Empirical identification of the creative class in Ukrainian society
Institutional shifts in the labour market during the transition to a post-industrial economy have blurred the boundaries of the traditional classes, including the middle class. The emergence of new classes requires their appropriate theoretical and empirical study. The article dwells upon the empirical identification of the “creative class” in modern Ukrainian society. Author suggests a theoretical review of the concept, clarification of its characteristic and critical remarks. It was found that in modern social science the concept of “creative class” is often used as an obvious one. This concept became the subject of discussion not only among urbanists and sociologists, but also among politicians, journalists and publicists. However, the discussion of the concept does not eliminate the contradiction between the fact of the existence of new classes in the modern stratification system and the insufficient level of empirical knowledge about them. That is why this article establishes class affiliation in the categories offered by R. Florida with the help of classical tools of modern class analysis – by respondents’ employment status, profession, and occupation. Empirical identification of the creative class was carried out as a part of the secondary data analysis from a representative survey of the Ukrainian population aged 18 and older, living in cities of 50 thousand people and more and watching TV. The selected creative class is considered within the concepts of class analysis according to the classification of thematic clusters by O. Symonchuk. The theoretical provisions on the characteristics of the creative class are tested on the data of quantitative empirical research. The author suggests the comparison of values of different class representatives with the controlled variable “employment”. Paper concludes that the empirical identification of the creative class in Ukrainian society is quite possible due to the use of indicators “position, profession, activity”. It is noted that additional research is needed as for a general issue of new classes, given the changes in the modern labour market, and the concept of “creative class”.
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