the scenario. The first thing that comes up is your age. (3-09-4).

 

 

Even those in this category who felt that they could get a job if they tried were unable to imagine working in the jobs available. That is, their pessimism revealed itself with regard to the idea of adaptation to a world in which there was no demand for their professional skills. This is clearly illustrated by the case of Volodya (4-35, b. 1964), a former pilot from Syktyvkar thrown out of work by the dramatic cuts in the aviation industry. As he reported:

 

At Aeroflot at our local airport there are only eight air crews remaining out of eighty. Therefore no one will take me on. My commander is working as a watchman at some hut [a kiosk]. Very many of them have turned to drink or died from vodka. (4-35-3)

 

It was clear from his first interview that he viewed his profession as the core of his identity:

 

For me work was something central, my own world or something. I don’t even want to talk about it now. It’s a sore point. It’s too painful even now. It’s like someone cut off the oxygen supply. Now I’m not even looking for work. I don’t see myself in any profession in today’s world. If I do look for work then it will only be for the money. (3-35-1)

 

Despite his financial need, Volodya in practice found it difficult to accept the idea of working in a different field in order to earn money. During interviews he listed numerous possibilities, only to reject them, as the following extract illustrates:

 

But is it possible to find other work? Have you tried?

 

It’s possible. It’s possible to work as a fitter of gas [pipeline] equipment, like my friend, he’s also a former pilot. He gets up to 3,000 for that work, but it means enduring the cold, unfreezing pipes in intensely cold weather.  I could work as a security guard, but I don’t want that kind of work for 2000….[8]

 

And what sort of work would you like? What sort of work would you consider good?

 

The work I had [as a pilot]. I can’t imagine anything else for myself. (4-35-3)

 

Even by the final interview, at which point his wife had divorced him, ‘probably because of work, because I’m not working’, he still seemed unable to envisage a future outside the aviation industry:

 

It’s useless…: I’m not capable of doing business. I can’t cheat people. It’s a big moral price for me, on top of the constant absence from home…. Aviation – it’s a particular system. There’s this saying: ‘Capitalism, Socialism, Aeroflot’. Aeroflot is its own system with its own values. That’s probably why people in Aeroflot are not fit for business…. I don’t see myself in another job. I can’t be a security guard – that was offered me not long ago. I refused. (4-35-4)

 

Volodya’s interviews were peppered with the words ‘I can’t’, and by the end of the research he was poor, unemployed and facing exclusion from the household where he was living with his former wife and children.

 

Analysing the interviews of our comfortable and excluded respondents consecutively certainly left us with an impression that personal activism and optimism were important factors. These shone out from the interviews of the more successful respondents, while negativity and pessimism pervaded the interviews of those who ended up poor and out of work. But were these attitudes a cause or an effect of our respondents’ outcomes? Before exploring this issue, we deal with another aspect of individual behaviour raised by Volodya’s case: flexibility.

Moving with the times: flexibility

 

From a neo-liberal perspective, adaptation to economic reform entails responding flexibly to market signals. All our respondents had reason to reconsider their professional attachment in the light of changed economic circumstances. To what extent did they do so? After analysing the trajectories of men and women with a professional orientation to work we were able to identify three main types of response to the challenges of transition differing in terms of their level of flexibility. These were: a refusal to compromise professional integrity by changing job or doing supplementary work; a hybrid response, characterised by a desire to maintain professionalism, but a willingness to do supplementary work in order to ‘subsidise’ a job in a poorly-paid profession, and a flexible response, implying a willingness to sacrifice professional integrity in order to maximise income. On the basis of this analysis we ask, did the level of flexibility displayed by our respondents influence their outcomes?

 

Our results suggest no clear link between flexibility and success. Only two of our prosperous respondents compromised their professionalism by taking a main job outside their profession during our research, and only one remained in this until the end of the research. Overall, our ‘comfortable’ respondents showed no more desire to respond to economic signals than did those in our excluded category. Anatoli, for example, clung tenaciously to his scientific career in spite of the difficulties involved:

 

It [science] is my whole life…. In that sense it satisfies me and I never had any great desire, for example, to change things in a strong, radical way – to drop science and go into business. That’s one side…. But the other side … is the organisation of science and the question of how to survive in it. Now it’s not at all easy. (1-16-1)

 

