ABSTRACT
At moments of rapid political and economic change, deeply-rooted norms and dispositions play a crucial role in shaping the society that emerges from the transformation. They guide the responses of individuals to their changing environment, and in this way features of the ‘old’ society are often reproduced within the ‘new’. The Bolsheviks, for example, wanted to reconstitute relations between men, women and the state, yet past patriarchal norms and practices were reproduced in many areas (not least in the thinking and behaviour of Bolshevik leaders). Unlike the Bolsheviks, the marketrevolutionaries of the 1990s did not have a particular agenda with regard to gender relations. Some of them favoured a supposedly ‘traditional’ model in which women would return to the home, but most were not concerned with gender relations, which were now considered a matter for the individual rather than the state. In the absence of a strong state agenda, past norms and dispositions were likely to be crucial in shaping post-Soviet gender relations. Our focus in this book is limited to the labour market and the household to the extent that it shapes participation in the labour market. But in this area, no less than in others, we consider that norms and dispositions derived from the Soviet past play an important role in structuring behaviour. In this chapter, I begin by outlining the salient norms likely to underlie differences in the responses of men and women to the new Russian labour market. I then examine the extent to which these influence labour market behaviour and outcomes.
