The Community of Parents of Schoolchildren as a Subject of Civil Society (Based on Materials from a Study Conducted in a Russian Megalopolis)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to analyzing the potential of transformation of parents into a subject of civil society through amplifying their social activities in schools and in big cities. The school and the megalopolis are regarded as social environments that have the potential to create new social trends and movements that are manifested in modified urban community behavior strategies, with such communities including parents of schoolchildren. The results of a survey of parents of schoolchildren (2019, Yekaterinburg, n = 7281) serve as the empirical foundation for the article. The article analyzes the characteristics of parents of schoolchildren in the megalopolis as a social community and as a subject of civil society. The importance of forming and developing this community’s social capital in relation to both its “strong” and “weak” connections is emphasized. The features of schoolchildren parents’ involvement in public practices at the school and in the megalopolis are shown. The forms of public participation preferred by parents in schools and in megalopolises are determined. Parents are becoming increasingly willing to engage in various practices of social activity in the future. Something else we noticed is the lack of active desire on behalf of the schoolchildren parent community to participate in managing the school, to stage protests or to support public initiatives in big cities. The authors insist that the parent schoolchildren community has the potential to turn into an active subject of state policy by means of increasing social activity and possibly translating it into civic activity under certain conditions. © 2021, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.