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FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

FOR HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

St. Petersburg School of Social Sciences and Area Studies

BACHELOR'S PROJECT

Field of study: 39.03.01 Sociology

Degree programme: Sociology and Social Informatics

Professional choices and ñareers of young female healthy lifestyle bloggers of St. Petersburg: work-life balance, professional trajectories

Rusalina Isaevna Bozheva

Supervisor: Lecturer of the Department of Sociology,

associated research fellow in CYS

Anastasia Andreevna Sablina

Saint Petersburg

2020

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The sociological debate around the professionalization, blogging and the construction of body capital
• 1.1 Concepts of profession, career and «serious leisure»
• 1.2 Optics of a new profession: a career in the blogosphere
• 1.3 Construction of appearance and body project in the context of modernity and media space
• Chapter 2. Methodology, methods, sampling, and difficulties in the «field»
• Chapter 3. Professionalization, blogging and work-life balance
• 3.1 Background: the past experience and the environment
• 3.2 Professional strategies and trajectories
• 3.3 Blogging as an integral part of life and the issue of maintaining work-life balance among bloggers
• Conclusion
• References
• Appendix 1. The table of informants
• Appendix 2. The interview guide
• Appendix 3. The example of an interview transcript
• Appendix 4. The coding three

Introduction

The concept of a career is subject to transformation over time. So, if earlier the concept was about “the pursuit of success at any cost, disregard for the values and ideals of society” (Tkach, 2004, p.3), the modern society dictates new interpretations of professional careers. Now, the accumulation of professional experience, professional self-determination, and professional self-expression are coming to the fore. In the 21st century, the concepts of a professional career and career searches are firmly entrenched within the media space, where people are able not only to find leisure and communication, but also to engage in professional self-realization or discover a new way to earn money. One of the clearest online spaces where people can build their career strategies can be Instagram. “This social network is now in demand among Internet users what contributes to the development of the platform as a venue for keeping your own diary/blog, which are completely diverse in their focus” (Bozheva, 2019, p.3). However, such blogs automatically become guides from “private to public”, which can have a specific impact on blog holders.

It is known that female bloggers are often subjected to sexualization, objectification, and various kinds of criticism, occasionally entire sites are created for this purpose (Van Syckle, 2016), but they manage to build individual professional pathways in a non-trivial way and achieve success in one or more career directions. In this research, we are primarily interested in finding out how bloggers are building their career paths, how and through what they build them, how they manage to combine them, as well as what is behind their desire to go to the public level and talk about their practices.

Studies of blogging as a profession are a new field of research, in which many new directions are emerging, nonetheless, blogging is not received in the context of Russian society as a full-fledged professional activity. Therefore, to highlight the problem and relevance of the upcoming study, it is worth paying attention to a number of prerequisites that affect the transformation in career choices and strategies of people who use social networks as a platform for creating their brand and generating income.

Considering the issue from a broader perspective, the first thing to mention is the changes in the Russian labor market in the last decade. Significant aspects in the transformation of the professional structure of society are the emergence and adaptation of new professions, as well as the introduction of new technologies. these trends, although they seem positive and contribute to the flexibilization of the modern labor market, nevertheless facilitate the formation of economic growth without creating workplaces (Vershinina & Markeeva, 2015, p.27). Thus, many employees have become unable to build vertical careers, that is why there was a request for new forms of flexible employment, which are not just more convenient in the framework of time management and competitive in wages, but also allow people to ensure a balance between personal life and work. A little bit later, this idea will be developed in the literary review, which will also consider the concepts of introducing freelancing and self-branding.

Another important factor that actualizes the topic is that the influencer-marketing experiences exaltation now, which means that the so-called micro-influencers from the online community, who form the demand for products and services, are becoming more popular and, accordingly, get more profit. Epicstars service predicted that in Russia by the end of 2019, advertisers will spend about 10 billion rubles on advertising from bloggers in social networks and messengers, which will almost double the previous year's figure (Lebedeva, 2019). Moreover, this trend leads to an increase in those users who want to join the ranks of opinion leaders in order to get a large profit.

Thirdly, healthy lifestyle bloggers tell about a life where healthy eating and sports practices are integrated into the daily routine. It is really necessary for the modern user of social networks, so such blogs seem to be thriving now, receiving a lot of offers for sponsorship (Boepple & Thompson, 2014). What is more, lifestyle bloggers always have a specific target audience, which is characterized by active media consumption that can also be controlled and regulated. The specificity of blogs and their holders is that they have accumulated resources that allow them to gather a large number of followers around themselves and their content. Thus, opinion leaders build their “ideology” and broadcast it to the masses, which becomes a large-scale ground for scientific debate.

