“In its Complexity it’s Work, in its Soul it’s Family”: Professionalization of Foster Parenting in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

This article is a sociological investigation of the concept of care, particularly in terms of professionalization of (parental) care. The aim of the article is to analyze how foster parents who live in children's villages make sense of their parenting activities for themselves. Sociological conceptualization of care serve as the theoretical framework for our research, which allows us to answer questions, such as: what is care as an activity; who is supposed to provide mundane care; what is the locus of care; what kind of an institutional logic and cultural models of justification it is connected with. Our analysis is based on the empirical research in five children’s villages in which we conducted focus groups with foster parents living in those children's villages (family campuses) and three semi-structured thematic interviews with foster parents which all were recorded and transcribed.