Several of our ‘comfortable’ respondents chose to ‘subsidise’ their professional attachment through supplementary work, but their cases illustrate the same inability to ‘move with the times’. For example, Sergei (1-31, b. 1949), a chemist, was supplementing his academic income with proceeds of his supplementary employment as a freelance photographer. His secondary employment was successful; he had a long client list, a good reputation, and a lucrative contract to take photos for the yearbooks of the Gasprom high school. He realised that economically the most rational decision was for him to concentrate on his photography, which had formerly been his hobby. Trying to combine both jobs, despite the high degree of freedom in his academic post, left him exhausted:

 

In the last few years my life has been so harassed, it’s really true to say that I’m in a permanent state of tiredness… even, I’d say in a state of depression because of tiredness…. This state of tiredness has built up so much that sometimes simply … you feel tired of life…. [T]he thought comes into my head – it would be a relief to have done with all this. That is, I’m all the time running somewhere, I’m always hurrying somewhere, I’m always in a state of time-trouble [tseitnota], and because of that there’s always something that I should have done and haven’t managed. I am by nature a slow person. I am by nature a one-job man. I am by nature a person who gets carried away. That is, I get caught up in some work – I’m happy and I give it all I’ve got. By when at the same time I’ve got five jobs, well then I begin to rush about, to dash from one side to another, and it’s with difficulty, with great difficulty, that I plan and co-ordinate my everyday life… and for me there’s already no joy in it. (1-31-4) 

                                                                                                                                                                      

Nonetheless, despite contemplating giving up science in every interview, Sergei felt unable to make the break. Discussing this in the third interview he noted:

 

It’s very prestigious to belong to the intelligentsia, well, even if only through working for the Academy of Science, that is [to belong to] the academic world. I haven’t lost everything that I knew earlier. And therefore I think … it’s simply a pity to throw away all those years of learning, of work, that I spent here. I simply know a lot of stuff, and perhaps it’s needed. I hope that perhaps there will be some kind of demand for it. (1-31-3)

 

By the fourth interview he was still vacillating, noting his inability to ‘completely cross out’ his previous commitment of ‘time and effort’ to science.

 

Flexibility was thus not what explained the successful adaptation of our comfortable respondents. The proportion who took a main job outside their profession was exactly the same in our excluded and comfortable categories (one fifth). Indeed, the behaviour of all our committed professionals was above all characterised by unwillingness to compromise professional attachment. Moreover, Volodya was not alone in clinging to his profession in the face of overwhelming economic pressure. Kostya, a geologist, felt a similar level of dedication, as is clear from the following exchange:

 

What do you think, is it possible to get a job in your profession now?

No. No. Absolutely [not].

Well then, what’s the way out?

There isn’t a way out. What’s the way out? To die. (3-11-2).

 

At this point, Kostya and his wife were destitute. Having exchanged their flat for smaller accommodation for money, they were reduced to selling their book collection in order to cover daily expenses. By stage three of the research, however, Kostya was saved from further impoverishment when his persistent visits to his former employer paid off, and he was reemployed on a rolling two-month contract on a wage above the subsistence minimum. This was fortunate, for nothing in his previous behaviour had suggested that he would be starved into a more flexible stance.

 

Such attachment may seem ‘irrational’ from an economic perspective, but the distress of those who attempt to compromise their professional values should not be underestimated. This is starkly illustrated by the case of Oksana (1-17, b. 1959), a research chemist married to the leader of her research group. The couple’s financial difficulties led Oksana to take a second job as an estate agent in order to allow them to remain at the institute. But when the situation at the laboratory eased after a successful grant application, she immediately gave up her lucrative second job. She explained that it had entailed, to use Volodya’s words, ‘a big moral price’:

 

I went through some kind of difficult period connected with all kinds of different illnesses…. Well, let’s say, I had these bad thoughts that I had cancer. Along with that I was in an awful psychological state. Well and naturally, after a number of visits to the doctor it was established that thankfully it wasn’t the case….  Moreover, I’ve got this feeling that it’s a consequence of the accumulation of all that negative energy in my [supplementary] work. So I gave it up – thinking that should put an end to the stress, but, look, it all immediately went away. One after the other. (1-17-4) 

 

Oksana’s decision to leave her second job left her with a personal income below the subsistence minimum, but she saw this sacrifice as minor in comparison with her psychological gain.

