5.3. Attitude to money from different social groups. Stratification of People in Relation to the Amount of Remuneration, Money Spending - Money Psychology

Money becomes a powerful factor in the separation of people in various fields - spiritual values, material security, ideological views, social stratification. Under stable conditions in the country, attitudes toward earnings are formed in connection with the specific psychological characteristics of people. Willingly or unwittingly, they differ in relation to the work activity of the group.

• The first group consists of mainly hired labor people who are employed with a cash income depending only on wages. These are teachers, doctors, military workers.

• The second group includes representatives of the liberal professions who receive a fee or contractual amount for their work. These are lawyers, artists.

• Third - private entrepreneurs of any scale , engaged in the organization of production. Their income depends only on themselves. Naturally, a member of any group would like to receive more money, but accordingly by raising salaries, fees, income from production.

A person who is employed receives any set amount of wages almost independently, especially in the public sphere, from his qualifications. The slogan "know how to sell your work" in its pure form is valid only in the area of ​​increasing the number of jobs by the individual. The amount of remuneration for his labor depends on the policy of directing funds for labor remuneration (in our country, 20% of GDP, in developed countries - 80%). True, in domestic conditions there are double standards of payment. Often, for the same work done in a public and private firm, an employee receives a salary that differs 2-10 times.

Satisfaction with payment (and in case of dissatisfaction — lack of attempts to change the situation) refers to a particular psychological inclination of people — to receive a fixed salary for their work on certain days (they feel calm, confident, carefree, can completely surrender to work). Often, you can hear the bitter "what we can do - only go to work, only invent, only treat, etc." from qualified engineers or doctors, although they are the aces in their work, and everything that surrounds us is made by their mind and hands. For these people, priority was and is business. Their money, as a rule, is inactive, is not capital, but becomes an element of the consumer sphere of economic life. Their attitude to money is abstract, which makes it difficult for people of this type to adapt to a market economy. For them, money is "pay."

For others, more inclined to sell their work and who can do it, the place of permanent work was nominal in Soviet times. The main income they had not there. These are people of many working professions of the service plan (carpenters, plumbers, repairmen, for whom there has always been a great demand), private practitioners and teachers, various consultants and experts and a number of other specialists. For most of these people, the priority is the amount of earnings. As a rule, the case, the quality of their performance interests them only to the extent that it affects the amount of payment.

The share of those who are fanatical in making money is quite small, both in foreign and domestic research. True, our respondents, unlike Westerners, show greater dissatisfaction with their financial situation than they fantasize about money.

A special subgroup - persons of the liberal professions. According to the psychology of activity, they are interested in the quality of their work, but according to the demand for it, they do not disdain the "careless work".

The third group of persons is usually interested both in business and in earnings. Its representatives most often immediately refuse public service, organize their work, the success of which directly depends on the quality of work. They need a free private ownership economy and active money. The power of money they have is directly related to the concepts of freedom, because thanks to them you can earn, get rich, "release wealth from the chest" and invest it in business, and make a profit by turning it into circulation.

One of the interesting domestic works on determining the priority of a cultural-territorial or class factor is a cross-cultural study of the relationship to money, conducted by O. Deineka and O. Dvorkina (Table 3).

Table 3

Differences in attitude to money of representatives of different social groups

The study showed that it is money that becomes one of the adaptation tools that compensates for unbalanced relations between the state and entrepreneurship, a means of autonomy, a component of the image of an entrepreneur. There is a deterioration in the moral state of the intelligentsia, even in the absence of objective indicators of the deterioration of the material condition. Its representatives understand that they depend on the money received from the state, that the restrictive tendency to savings for the “black day” is increasing, there is a caution to new financial structures and instruments and envy.