BOOK REVIEW
The Babushka Phenomenon: Older women and the political sociology of ageing in Russia, by Anna Shadrina, Series: FRINGE, UCL Press UK, 01 October 2025, 188 Pages, £25.00 (Paperback), ISBN 9781800089082, DOI https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089099
The Babushka Phenomenon arrives at a moment when management scholars are increasingly attentive to inequality, precarity, care, and the social infrastructures that sustain everyday life, yet still too often overlook older women as central actors in those processes (Grenier & Hanley, 2007). Anna Shadrina’s book makes that oversight impossible to maintain. In her account, the Russian babushka is not a sentimental residue of tradition, nor a merely private family figure, nor a colorful cultural stereotype. She is a crucial social institution, an ethical subject, and a political actor whose labour absorbs the shocks of post-Soviet transformation, weak welfare provision, labour market insecurity, patriarchal family arrangements, and authoritarian state priorities. For scholars in Social Issues in Management, this is the book’s most important contribution. It demonstrates with unusual clarity that the reproduction of economic life depends not only on organizations, policies, and markets, but also on forms of unpaid, informal, feminized labour that remain structurally necessary and publicly undervalued (Bergeron, 2016).
Shadrina opens with an unforgettable scene. In 2011, thousands of older people, mostly women in their late sixties and early seventies, attempt to occupy seats across the Moscow Metro while wearing white vests printed with the slogan, “Is something not quite right here? Have children!” The event first appears absurd, almost theatrical, and perhaps even comic in the way state managed public performances can appear at a distance. Yet Shadrina reads it not as spectacle alone but as social diagnosis. The flash mob condenses two linked realities that drive the entire book, older women’s central involvement in social reproduction and their simultaneous marginalization as a social group. That opening is rhetorically effective because it transforms a single public anecdote into an aperture through which a wider institutional logic becomes visible. The slogan is not only pro-natalist. It reveals a whole moral economy in which older women are mobilized to regulate younger women’s reproductive choices, while their own labour and vulnerability remain concealed beneath state and family narratives of duty.
This ability to move from anecdote to structure is one of the book’s deepest strengths. Shadrina writes with a sociological sensibility that never loses sight of embodiment, memory, or voice. Her analysis is consistently anchored in lived episodes that resist the flattening effect of abstraction. Yet these episodes are never left to stand as mere illustrations. They are carefully interpreted as socially dense moments in which ethics, power, and inequality intersect. This is especially important for SIM scholars, because the field often struggles to connect macro concerns such as exclusion, justice, institutional failure, and moral responsibility to the ordinary practices through which such phenomena become durable. Shadrina shows that the ordinary is where the social order hides its most consequential truths.
The author’s own trajectory gives the book unusual depth, and her expertise matters not as a biographical embellishment but as part of the book’s intellectual authority. Shadrina explains that the idea for this work emerged from a larger trilogy on women’s lives after Soviet socialism, following earlier studies of marriage and reproduction. She was born in the Soviet Union, comes from Belarus, and pursued her doctoral and postdoctoral work in London after recognizing that questions of gender, sexuality, and social transformation required institutional spaces unavailable in many post-Soviet settings. She also makes clear that the research impulse behind this book was shaped by intimate observation, particularly her mother’s painful loss of stable professional identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the forced adaptation to precarious, undocumented work near pensionable age. These details matter because they help explain why the book is so strong on the interface between biography and structure. Shadrina understands old age not as an isolated life stage but as a sedimentation of prior institutional histories, classed trajectories, and gendered obligations. She brings to the subject both scholarly distance and lived historical literacy, and the book benefits from that combination.
At the center of the book is a powerful conceptual move. Shadrina treats the babushka not simply as a grandmother in the kinship sense, but as a socially produced role that exceeds biological relation. A babushka is a woman who inhabits the performative position of a socially old member of society, one whose legitimacy is tied to care, modesty, endurance, and self-abnegation. This reframing is important because it rescues the figure from stereotype and turns her into an analytic category. The babushka becomes a site where age, gender, class, labour, morality, and citizenship converge. For SIM scholars, this is a fruitful move because it resembles the best critical work on identity regulation and institutional role assignment. The category is not natural. It is produced through policy, culture, labour market exclusion, demographic discourse, and family expectation. It tells women what kinds of usefulness remain available to them in later life and what kinds of visibility are no longer permitted (Gray & Kish-Gephart, 2013).
That point becomes especially clear in the book’s treatment of social reproduction. Shadrina argues that older women in Russia do far more than help with domestic chores or childcare in the incidental sense. They provide practical, financial, and emotional support that enables younger generations to navigate unstable labour markets, expensive housing, inadequate childcare provision, and the wider risks of a post socialist social order. She invokes the idea of ontological security to capture this role, suggesting that older women provide continuity, meaning, and practical reassurance in a context where the guarantees once associated with Soviet social provision have dissolved. This is one of the book’s most important contributions for SIM scholarship. It shows that what organizations and states fail to provide is often compensated for by invisible actors in the intimate sphere. When younger families remain functional despite insecure work, long hours, low trust, and weak public support, it is often because someone else is quietly subsidizing that survival through unpaid labour. Management scholars who study resilience, work life conflict, employee wellbeing, or economic insecurity should pay close attention to this hidden subsidy.
