From the Perception of Social Changes towards Social Behavior Change

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of changes in the educational and professional trajectories of  both younger and older generations. The research is based on interviews with respondents of  different ages who investigate their life experience retrospectively. Our analysis of these biographies reveals that the educational and professional trajectories are non-linear and depend on respondents’ attitudes towards social mobility and inequality in access to professional education. The respondent tended to one of the types of reaction to the specifics of his/her situation: strategy of  stability or  strategy of mobility, and the model of social behavior was determined by his/her proactivity. The variety and flexibility of the choice of the further path became possible to a large extent due to the relative openness of the Russian system of professional education. To  characterize the choice of educational and professional trajectories, we propose the metaphor of “a quest”, which emphasizes the need to recognize new circumstances and to act accordingly. The nature of the changes suggests they are not bound to the field of education alone, rather they have important implications for the formation of human capital in general, and define a new mainstream in the sociology of education.