 

Our results therefore suggest that flexibility cannot be seen as a major factor explaining the success or otherwise of committed professionals in transitional Russia. Although our respondents showed somewhat different levels of flexibility, they all did their best to maintain professional attachment in the face of hardship, often displaying extraordinary tenacity. This suggests that a professional orientation to work forms part of individual identity which cannot be easily discarded.    

Contextualising responses: Structural constraints and supports

 

In this section we situate the behaviour of our respondents in context. The previous section has shown that varying levels of flexibility did little to account for the outcomes of our respondents. In this section, we look at the structural factors facilitating or inhibiting the adjustment of our committed professionals to their changed environment. These not only help explain our findings regarding flexibility, they also shed light on our initial evidence regarding activism and outlook. Having identified the main constraints and supports facing our respondents, it became clear that outlook and behaviour could not be understood without reference to these structural factors. There is not space here to report our analysis in detail, so instead we illustrate our argument by returning to the cases of the respondents discussed above, supplementing these with other examples where necessary. Key structural advantages which recurred in our analysis were continued demand for the relevant skills and network support, while key constraints were lack of demand, pre-pension age, and poor health. We do not intend this to be seen as a comprehensive list – clearly significant variables such as education are absent. Rather, we use this discussion of structural factors to illustrate the way in which prior (dis)advantage shaped the ability of our respondents to deal with economic change. That is, the section is designed to illustrate the difficulty of disentangling structure and agency when analysing responses to reform.

 

Continued demand for the relevant professional skills had a crucial influence on the outlook and activism of our respondents, and on their economic success. This can be illustrated with regard to our academic respondents Andrei and Anatoli, who benefited from demand for their skills in a number of ways. Their activism occurred in a context in which it was possible for them to draw upon and safeguard their professionalism. First, the existence of grant-awarding bodies, both Russian and international, provided them with a potential lifeline which both of them actively exploited. As Anatoli put it, ‘The pay of my colleagues is pretty high because of those grants. Because we’ve got these additional sources [of income], we can survive’ (1-16-2). Secondly, they proved able to market the skills of their research teams commercially. This again relied on the existence of demand, as Anatoli’s comments about the vicissitudes of the market, acknowledge:

 

We had a break when there was nothing. There was a very bad situation around the mid-1990s. Because to give supplementary work the employers have to have some money [emphasis added]. The mid 90s – that, I consider, was the very worst situation. Now it’s all the same better. (1-16-1)

 

Thirdly, the precondition of exploiting such demand was continued, albeit inadequate, state support for science, which allowed these respondents to remain in formally-registered work. This was crucial in enabling them to obtain grants and tap commercial demand for their skills. On the one hand, the formal requirements of their official jobs were minimal: as Anatoli put it, ‘because they don’t pay much, they also don’t ask for discipline’ (1-16-4). This meant that research teams had ‘enough freedom’ (1-16-4) to concentrate on their grant-funded and commercial activities. On the other hand, these formal jobs also provided them with a ready-made base for entrepreneurship in the form of infrastructure, connections, status and power. This can be seen clearly in the comments of Andrei:

 

Since state funding isn’t available, then my job is to look for non-state funding in order to support the institute. […]

 

This is a bio-information technology firm which was opened in 1991 and the main founder of the firm is the Institute of Biochemistry itself. And the task of the firm is the commercialisation of technology and innovations which are produced by the Institute itself. (1-20-1)

 

 

Certainly, securing grants and commercial contracts required activism on the part of academic managers such as Andrei and Anatoli. But they built their survival strategies on the institutional base provided by their formal jobs, and without external demand for their labour on the part of grant-awarding and commercial bodies, their success would have been impossible. The dependence of structural support is even more pronounced in the case of those academics in our comfortable category, such as respondents 1-30 and 1-34, whose prosperity resulted from grants secured by others.

 

Indeed, in all but two cases the success of our comfortable respondents was partly explained by the existence of continued demand for their skills. In general, those respondents whose activism took place in the confines of their professions were the most successful. Although there were cases of economic success among those with supplementary work in an unrelated field, this was generally a source of dissatisfaction (as it was in the case of Sergei discussed above). Meanwhile, there was only one case in which a respondent was able to flourish outside her profession. Our analysis supports Irina Popova’s earlier finding (based on a larger data set) that those with a professional work orientation fare best not when they are forced into flexibility, but when they are able to use their existing skills (Popova, 2004).

