On Thursday, December 3, at 6.00 PM, an online seminar of the STS Center will take place. Leila Sayfutdinova from the University of St. Andrews will deliver a lecture "Engineering Career in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan: Soviet Legacy and Post-Soviet Changes".
Engineering is one of the professions that underwent significant disruptions in the course of post-Soviet transition to market economy. Some of the factors that affected the profession across post-Soviet and more broadly postsocialist space were deindustrialization, technological change, and the decline in demand for engineers in the new economy. In this talk, I discuss the impact of this transition on engineering careers in Azerbaijan. I focus on changes in career trajectories, professional mobility, and work orientations across different industries and specializations. I argue that two processes―informalization and partial integration into global economy were crucial in this transformation. As a result, the profession became strongly stratified, with internationally mobile professionals mostly in the oil industry, and the rest increasingly relying on informal ties to maintain their professionalism. While the content of engineering work has also changed due to influx of new technologies, there still exists continuity with the Soviet vision of engineering as a holistic profession integrating different elements of production chain.
Date and time: December 3, Thursday, 6.00–8.00 PM.
The speaker’s speech and the seminar will be held online on the BlueJeans platform. To get the link, please register. The link will be sent to the specified mail one hour before the event. For all questions, write irinantoschyuk@gmail.com.