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Work Communities: Sense of Place in the Context of a Single-Industry Arctic City

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Nedoseka E.V., Sharova E.N., Lizova V.A.

Specific entry: Northern and Arctic Societies

Annotation

The aim of this article is to provide a substantive definition of the sense of place among the residents of Norilsk, who constitute an urban working community. The term “working community” is used to refer to the residents of an industrial single-industry town, united by a shared mental conceptualization of those with whom they live, work, communicate, share common values, for whom professional and corporate identities are dominant and determine the nature and directions of the urban community’s sustainability. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the principles of social constructivism, which views social identities as multiple discursive constructs of the modern globalized world, in which the loss of place and ties to communities are consequences of the ongoing changes. As the main concept for identifying the characteristics of the local, we chose “sense of place”, which arises as a result of interaction with the environment and is meaningfully reflected in its interpretation by residents. The methodological basis of the work was the method of qualitative text analysis, specifically narrative analysis. At the empirical level, a detailed description of subjective perception of the city of Norilsk was carried out on the basis of a) text messages, posts and comments to them for 20212024 (the total number of posts was 4,511, of which 110 posts with the number of comments exceeding 50 were selected); b) individual in-depth interviews (18 people, employees of the Nadezhda Metallurgical Plant named after B. V. Kolesnikov; the Talnakh Concentrator; the Komsomolskiy Mine). The analysis allowed us to identify the main dominants of the “sense of place” among Norilsk residents as an urban working community: ambivalent emotional attachment to the city; perception of Norilsk as a “place not for everyone” and as a city of an industrial corporation with a special professional profile — heavy labor professions.

About authors

Elena V. Nedoseka, Cand. Sci. (Soc.), Associate Professor, Senior Researcher
Branch of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Science, ul. 7-ya Krasnoarmeyskaya, 25/14, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Murmansk Arctic University, ul. Kapitana Egorova, 15, Murmansk, Russia
nedelena-24@yandex.ru, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1944-0367

Ekaterina N. Sharova, Cand. Sci. (Soc.), Associate Professor
Murmansk Arctic University, ul. Kapitana Egorova, 15, Murmansk, Russia
kateshar1@ya.ru, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9042-3570

Veronika A. Lizova, Student
Saint Petersburg State University, ul. Galernaya, 58-60, Saint Petersburg, Russia
veronica.lizova@gmail.com, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6166-3692

Keywords

urban working communities, sense of place, Norilsk, Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation (AZRF), public discourse, online community

UDC

316.334.56(985)(045)



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This work is licensed under a CC BY-SA License.

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