The key aspects on which this study is based will be described below:

The participants of the study are young female healthy lifestyle bloggers living in St. Petersburg and keeping an account on sports and nutrition on Instagram. Within this study, we examine the career choices of healthy lifestyle bloggers.

The research question of the work is formulated as follows: how do female healthy lifestyle bloggers construct and manage professional choices and careers?

The aim of this study is to identify which career choices and strategies are undertaken by healthy lifestyle bloggers and how self-branding is formed among those young women living in Saint-Petersburg, who are active users of the social network Instagram.

Research objectives:

1) To identify the main prerequisites and motivations for blogging about sports and nutrition;

2) To analyze how female healthy lifestyle bloggers manage their career and combine professional activities;

3) To distinguish how female healthy lifestyle bloggers use the media space as part of their career strategies;

4) To analyze what challenges the studied group has to maintain work-life balance as part of their public activities in the online space and how they cope with them.

Further, the paper will present the following sections: a theoretical analysis of important concepts for this study, an overview of research methodology and methods, and an empirical analysis of the collected data with the results obtained. At the end of the work, you can also get acquainted with additional tools and their examples used for the realization of this study.

Chapter 1. The sociological debate around the professionalization, blogging and the construction of body capital

The present chapter is devoted to the theoretical saturation of the main concepts that accompany all research material and key elements of analysis. So, the first part will conceptualize the notions of profession, career, and “serious leisure”. After that, we will discuss in more detail the types of modern non-standard employment, blogging as a “new profession”, as well as the changes in the labor market due to its partial transition to the media space. In the third part, we will look at the concepts of “body project” and “body canon”, and how they fit into the sphere of online earnings.

1.1 Concepts of profession, career and «serious leisure»

professional career female blogger

Professional employment and labor relations have undergone various transformations over many decades. These transformations are primarily related to the modernization of the labor market: the emergence of new types of activities, communication, and the working environment, including physical or virtual ones. Thus, in this part of the theoretical chapter, we will consider the concepts of professionalization, career, and also turn to the concept of “serious leisure” that is relevant for this study.

As already noted, the process of professionalization of human labor is extensive and “stayless”, the definition of which is constantly being adjusted over time. From a sociological point of view, professionalization is distinguished when an individual passes the theoretical and practical stage of becoming a specialist in a particular field, masters the job responsibilities, and secures a certain labor position. Thus, the profession is considered as an organized group, embedded in society and performing its social functions in it through a network of labor relations and creating a certain subculture. Among the key characteristics of the profession were: (1) systematic theory (requires superior skill and lengthy training), (2) authority (client-professional relationship), (3) community sanction (informal or formal community approval of profession), (4) ethical codes (the essentials are uniform, while the specifics are various among professions), and (5) a culture (unique profession values, norms, and symbols) (Greenwood, 1957). Next, we will look at this process in more detail through the concepts of the profession and career of later authors.

There is quite an extensive and long-term debate around the concept of the profession, which is popular both in the Western and home scientific community. Based on the article by Romanov and Yarskaya-Smirnova (2007), the term “profession” can be broadly divided into the Russian debate - an occupation of the working class, and the English debate - an occupation, characterized by a high level of technical and intellectual competence. The authors also listed various theoretical approaches, which in turn fit into the typology of knowledge in the sociology of professions. The structurally functionalist approach by Durkheim and Parsons identifies a technical type of knowledge in the concept of a profession, where professionalization is defined as a progressive process designed to ensure public order through specific functions of professions; here, attribute approach defines the “verity” of professions by highlighting professional traits. Other approaches are critical and phenomenological: in the first, emancipatory knowledge is formed, in that there is a struggle between professionals for an advantageous position in the stratification system, monopolizing professional knowledge as property, while the second approach considers the profession as a relatively closed and self-sufficient life world, possessing tacit and everyday knowledge due to human experience. Thus, the studied group of healthy lifestyle bloggers in this study can be considered primarily through attribute and phenomenological approaches, since the status of such a profession as a blogger in the modern world is still quite relative, however, given the acquisition of specific theoretical skills and their application in practice (in the blogosphere), the self-identification of professionals as part of the community and the presence of a professional platform for realizing the potential, it is reasonable to define such a field of activity as a blogging as a professional one.

Besides, the interactionist approach, which was born in the works of Weber, allows us to determine the type of employment that does not require higher education, but has some unique “own” knowledge, style features and habitus, as a professional. Thus, “profession” acts as a social “label”, becoming an element of a person's identity and an element of the social structure of the society (Romanov & Yarskaya-Smirnova, 2009).

