A study of how society actually reaches the individual. Yu. V. Sychev takes his method from Marx's sixth thesis on Feuerbach-that the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each person but, in its reality, the ensemble of social relations-and asks how, concretely, that ensemble reaches down and shapes a particular life. His answer is the microenvironment: the immediate surroundings through which the large abstractions of society and the mode of production are refracted before they touch anyone. The work team, the family, the study group, the local organisation. It is a real question, and for long stretches the book handles it with intelligence. Sychev was a working sociologist rather than an apparatus polemicist, and the book carries the marks of genuine empirical labour. Much of its data comes from case studies he took part in at the Perm Telephone Factory, run by that plant's own section for research in the sociology and psycho-physiology of labour: surveys of what workers liked and disliked about their jobs, how team relations tracked with productivity and turnover, and how young recruits settled into a shop. That places it among the records of a particular event-the cautious readmission of empirical sociology to Soviet intellectual life after the Thaw, and what such research was permitted to ask. Translated by Katharine Judelson. The Russian original is of 1974, revised for export toward the end of the developed-socialism years. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the one set of social relations the book is not licensed to describe.