 

If we turn to the cases of our other ‘positive’ professionals, Lydia and Arkadi, we see the importance of another structural resource which is particularly crucial in contemporary Russia (Clarke, 2002) – network support. Despite her strictures about the need to ‘take the situation into your own hands’, Lydia received a great deal of support on road to success from her mother. Constantly advising Lydia on the way to succeed, her mother initially gave Lydia a job at her own workplace, in a bid to ensure that her daughter would ‘inherit’ her position:

 

I’ve got a job, as a cashier at a canteen. They invited me … I didn’t look for it. My mum is the manager at that canteen, but she thinks that, sooner or later, she’ll retire, and she wants to give her position to me. So when there was a vacancy she took me on there. I work at the till, but at the same time I also help her.

 

And what was the reason, financial or…?

 

The main [reason for taking the job] wasn’t financial; the most important thing was for her to give me her position. (4-09-2)

 

This powerful mother later provided Lydia’s unemployed husband (a security guard by profession) with a job as a delivery driver at the same workplace. Meanwhile, when Lydia set up her own station café, her mother’s hand was once again clearly visible. She provided the start-up capital for the business, as well as expertise. As Lydia explained at the planning stage:

 

At mum’s [canteen] I learnt a lot, and then she’s also giving us the money, she’s investing in our project, on the calculation that we’ll help her at some point, when she herself will be on her pension. And in general we are going to cooperate with her canteen, to take some of their products, so that mum’s business will continue. (4-09-3)

 

Like Andrei and Anatoli, Lydia showed energy and commitment. For example, she followed a correspondence course in various aspects of business management, such as law and finance, which she found very useful once she began to run her own business. Nevertheless, her mother’s investment was crucial to her success: as Lydia acknowledged, ‘to get that amount of money from the state is not easy, you can borrow it, but at such a rate of interest that you’ll never be able to pay it back’ (4-09-4).

 

Arkadi’s case is even more striking. After the first two rounds of the research we were somewhat mystified by Arkadi’s ability to survive without any apparent source of income. He was not actively looking for work, and all his energy was focused on his academic research. During the third interview he finally revealed his secret:

 

 

Well, an acquaintance from my youth agreed, that until I finish my work, he’ll pay me a certain sum…. 5,000 roubles a month. Of course, I was modest. He asked how much I needed to live on. Of course, he could afford to give more. (3-42-3)

 

Arkadi’s comfortable financial position thus resulted from his luck in having a rich friend with an interest in philosophy. As he explained:

 

He’s not a sponsor, but more like a patron. There’s nothing in it for him personally. The idea of a patron – it’s a person who in their youth wanted to do something, to study philosophy, for example, or figure skating. But time has passed, he’s grown past that age and, well, he hasn’t been able to do what he’d hoped, he didn’t have the inclination or possibilities to live that life himself. If you can’t do it yourself, you can at least let someone else live that life. I don’t beg, I give [my patron] the chance to do a good turn. (3-42-3)

 

Arkadi’s role in this story amounted to convincing his patron that he was a serious philosopher, deserving of support. His self-confidence clearly helped him in this endeavour, but at the same time his patron’s support sustained him in the face of setbacks such as that mentioned above. Again, therefore, neither the optimism nor the relative prosperity of Arkadi or Lydia can be understood without reference to the role of their respective patrons. This insight takes on a wider significance when viewed in the light of the finding that the social similarity of networks means that their operation tends to help the already-advantaged (Clarke, 2002: 206; Tartakovskaya and Ashwin, 2005).

 

If we turn to our excluded respondents, it is once again clear that outlook, activism and outcomes are closely related to structural conditions. First, in four out of five cases, lack of demand played a role in the downward trajectories of the respondents. Volodya’s case history is again instructive. As was shown above, like most of those with a strong professional orientation to work he was unwilling to consider working outside his chosen occupation. But this left him with few options:

 

I know that I can get a job only in an illegal firm that sends pilots to Africa. But it’s semi-criminal; it’s a risk…. You fly without any documents. And if they catch you for something the firm burns your documents and refuses to recognise you as an employee…. And it’s related to drugs, weapons, it’s basically criminal.

So how much do they pay for that kind of work?

