Russian Society and Russian Civil Identity (Case of the Youth). Tutorial

community, based on the values and references acquired. This provides an opportunity for self-actualization 85.

E.P. Ermolaeva holds a view that professional identity may only be completely built up at the stage of choosing professional activities. E.P. Ermolaeva points out that “the content of professional identity is a stable concordance of the basic elements of a professional process” 86.

Thus, professional identity suggests an individual being a member of a certain professional group. At the same time, the factors of attributing a person to one professional group or another are of smaller importance than the fact of such attribution itself. Where an individual supposes him or herself to be a representative of a certain professional group, he or she starts to adhere its rules and learn its norms, references, values, and traditions.

sociologists, this creates the need for concentrating people on a certain territory that contains social institutions, logistic schemes, and large business centers. Such territories attract more and more people searching for success and start to expand. This is the manner, in which cities and towns become urbanized. It means that the density of urban population increases due to migration, births, etc. Urban territories are also being added to with population due to rural depopulation. These processes lead to appearing a special city-type that becomes universal. There appear special mentality, values, and views that form the urban identity during identification.

Groups that may help develop urban identity are the inhabitants of cities and rural population. This is why we can say that two identification centers manifest in forming urban identity. These outgroups are a kind of conceptual cores in forming urban identity. Urban outgroup helps conceptualize the values, behavior, norms, and ruls of a city inhabitant, opposing them to the special features of living in rural areas, i.e. understanding the statement: “I’m an urbanite” is being formed. The second process is related to forming a specific identity of a specific city and assimilating with exactly this city’s specific features and values; i.e., understanding the statements of “I’m a native of Kazan,” “I’m a Moscuvite,” etc., is being formed. A special point in forming urban identity may be evaluating one’s city as a capital city or a provincial town. It is proved empirically that the processes of forming urban identity flow differently among the inhabitants of large cities and those of small towns 88.

Urban identity crisis may take place where a person moves from one city to another, from a village to a city, or vice versa. This is related to the fact that an individual has to adapt to the social and material conditions and apply a new lifestyle, when in a new reality. Forming a positive urban identity is one of the most important criteria of the individual’s adaptation to his or her new place of residence.

These ideas were primarily worded in H. Tajfel’s social identity theory and J. Turner’s self-categorization theory. It is argued that both personal and social identities are based upon the unified processes of categorization - social identification (awareness of belonging) and differentiation (awareness of differences). The modern followers of this theory consider the identity problem within the framework of the cognitive scheme I-We-Others. Besides, social and personal identities form a single image of the I-personality. Personal identity in this sense is a subsystem of knowledge about oneself, which is created from comparing oneself to members of the "ingroup" (insiders) and consists of a set of personality traits specific to the self. The social identity is also constituted by a set of specific features, but identified in social comparison of representatives of

"The specific feature of economic identity formation process, unlike other types of identity, for example, ethnic identity, lies in the fact that it is the result of social categorization (identification and differentiation) in the bipolar system of concepts of ‘the rich – the poor’ economic categories 93 and, accordingly, attributing to them high and low status positions.

Thus, the level of a person's income can change objectively, as the welfare of the community grows or because of the specific economic or social circumstances of his life, for example, if he moves to another country for permanent residence, etc. This in many respects neutralizes the differentiating power of these features. Therefore, we can talk about the existence in the public and individual minds of more or less specific ideas about groups of poor and rich people. The notions about the ‘intermediate’ economic groups of the population in the ordinary and scientific mind are extremely "loose" in the objective sense. At the same time, owner groups

largely act as a "product" of social representations or statistics. Typically, researchers distinguish such groups as "the poor", "the rich" and " middlemen".

These methodological grounds have also determined the empirical studies of economic identity carried out by V.А. Khashchenko. As a subjective determinant of an individual's perception of his belonging to a owner group, there is a number of the individual's economic awareness components: the attitude to property (including the awareness of the individual’s economic status assessment by others); the attitude to oneself as an economic entity, including the person's self-image (economic Self of personality), economic well-being, economic aspiration, the "locus of control" economic self-awareness type (orientation to the external – friends, government, or internal – own efforts – factors to ensure their own material well-being ); and the attitude to life conditions 95.

On second place was the social and labor structure (where a person worked). This feature of the social structure was specific for the USSR, where the living conditions of labor collectives in various sectors and departments were sharply differentiated. The third place was taken by the family and economic structure, which accounted for the majority of the differences between groups in the consumer sphere. The socio-territorial substructure which was associated with other substructures closer than all the rest was not far behind it. In this way, it seems as though the differences born in other substructures were projected onto it 96.

The Soviet society researchers from the FRG, who also worked within the framework of the stratification approach in M. Weber’s traditions, in addition to the ‘purely’ social and economic identification factors, put forward the factors of power and prestige of occupations that set an extremely important for a person system of privileges 97.

The corporate nature of the society that existed, in their opinion, in the USSR, defined in each corporation its benefits and privileges. But in any of them there were three main layers: 1) the governing layer, which has both power and privileges; 2) the layer of privileged executors who do not have power, but who receive certain privileges; 3) the layer of unprivileged executors who possess neither power nor privileges.

N. Tikhonova, in her research, does not only rely on statistics in the level and methods of income generation, but also actively uses the respondents' subjective views on their place in the social structure, noting that ‘... they say with unfailing regularity that when determining their status in the society, they base, first of all, on the level of their material well­being. Indeed, the data indicate a direct effect of the level of material well­being on people's self-awareness in terms of their social status.

configuration, has changed – the status of the family of origin has come to the fore, after the factors of well-being (self-assessment of the financial situation, assessments of one’s own abilities in different areas of consumption – food, clothes, holiday making, etc.). This showed the ever increasing intergenerational conservation of status in modern Russia, the closure in it of means of social mobility. And the higher was the status of respondents, the more important were the indicators related to the parental family. The question: "What is your family background?" does not lose its relevance, but rather reinforces it. Besides, health is put forward to the leading roles as the factor of occupying certain status positions and especially as the factor of well-being. Equally important today is the factor of the place of residence. So, the socio-economic identification factors are pushing to clustering not only into the rich-medium-poor groups and upper­lower classes, but ‘belonging to more influential or less influential families’, ‘more healthy – less healthy’, ‘residents of capitals and megacities – provincials‘, ’people in work – the retired’, ’the youth – the middle-aged – the elderly’.

the welfare of the respondents themselves – the higher is your own income, the higher is the ‘wealth threshold’ bar”