CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Redkina, Irina |
|---|---|
| Title | Gender, Life-Course, Generation: Entrepreneurship In The Post-Soviet Industrial Town Of Mezhdurechensk |
| Summary | In my thesis I explore self-employment in Russia’s small de-industrializing town of Mezhdurechensk, as one of women’s livelihood strategies after they lost the opportunity to keep their white- and blue-collar working places in the aftermath of post-Soviet transformation. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with seven women born in the 1960s and 1970s, who started to run small-scale businesses in Mezhdurechensk in 1990s and 2000s while being young mothers, as well as on archival materials such as local newspapers and official statistics. Doing business offered women flexibility in structuring the workday to combine it with the household work, which has been considered women’s duty. I focus in my research on two important historical turns: the 1990s as the birth of entrepreneurship, and 2008 as a moment of snowballing crisis and vulnerability. The continuing macro-changes affecting Mezhdurechensk made female entrepreneurs, who started to run business in early post-Soviet time, to adopt and eventually re-consider their working tactics. Mothers’ decisions to become entrepreneurs can be understood both by looking at their life courses, and by embedding their individual biographies in the broader transformations of the post-Soviet gender regime. The entrepreneurial subject is not a genderless subject as it is often considered in the neoliberal model of personhood. The figure of the entrepreneur belonging to a certain generation of women has been gendered within the broader social and economic transformations of the post-Soviet space. Within the gender regime enabled in post-socialist neoliberal Russia, women’s lack of access to financial capital has been compensated by social relationships, cultural capital and their gendered skills. |
| Supervisor | Violetta Zentai; Susan Zimmermann |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/redkina_irina.pdf |
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