Professional Choices and Сareers of Young Female Healthy Lifestyle Bloggers of St. Petersburg: Work-Life Balance, Professional Trajectories

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. Studies of blogging as a profession are a new field of research, and a fairly promising due to the changes in the Russian labor market in the last decade. Nonetheless, blogging is not received in the context of Russian society as a full-fledged professional activity, therefore this work is intended to highlight the professional trajectories of bloggers. In this research, we are primarily interested in finding out 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. As part of this study a theoretical analysis of important concepts was conducted and a research program was developed in accordance with the qualitative tradition in empirical sociology. Within it, in-depth biographical interviews were preferred, afterwards, they were processed by encoding procedures and analyzed using the thematic analysis method. It was found that female healthy lifestyle bloggers have a large professional and personal background, due to which they receive “formal capital” that helps them determine professional choices and strategies, and move up the career ladder. Women-bloggers manage their careers, which include blog activities, using three main strategies: “career reconciliation”, networking and self-branding in the blogosphere, thereby planning their professional activities and keeping it under strict control.