Horizontal professional mobility in contemporary sociological studies

Abstract

The article deals with contemporary foreign and Russian sociological research in the field of horizontal professional mobility. Interest to this issue had increased in the late 1970s; by the late 1990s, significant empirical data had been accumulated, which allowed for conducting in-country and cross-country comparisons. The experts focus on such problems as territorial mobility when it comes to professional fulfillment, the influence of age, the level of wages and satisfaction with one’s previous job, as well as gender and inter-ethnic differences when it comes to changing one’s professional trajectory. Research approaches and the identified predictors of such mobility are described in the paper. The analysis of horizontal professional mobility today is mainly represented in the studies of both labor force in general, and of professional groups in Germany and post-reform China. Studies by Russian sociologists are distinguished by the use of the stratification and activity approach, in which the relationship between the individual choice of changing one’s professional trajectory and socio-economic, political changes in the country, together with structural shifts in the modern economy is established and explained. A review of theoretical and empirical sociological research allows for concluding that horizontal professional mobility and flexibility of labor resources have a “cumulative effect” on career development, due to an increase in knowledge and competencies. As a result, an increase in labor productivity is expected over time. Attention is drawn to the fact that not many studies can be characterized as a complex study of horizontal professional mobility, and not many of them focus on the aspects of changing professional trajectories and the role and importance of education in changing one’s professional activity. Sociologists and economists note that the scale of professional mobility in the Russian Federation is vast, but at the same time underestimated, and the process of changing one’s professional trajectory and mastering a new profession is poorly understood.