A slightly different discussion turns around the term “career”, which is usually used only in relation to professional activities. The concept of a career implies a certain attitude to work that is exclusively professional, sometimes contextualized as a vocational aptitude (Greenwood, 1957). Later, Sorokin (2013) based on the analysis of a number of foreign and home theoretical approaches to defining the handling of the concept of “career” identified two main approaches - “subjectivist” and “objectivist”. In the first approach, career is considered as a personal awareness of the position by a person, which is related to his/her work experience and activities during the working life trajectory, ofttimes, in this approach, “career success” is defined through the individual's internal personal criteria. The second approach focuses on the external aspects of the career process and considers the career as a linear trajectory of interrelated works associated with vertical mobility.

The problem of the concept of career can also be considered at the level of individual social mobility, referring to the discussion of followers of the field theory by P. Bourdieu. Bourdieu's social theory of practice contains three major constructs - field, habitus, and capital, and also considers individuals as producers of social practices in a social space that use their respective capitals - economic, cultural, and social - that can play the role of symbolic capital in professional fields (Chudzikowski & Mayrhofer, 2011). Here, the career is included in the concept of “social field”, which the authors transform into a “career field”, within which individual career advancement occurs through two aspects: “career habit” - a set of long-term dispositions of the mind and body that determine the agent's perception of the own career opportunities, goals and the field itself, as well as “career capital” - a set of resources (knowledge, skills, education, etc.) that contribute to the growth of the agent's position in the career field (Sorokin, 2013).

In addition, Sorokin (2013) notes that “career success” is an important construct in research on the social aspects of a career. Thus, the author identifies two main indicators of career success: 1) career satisfaction according to the assessment of the career subject, 2) the presence of career promotion as a criterion for career growth. Moreover, the key social elements of the career process were identified: 1) career aspirations as part of professional motivation, 2) individual “resources” in the form of professional qualifications and “social capital”, 3) the relationship between career characteristics and the organizational environment.

It is worth paying attention to such a modern phenomenon that allows persons to build a career in conditions of relative freedom, in a broad sense called flexible employment. The most important perspective, which is intended to highlight the theoretical chapter of this study, is the serious leisure perspective (SLP), developed by Robert Stebbins, where the author reflects on how people form an optimal leisure lifestyle, embedding it in their career paths (Stebbins, 2015). The author considers “serious leisure” as a positive phenomenon of modernity with an increasing role in society, which contributes to the development of the individual, including in the professional environment. Thus, “serious leisure” can be defined as “sustainable activities of an amateur/hobbyist or a participant in a public (self)activities” that offer a wide range of opportunities, have structural complexity, emphasize the importance of the relationship between work and creativity, and force the individual to use their mind, skills, and experience to create something (Stebbins, 2000; Sennett, 2008). The researcher also noted that certain prerequisites for this type of employment are an increase in spare time, the social and cultural implications of consumption and changes in communications in the modern world, that are reflected in the expansion of the range of so-called leisure careers, including on the Internet (Stebbins, 2009).

One of the main points is that leisure comes to the forefront in the post-information society and becomes successfully "embedded" in professional activities. In addition, the author notes the presence of creative potential as an integral part of an optimal leisure lifestyle, moreover, in some activities the occupation of "serious leisure" may replace some forms of professional training and be based on experience, acquired competencies (Stebbins, 2000).

In the modern world, the border between leisure, namely "serious leisure", and professional activity is almost invisible, due to the consumerization and mediatization of leisure, as well as its transformation into a format for the realization of the own skills and hobbies. Accordingly, there is an intertwining of work and leisure practices in the context of flexible employment. By maintaining a balance between the former perception of leisure and the later formed "serious leisure", rather than defining leisure as the only career advancement, the individual is able to obtain the desired quality of life (Stebbins, 2000, 2009).

1.2 Optics of a new profession: a career in the blogosphere In this section, materials were used from Bozheva, R. (2020). Professional Choices and Careers of Young Female Healthy Lifestyle Bloggers of Saint-Petersburg: Work-Life Balance, Boundaries and Trajectories. Project Proposal.

Continuing the final topic of the previous part of the theoretical chapter, we will consider in more detail other discussions that are directly related to the focus of this study and return to non-standard employment as a key optics of “new professions”. Sorokin (2013) in the framework of “new career theories” believes that “employability” for a modern worker is the most significant characteristic expressed in maintaining his/her employment in a changing environment through the constant development of abilities and skills such as networking, learning ability, and entrepreneurial skills.

Here we turn to the phenomenon of the creative economy that emerged not so long ago, which has formed a number of new, promising areas of employment of various spectra. Comparing the industrial era and modernity, it should be noted how important the role of human knowledge and competence has become in the context of the transition from standardized to creative labor. Studies in this area show that, in addition to focusing on individualism, openness, and value transformation, creative labor embodies a number of drawbacks and risks, in particular the risk of unemployment within precarious employment (Florida, 2008; McRobbie, 2003). For example, the increased number of creative industries, and consequently their employees, has entrenched the trend towards “portfolio employment” or work based on the principle of combining professional activities, where individuals are often on the border between employment and unemployment (Neff, Wissinger & Zukin, 2005).

