Abstract

The issue of exploring historic transformations in social processes with regard to the individual development or social position is not new in social sciences; and yet history appears to be one of the most complex and controversial issues in social scientists’ debates. This article contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussion of studying an individual in history and history in an individual. At the basis of the argument is a case study of transformations in preparation for work in Russian schools as a result of the 1991 political change, and the role of those transformations in students’ construction of future working lives. I argue that the structural nature of the social activity can be used as the fi rst methodological entry point for studying historical aspects of social processes; the concept of personhood, understood as a socially formed system of long-life functions, forms a methodologically more abstract level of linking history and individual development. I conclude that when history is taken seriously in social research, analytic processes become all-inclusive in the analysis of social processes and individual development.

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