Chepurenko A.Y., Kolennikova N.D. Private entrepreneurship in the mass consciousness and social practices of Russians. In: Russian society and challenges of the time. Book Eight ...

Abstract

Based on the monitoring data of the Federal Penitentiary Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences for the corresponding period, trends in the mass consciousness of Russians in relation to entrepreneurship as a socio-economic practice and in the level of entrepreneurial activity of Russian citizens in the first 20 years of the 21st century are analyzed. It is shown that the attitude of Russians to entrepreneurship can be characterized as rather positive, but internally contradictory: allowing its development and agreeing with the positive role that it plays in the economy, tolerant of private property, the respondents are alienated from capitalism and the market and most of them advocate a return to centralized regulation of the economy and price control. Moreover, over the past quarter of a century, this twine between the perception of entrepreneurship as something "good" and the negative attitude towards the socio-economic environment in which only it can organically develop, i.e. capitalism and the market, has only increased. At the same time, although they are decreasing over time, differences in the level of involvement in entrepreneurship and the perception of this socio-economic phenomenon are still being reproduced, depending on human capital (age, education), as well as on the type of settlement. With some exaggeration, we can say that entrepreneurship is the lot of the younger and more educated. It causes a more positive perception among those living in capital cities. The older and the lower the level of education, the lower the level of involvement in entrepreneurship, the higher the level of rejection of entrepreneurship and the phenomena associated with its development - market economy and competition. In contemporary Russia, two multidirectional trends can be distinguished, which in the long term can affect the level of entrepreneurial activity and the perception of this phenomenon by the mass consciousness. On the one hand, it is digitalization and related socio-economic processes (the emergence of a platform economy, the introduction of artificial intelligence in business processes, etc.), which objectively form a hybrid type of worker-entrepreneur-self-employed and make entrepreneurship an everyday reality for the growing masses of the population. On the other hand, these are the processes of nationalization of the economy, restrictions on the freedom of private property, which objectively narrow the opportunities for entrepreneurial initiative and marginalize this phenomenon.