Precarious employment, freelancing are some ways of organizing the work process, self-organization in professional activities. Such employment frequently based on “serious leisure” can have many positive features for professional reconciliation or even a single type of employment. Thus, precarious employment is an important phenomenon of the modern labor market, in which a precariat is a socio-economic group defined as “class-in-the-making”. This “new professional class” has several main features: the absence of employment and job security, a peculiar status position as a worker, work based on competitiveness, reputation and flexibility. Such “new” labor relations have a certain “level of freedom” and acquire a contractual nature, which becomes popular among young professionals, but also guarantees them an “uneasy” status position (Kalleberg, 2011; Standing, 2011). Here, we need to define the term “freelancer”.

Strebkov and Shevchuk (2009) distinguish this term as a new scientific category, meaning self-employed workers who have a high level of professionalism that helps them work remotely and autonomously, without being involved in traditional labor relations. The self-employed are a heterogeneous group, able to differ in their working behavior, nevertheless, freelancers are united by the fact that they sell their professional skills and abilities, provide services, and do not produce goods. Understanding what is behind the term “freelancing”, we can conclude that it is not always applicable to the studied group of bloggers in this paper. Then, it is worth returning to “portfolio employment”, which can include “electronic freelancing”, when an employee forms a “portfolio of orders” and carries it out remotely using information and communication technologies, this is primarily due to the reconstruction of the activities of individuals driven by rapidly developing digital technologies in the economy. Thus, the authors lead us to the concept of portfolio strategies, in which individuals are able to form the entire “portfolios of work”, for example, when combining various types of professional employment.

Having delved into the concepts of non-standard, new employment, we will consider blogging as a new profession using empirical sources. Entering the career path in the blogosphere, bloggers achieve professional success in online earnings more often by trial and error or by imitating colleagues than by strategic research of the specifics of working in this professional environment (Abidin & Gwynne, 2017). Most often, the first method takes a lot of time and effort, which can influence the fact that a decision is made in favor of giving up formal education. At the same time, the lack of material capital, which is quite important for success in the industry, can affect the failure of professional business activities within the virtual community, which can also be associated with the growing competitiveness of the blogging market, which both gives new career opportunities for many young women and leads them to financial insolvency (Abidin & Gwynne, 2017).

In this context, it is correct to mention that bloggers are also endowed with various forms of capital, which they skillfully use to realize their needs and goals. Accordingly, here we rely on the theoretical basis created by Pierre Bourdieu (Pedroni, 2015). Based on the concept of Bourdieu, we can apply it directly to the focus of this study, considering various forms of capital as a way for bloggers to enter the professional arena. As in any other fields, capital functions and transforms in the blogosphere and can have a certain impact on the career paths of bloggers. Thus, capital can appear in three main forms: economic, cultural, and social. In the first case, it means direct conversion to material resources. Within the framework of cultural capital, three forms of it are considered (objectified, institutionalized and incorporated), where material cultural goods, educational qualifications and competencies, knowledge and interests can be accumulated, respectively. The latter form of capital involves the accumulation of social connections, which are then converted profitably into economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986). One of the most interesting forms of capital in the context of blogging is social capital and the possibility of converting it into economic and symbolic (prestige, recognition) capital. Accordingly, it is necessary to mention networks that connect individuals both in life and in virtual space. Networks consist of connections that are formed through different types of social capital - bonding and bridging. The first type is “responsible” for close, strong ties that tend to shrink globally in the modern world. The second type is “responsible” for weak, non-intensive connections, which, on the contrary, are gaining momentum: they change the structure of modern interaction networks, create conditions for cooperation, and acquire actual “strength” (Florida, 2008). Thus, it can be noted that this type of social capital in the media environment is the most important “proponent” of economic capital for bloggers.

In addition, Abidin and Gwynne (2017) mention that one of the indicators of professional mobility within successful commercial blogs is recognition from a number of realms including various corporations, political, educational, social and humanitarian organizations, and the mainstream media runners, which emphasize their unique status and social prestige. Blogging as a form of professional employment is becoming more common, and this contributes to the appearance of additional nuances and difficulties in building a career within a particular social network. As strategies to combat them, opinion leaders resort to various forms of communication and attract new followers. Inga Saboia and others (2018) in their article study different types of opinion leaders on Instagram and analyze their methods of interaction with the audience such as: personal online presence, creating your own brand of goods or services and distributing them or advertising products and services to third parties. They also resort to such forms of communication with the audience as «informing», «empathizing» and «inspiring». Other researchers conclude that cultural and external capital and power relations determine how authenticity is constituted and maintained in the online healthy lifestyle blogging field (Braumuller, 2017; Grande, 2019).

