CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Koziienko, Ruslana |
|---|---|
| Title | Tension, Affection, and Illusion: Experiences of Professional Employees in Two Public Cultural Institutions in Post-Soviet Ukraine |
| Summary | The research focuses on working conditions and lived experiences of professional employees at two public cultural institutions in Kyiv. It examines the formal structures and informal arrangements practiced at the workplace, and the ways they shape and accommodate employees’ experiences; it inquires into the employees’ attitudes toward the job, their, largely value-oriented, goals as well as the caring relationships some of them develop toward the art collections and the institutional buildings; it specifically focuses on the tension, which, as argued, is essential to understanding the employees’ experiences of the job. This tension occurs between the employees’ dominant interest in the rewards other than money and their (sometimes critical) lack of economic capital. By inquiring into the respective sides of the tension, the research identifies the employees’ socioeconomic conditions and gender roles as the two main premises of the illusion of their economic disinterestedness and of their ability to “afford” to work at the institutions in the first place. By doing that, the thesis contributes to the scarce body of social research in the field of arts and culture in Ukraine. In particular, being based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, the research addresses the absence of ethnographic studies on working conditions in public cultural institutions and their professional employees. Although many of the features discussed in the thesis - such as the informality, caring, and subsidy “from below” - are more salient at public cultural institutions, they are not confined to them but are inherent to many underfunded public institutions and whole sectors in the post-Soviet states. This, in turn, calls for alternative ways to approach those features, as discussed in the conclusions. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar; Cucu, Alina-Sandra |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/koziienko_ruslana.pdf |
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