A lot. About $50,000. But if you get caught, you’ll go to prison.

And would you agree to that kind of work?

So far I haven’t agreed, I’m scared.  (4-35-3)

 

 

Volodya’s willingness to consider drug and weapon smuggling in Africa once again bears eloquent testimony to the frustrations of committed professionals unable to use their skills. These people find themselves in a blind alley in which, as Kostya put it, the only way out many of them can see is ‘to die’.

 

In the case in which lack of demand played no role, the respondent, Maria (3-39, b. 1946), an academic economist, specialising in finance, faced another potent constraint in the form of poor health. Her career had been successful, but from 1994 she had begun to suffer health problems. Maria’s level of activism in terms of job search, mobility and performance of supplementary work was equal to that of our most successful respondents. But in the new Russia, poor health has the capacity push all but the most affluent into poverty, and is a force against which individual ‘agency’ is largely powerless. At the beginning of our research she had been unemployed for two years, having left her previous job teaching in a private college after a spell in hospital. By stage two of the research she had got another teaching job, but once again she ended up in hospital, prompting her new employer to ask for her resignation. Her frequent illnesses left her with little hope of returning to work in her profession:

 

They know me in the town, I mean in those circles in which I would like to work…. It works out that they know about my illnesses and gently refuse me. I don’t blame anyone, because it really is the case [that I’m ill]. It’s not that someone’s spreading rumours – that’s really how it is. (3-39-3)

 

By the final stage of the research she was desperately poor, her only income coming from writing coursework for students.[9] Maria’s pessimism was therefore not the cause of her poverty, but rather was grounded in the reality of her experience. Declining health haunted even our most successful respondents as something which could destroy their relative prosperity. Sergei’s worries about the level of stress he was under were informed by this, while even Andrei recognised that his success was contingent on his continued good health (see quotation above).

 

These cases show that in the case of committed professionals flexibility is largely irrelevant in explaining their differing levels of success. Far more important is the opportunity to use their skills – which highlights the fact that individual activism and optimism can only be understood in context. This is not to say that the latter factors play no role in individual adaptation to change, but it is hard to see them as independent variables in the manner of Tikhonova. A sense of efficacy and the action which flows from it is fostered in specific conditions. The actions of those facing more favourable conditions are more likely to bring rewards, and can thus set in train a virtuous circle. By contrast, those individuals in a more difficult situation tend to have their sense of powerlessness confirmed by any action they take. This is particularly true in the case of committed professionals, who see their own fate as being inextricably connected to that of their wider profession.  As Kostya put it, ‘I haven’t got any plans. If it depended on me then I’d have plans. Nothing depends on me. If only it did depend on me!’ (3-11-3).

 

Conclusion

 

Our analysis confirms the suggestion of Osinsky and Mueller that committed professionals constitute ‘a community of fate’ (2004: 215). A strong attachment to a particular line of work is a part of identity which it is hard to compromise. Those unable to use their skills in the labour market appear highly resistant to ‘market signals’ – even when destitute. This supports the wider argument that ‘forcing down people’s wages and destroying people’s jobs does not transform labour power into a flexible resource, it merely demoralises people and induces them to cling more tightly to their customary attachments’ (Clarke, 1998: 83). In line with this, our successful respondents were not those schooled by the market in the virtues of flexibility. Rather, they were those who were able to build on their strengths, either because of connections, or the existence of demand for their skills. For example, Andrei and Anatoli displayed energy, creativity and persistence, but the motivation for this activity lay in their professional passion, while their activism was facilitated by the resources at their command. That is, their outlook and behaviour were as much a consequence of their favourable situation as a cause of it.

 

Our analysis of professionals is instructive about the wider fate of Russia during transition. The commitment of professionals was a resource which could have been harnessed in Russia’s economic transformation. But shock therapy was designed to ‘dissolve the past as quickly as possible’ in the belief that ‘destruction is the vehicle for genesis’ (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999: 5). In that process, a great deal has been squandered, for creativity does not occur in a vacuum. Instead, the evidence of this article suggests that successful adaptation to change has been possible where people have been able to use existing institutional and personal resources. Unfortunately, the stringency of Russia’s reform programme meant that a large proportion of the Russian population, including many devoted professionals, were denied the opportunity to do this.[10]

 

 

 

References

 

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