The modern labor market dictates new «rules of the game» for female workers. The widespread individualization of the creative workforce has not previously been so noticeable and marked by the potential in the online environment, while now there are various genres of production in social networks (Duffy & Hund, 2015). In their study, Brooke Erin Duffy and Jefferson Pooley (2019) analyzed «mass idols» and concluded that in the precarious employment economy, they represent «idols of promotion», and this follows from a mix of traits from the sphere of consumption and the sphere of production. In particular, one of the most commercially successful and widely available forms of digital cultural production now is a women's blog, which is divided into many topics that excite a mass audience. The break-up and oblivion of the “so-called era of big work” gave rise to the emergence of an independent labor force (Duffy & Hund, 2015), which increasingly comes to earn money in pleasure or through hobbies. Thus, social media production has become an important vehicle for women's financial independence and empowerment (Duffy & Hund, 2015).

Nowadays, in the cultural industry, the emphasis is on self-branding, which, within the framework of individual Instagram accounts, reinforces the idea that bloggers are not only “objects” of mass consumption, but also authors-producers of their careers and their talents and skills (Duffy & Pooley, 2019). The concept of self-branding itself also originates from the emergence of various social networks and the development of the media space as a whole (Khamis, Ang, & Welling, 2016). For the first time, the term self-branding was voiced by Tom Peter. since then, the term has been refined, and at the moment it sounds like “a set of practices, a mindset, and/or a way of remaking the self as a salable commodity to attract attention and acquire cultural and monetary value through social media platforms” (Liu & Suh, 2017). The concept of self-branding is quite paradoxical, since it implies the freedom of online influencers, but it is closely related to the constantly growing needs of the market.

As part of this work to ensure the success of your blog, you can find both a positive aspect of building your own digital self, self-knowledge and individualization, and consider the real disadvantages. For example, the deceptive ideal of “flexibility” that actually takes the form of a round-the-clock work style or its long wait to get a job (Duffy & Hund, 2015). Entrepreneurship in the framework of thematic accounts in an online environment involves not only expanding the audience, mastering advertising and eventually earning money, but also a considerable amount of investment and personal expenses. Blogs created by women for the profit and professional implementation require their owners to make various kinds of investments, such as investments in their appearance and female corporeality (Abidin & Gwynne, 2017).

Today, Instagram is no longer just a photo-sharing app, the platform has moved further and has become the area of influencer marketing (Veissi, 2017). Instagram influencers create a “shell of trust” around products and services that is based on audience support and partner brands. The mass effect of trust in them can be explained as follows. One of the theories that explains the relationship between online influencers and ordinary users is the two-step flow model of communication developed by Paul Lazarsfeld. It concludes that the interpersonal interaction of opinion leaders and their audience has a much stronger influence on the formation of public opinion in general than the media alone (Lazarsfeld & Katz, 2005). In other words, people will prefer to pay attention to bloggers, and only then to the media, and perhaps completely ignore the second one. Thus, influencers have some power capital, interpreting and distributing messages from the media.

1.3 Construction of appearance and body project in the context of modernity and media space

The issues of constructing nutrition practices and forming practices of caring for the physical form of the human body in one form or another have been considered for a long time. However, it is worth noting that body techniques are not universal and vary depending on society and culture (Mauss, 1973). In an argument based on the significance of cultural characteristics, Susan Bordo (1989) agreed with Mauss, arguing that various types of changes by women in their figure and eating habits can be interpreted as a reinterpretation of the ideological position dictated to women within the culture, moreover, these acts can be regarded as a form of protest in the author's opinion. Bordo refers to the example of advocates of cosmetic surgery, who claim that the issue is about self-determination, about “taking one's life into one's hands” (Bordo, 2017). Another important phenomenon is that the body is not only a reflection of culture, but also a direct practical place of control (Bordo, 1989). Thus, the body is actualized through a discipline where individuals form their own traditional order, constructed through various body control techniques.

The facts of upbringing, according to Mauss, deserve special attention, since they are often dominant in the use of the human body. Thus, the author claims that the concept of upbringing is closely related to the concept of imitation (Mauss, 1973). Based on the material presented by Mauss, the practices of proper nutrition and systematic physical activity are adopted by young women from their parents, who demonstrate or instill in them similar traditional techniques from childhood. This idea was also supported by Eleanor MacCoby and Carol Jacklin, who also added that children reproduce the behavior of others by observing them: successful actions are fixed, unsuccessful actions are rejected based on the reactions of these people; a process of self-socialization occurs (MacCoby & Jacklin, 1974).

Turner was one of the first to declare the “body” as an object of research, which happened in the second half of the 20th century, so the sociology of the body can be called a relatively new field of sociological knowledge (Merenkov & Antonova, 2018). The researcher argued that people actualize themselves through labor on bodies, and such discipline is a self-imposed social practice. Additionally, he believed that personal control over a diet is an act of will which may enhance self-esteem (Turner, 1996). The human body is comparable to a politically inscribed entity, constantly under pressure and control, which in the modern context “echoes” the attitude to appearance, which is often perceived as an object that needs to be rebuilt and deconstructed (Bordo, 2017).

Further, it is necessary to introduce the concept of "body project", which implies a transformed body image, including mental and behavioral, in a specific body entity that has both actual limitations and a tendency to conform to the canonical body image (Cash, 2005). Cash also noted that image matching is becoming more and more preferable due to a number of external factors: the immediate environment, fashion, media, etc. The body project directly depends on the perceived body canon, which most often dictates the discipline of the body and the ways to work on its project. At the same time, the concept of “body canon” is something broader than the “body image”, since it is a normative system of attitudes and ideas about the external and internal component of the body; it is not static, it changes over time, so women have to adapt to fit it. The current situation of globalization, the Internet network, distributes unified virtual images, translating “fashion” to the “body canons” (Kirillova & Pestova, 2016). Such trends in the modern world lead to the fact that the body project becomes part of a constantly ongoing and changing process of working on an identity, that is, individuals use their bodies to achieve certain goals - personal or professional. Thus, individuals use their body project not only as a direct component of economic capital, but also, publicly demonstrating it, and consequently the work is done on it, they achieve a certain symbolic capital in the form of recognition as a master, a professional who has the competence to build an “ideal” body.

There are more and more new approaches to the study of the problem of female corporeality, since it plays an important role in determining the identity of women in modern mass culture. Banizhe (2017) argues that physicality in all its manifestations is a priority in women's communication strategies, which in turn attach special importance to building these communications. Thus, the bodily representation of an individual has become important in a post-information society, since it is an element of building a biography and searching for an identity. Bodily anxiety eventually came to the surface through the spread of communication through social networks, where individuals formulate their ideals of beauty and are able to be evaluated with their bodies as approved or unacceptable (Litvina & Ostroukhova, 2015). It is important to note that the collective response can be different, including social media users who can provide various types of social support to bloggers (Ko, Wang, & Xu, 2013).

Now, we see the process of women's involvement in the production of new identities through the consumption of new media, for example, running their own blog (Sergeeva, 2014). According to the definition of Nebykov and Efimov (2012), a blog is a form of self-presentation and communication, where the central tools are the text, its reading and discussion. Currently, a lot of healthy lifestyle blogs appear and develop rapidly, but the motivation of bloggers to create such "diaries" is poorly understood. A study conducted by Blower (2016) identifies three main motivations for women blogging: (1) blogging becomes a way to individualize women, (2) the desire to transform self-identification by expanding opportunities in cyberspace, and (3) expanding approaches to a self-analysis by connecting with a virtual audience.

To sum up, this chapter attempts to consistently consider the main theoretical concepts that can quickly build an understanding of bloggers' practices related to professionalization and online earnings in Instagram. Thus, the concept of professionalization, approaches to the definition of “profession” and its key characteristics were considered, and the concept of “career” was defined in various perspectives. Next, we looked in more detail at the optics of "new careers" and the discourse concerning non-standard employment. In addition, the concepts of “body project” and “body canon” embedded in the paradigm of body work and online earnings were considered.

Chapter 2. Methodology, methods, sampling, and difficulties in the «field»

The research program and the entire design of the study were elaborated in accordance with the qualitative tradition in empirical sociology. It is worth noting that this research should be considered as an applied one. As a method of data collection for answering the research question and problem under consideration, the interview method was chosen. Referring to foreign practice, the interview is one of the main methods of sociological survey (Balanovskij, 2001). First, the specificity of the interview method is that the interviewee is the primary carrier of certain knowledge about social reality, which is directly the main interest of the interviewer that enables to retrieve the observed behavior and logic of the object of the study. Second, the interviewee within the area of his/her competence is able to formulate original judgments, put forward valid criticism, and provide information that is fundamentally new to the researcher. Third, the interview method is able to rid the researcher of his/her own myths, which can somehow distort the results of the study (Belanovskij, 1992, p.7). In addition, this method allows the researcher to directly collect data by himself/herself that guarantees the avoidance of inaccuracy of the information received. Thus, in this paper, in-depth biographical interviews were preferred for the study of professional choices and career strategies of bloggers. The term “in-depth” can also be complemented with another term - “semi-structured”, which together imply the varying content of each interview, where no attempt is made to get repetitive information from informant to informant. Interviews are also “biographical” in nature, as they focus on the informant's background in order to learn more about his/her identity. In conclusion, the interviews are directed, since the moderator planed the entire interview procedure: created a guide, determined the order of covered topics and questions.

The sampling is criteria-based, as the research involves selecting only those cases that match the goals and overall design of the study. One of the standard and necessary criteria for searching for informants is the informant's competence and willingness to cooperate. In the first case, the informant has a certain breadth and depth of knowledge within which he/she can express a competent opinion and reflection within own practical experience. In the second case, the informant is ready to cooperate and gives permission (formal or informal) to participate in the interview. However, there is often a difficulty - the lack of motivation to cooperate, caused by a lack of time and distrust of “science”, which promises incomplete permeability for scientific research (Belanovskij, 1992, p.7). Thus, the empirical base of the research comprised interviews with female bloggers living in St. Petersburg and having the profile on Instagram, mainly devoted to the description and analysis of food and sports practices. “We define them as bloggers for three main reasons, including those revealed due to interviews: content is built around several topics (mainly sports and nutrition), impressive figures for a regular audience (from 3 thousands subscribers), regularity and frequency of publications in blog (from 1 post in a week to 1 post in a day)” (Bozheva, 2019, p.17). The table with a brief description of the informants is presented in Appendix 1.

The recruitment was passing via Instagram, as bloggers are most active during the day on this social network, which requires their constant presence. Requests to conduct an interview were sent out in private messages, and if there were additional contacts in the bloggers' profile, the messages were also duplicated there. Thus, the moderator wrote to 40 users: 9 - gave a refusal, 17 - did not give a response, 14 - agreed, which indicates 35% consent of potential informants.

There is an interview guide from last year's research, the blocks of which were partially replaced with new ones. However, it does not lose its relevance, as well as interviews have been taken earlier on its basis. The interview guide, given in Appendix 2, consists of the following semantic parts: introductory part, biographical block, questions about professional engagement and online earnings, blogging, questions about development and future.

The study included 14 in-depth interviews, ranging in length from 44 to 146 minutes. The interview procedure can be divided into two periods: the first - in-person interviews in the 2019 field stage, and the second - online interviews in the 2020 field stage. Initially, the “face-to-face” interview criteria were mandatory, but only 50% of the interviews were taken this way, since it became impossible to schedule face-to-face meetings due to the declaration of a coronavirus infection as a pandemic, so the second half of the interviews was collected in an online format. The factor of conducting an interview in an online format has complicated the procedure for the interviewer, since personal communication helps to win informant's favor and set up the informant for a conversation. In addition, the moderator could not transfer the interview to the format of a written answer to the questions or in the form of voice messages, since foreign studies have repeatedly noted a significant deterioration in the quality of sociological information when using self-filling by respondents (Balanovskij, 2001). A positive aspect, according to the researcher, is the fact that the topic of the study itself and the main set of questions of the guide is not sensitive, so the online format has not become a problem for obtaining information in a full range.

Information obtained from informants was recorded on a dictaphone and transcribed verbatim. During the transcription process, anonymization was also performed in order to exclude the possibility of revealing the identity of informants. The transcript of the interview can be found in Appendix 3.

The empirical part of this study consisted of the analysis of the in-depth biographical interviews with female healthy lifestyle bloggers. The received text documents as a result of the interview transcription and anonymization stage were analyzed using the elements of the grounded theory approach, developed collaboratively by Strauss and Glaser. The most important aspects of applying the method of grounded theory are assigning conceptual labels to the source data and formulating their relationships with each other (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Therefore, this study will apply the elements used in the logic of the grounded theory approach, specifically part of the encoding procedure.

The multi-step coding procedure was applied: first, using open coding, the most important phenomena described by informants and related to the research topic were assigned certain labels. Here, data from random interviews were read several times and grouped into tentative labels that summarize the meanings that emerge from the data (Gallicano, 2013). Then, axial coding was applied to outline the relationships among the open codes and combine them into more detailed categories (Gallicano, 2013). Axial encoding was performed in QDA Miner Lite: this program helped to create the code tree and structure the collected data in a convenient format for further application. The final stage of the empirical analysis was the thematic analysis method.

In this study, the researcher encountered several difficulties. The part of recruiting informants via the social network Instagram was rather challenging, which significantly increased the amount of time spent on recruiting and interviewing bloggers. Another difficulty that is essential to mention when recruiting bloggers via Instagram is both a large number of refusals about the possibility of conducting an interview and disregards the messages with a meeting offer. Moreover, the informants were reluctant to agree to an online interview, refusing to spend so much time on the conversation. Thus, this became the main difficulty of the study, since the total number of refusals from interviewing bloggers was high and amounted to about 65% of all cases. Additional difficulties in the part of the work following the field stage were the individual transcription of a large number of interviews, which required a large number of time resources. Besides, at the initial stage of the coding procedure, the researcher had a question about her grasp of theoretical sensitivity, which is often covered within the framework of a grounded theory approach, in this case using only part of its elements. The question was within the scope of the degree of the grasp of its sources, which is meant by a knowledge of the necessary theory, grasp of sufficient professional and personal experiences, as well as analytical skills (Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

As described earlier in the methodological part of the work, the coding procedure was performed in several stages for the convenience of the researcher, as well as for structuring a large amount of information contained in multi-page transcripts of interviews. Open coding was performed manually using three transcripts of interviews, which are considered to be the most complete and informative in the researcher's opinion, and then a large list of so-called open codes was obtained. Further, at the stage of axial encoding in QDA Miner Lite, a two-level set of codes was received, which was then logically followed by thematic analysis. Thus, the empirical part of the study is accompanied by the code tree presented in Appendix 4, which also supports the structure of the subsequent chapter with the analysis.

Chapter 3. Professionalization, blogging and work-life balance

In the empirical part of the work, the written material is built in the logic of the research objectives; structurally this chapter will be divided into three parts, as two of the objectives were combined into one section because they are logically linked. The chapter begins with a description of the informants' background, highlighting their experiences and the environment in which they socialized and fleshed out views on practices that later became the key ones to their career paths. Next, we will consider the main stages of professional trajectories of bloggers and identify conditional professionalization strategies chosen by women-healthy lifestyle bloggers. The purpose of the closing part of the chapter was to examine the behavioral models in Instagram blogs, where young women combine career, earnings and “personal diary”, as well as to determine the aspects that hinder or help the studied group to maintain a balance between online career and personal life.

3.1 Background: the past experience and the environment

To better understand the trajectories of career-building in the media space by female healthy lifestyle bloggers, it is necessary to delve into the personal experience that has become significant for women and has been prior to a period of development in the professional sphere. In this section, we will look at the guidelines, which were found in the narratives of the blogger group under the study.

The primary interest in constructing an individual nutrition process

Each informant in the study group of bloggers mentioned that they embed the topic of nutrition in the content of their blog to some extent. The topic of nutrition is, first, a key one in the discourse on a healthy lifestyle, and, second, it is directly related to the sample of the study, so it is important to understand through what circumstances women began to focus on individual practices related to nutrition.

The nutrition practices currently being broadcast on blogs are shaped by a variety of factors, one of which is the immediate surrounding, which includes both a “family experience” and a friendly environment. Here, the relationship is quite ambiguous, since the adolescent experience of nutrition could dictate both “positive” and “negative” prerequisites for coming to a eutrophy. In the first case, we are talking about the fact that parents did not impose, but demonstrated practices of healthy eating: “my sister and I are more like our mother, mother has stopped frying in oil, she stews everything now; and I also, looking at her, began to change somehow” “ìû ñ ñåñòðîé ñêîðåå î÷åíü ïîõîæè íà ìàìó, âîò ìàìà ïåðåñòàëà æàðèòü íà ìàñëå, îíà âñ¸ òóøèò òåïåðü, è ÿ òîæå, ãëÿäÿ íà íå¸, ñòàëà ìåíÿòü êàê-òî” (Èíòåðâüþ 3, ßíà, 31 ãîä) (Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.). In the second case, informants in their narratives shared memories that they were overfed or fed unhealthy, which became for them a so-called trigger for a radical transformation of their nutrition:

I'm looking at how my mother and stepfather eat now, well, they got very fat, very much, and if these habits remained with me until now, then 100% I would also probably put on weight, and the way my habits have changed allows me to stay in a healthy body “ÿ âîò ñìîòðþ òàì êàê ïèòàþòñÿ ìàìà ñåé÷àñ ñ îò÷èìîì, íó îíè î÷åíü ñèëüíî ïîòîëñòåëè, î÷åíü ñèëüíî, è åñëè áû ýòè ïðèâû÷êè îñòàëèñü ñî ìíîé äî ñåãîäíÿøíåãî ìîìåíòà, òî 100% ÿ áû òîæå, íàâåðíîå, ïîïðàâèëàñü, è òî, êàê èçìåíèëèñü ìîè ïðèâû÷êè, ïîçâîëÿåò ìíå îñòàâàòüñÿ â çäîðîâîì òåëå” (Èíòåðâüþ 13, Âåðîíèêà, 23 ãîäà)