The ethical implications are profound. One of the enduring temptations in discussions of care is to romanticize it, especially when care is performed by older women who are already associated with moral virtue, sacrifice, and family devotion (Antoni & Beer, 2024). Shadrina resists that temptation. She shows that care can be meaningful, identity affirming, and emotionally sustaining, while also being exhausting, coercive, and structurally exploited. This refusal of simplification is what makes the book analytically rich. The older women in these pages do not simply suffer under obligation, nor do they simply flourish through service. They inhabit a morally ambivalent world in which caregiving brings belonging and burden at the same time. This is exactly the sort of tension that care ethics has long tried to foreground, and Shadrina gives it compelling empirical life. For SIM scholars, the lesson is clear. Any ethics of responsibility that ignores who bears the costs of care, and under what conditions, will remain partial at best (Rynes et al., 2012).
A moving example of this complexity appears in the story of Larisa, who prepares twenty homemade Russian lunches of meatballs and buckwheat for her sister’s granddaughter and her classmates during a school trip to London. She carries the meals by public transport despite chronic back pain and without the aid of a car. She recalls with delight that the lunch became the children’s strongest memory of the trip. On one level, the scene is charming. It reveals competence, generosity, and the satisfaction of making oneself useful. On another level, it reveals a great deal about the economy of recognition in which older women live. Larisa’s effort is physically demanding, logistically difficult, and socially under celebrated, yet it becomes one of the main available routes through which she can inhabit the meaningful role of grandmother, even if only by extension. Shadrina perceptively notes that this role is both a source of pleasure and a mechanism of oppression. For SIM scholars, the episode opens a larger question about the relationship between dignity and sacrifice. What kinds of labour become morally valued only when they remain unofficial, feminized, and self-denying. Why do some forms of contribution generate gratitude without generating justice.
The book’s chapter on family care in old age further sharpens these concerns. Shadrina shows that Russian society places enormous moral weight on informal intergenerational support. Delegating the care of one’s ageing mother to institutional or paid careers is widely seen as morally suspect, even where such care options exist. This moral framework does not operate as a simple exchange. Daughters are expected to care for mothers not because there is a balanced ledger of reciprocity, but because female care is culturally treated as an obligation attached to life stage and kin position. At the same time, older women themselves often strive to conceal the extent of help they receive from children because self-sufficiency remains central to their sense of worth. The result is a social world held together by dependence that must not appear as dependence. This paradox should interest SIM scholars because organizations are full of similar moral concealments. People rely on others constantly, yet institutional cultures often reward the performance of independence. Shadrina’s analysis suggests that interdependence is not only a private matter. It is a structural condition that societies routinely deny while depending on it absolutely.
The symbolic economy of recognition comes through with particular force in small material details. One interviewee, Arina, proudly shows the author a plastic hairbrush brought back by her grandson from a trip. In purely monetary terms the object is trivial. In social terms it is immense. The gift serves as evidence that she matters, that she occupies space in someone else’s mind, that distance has not erased her from relational life. Another interviewee, Alevtina, speaks of her daughter paying for expensive eye surgery in Moscow as a birthday present, a gesture that relieves medical vulnerability but also confirms to her that she remains valued by the younger generation. Such moments are easy to overlook if one approaches inequality only through income or institutional position. Shadrina refuses that narrowness. She shows that late life is also organized through the distribution of symbolic assurance, and that recognition itself can function as a form of social sustenance.
The chapter on financial independence past pensionable age is one of the book’s strongest contributions to management theory broadly conceived. It centers work not only as a source of income but as a source of sociality, selfhood, and temporal structure. Muza, a retired engineer from a relatively privileged background, reflects nostalgically that work was a second life and that living without work is boring. Her comments are revealing precisely because she is not among the most economically desperate figures in the book. Even with a degree of material comfort and support from her son, retirement is experienced as loss. Yet that loss unfolds in a context where work options in later life are heavily shaped by ageism, class privilege, retraining opportunities, informal networks, and family expectations. Women are expected to remain economically independent where possible, while also becoming available for intensive grandmothering when family need arises. The contradiction is sharp. They must avoid becoming a burden and simultaneously make themselves indispensable. For SIM scholars, this chapter offers a powerful way to think about labour market citizenship, age-based exclusion, and the moral significance of work beyond wages.
Shadrina is especially strong on the uneven effects of post socialist market transition. The move from a planned economy to a market society did not simply alter employment relations. It reclassified competence, erased prior forms of capital, and forced older women to improvise new survival strategies under conditions of gendered disadvantage. Some women moved into precarious service work, some relied on informal trading or household production, some converted housing assets into economic support, and some drew on social networks to secure small opportunities otherwise unavailable. In one of the book’s most evocative patterns, women who once had professional prestige often narrate their post-Soviet work histories through a language of both necessity and diminishment. Their accounts reveal how social status can collapse even when activity continues. This matters for management scholarship because career transition is too often treated as a matter of skill adjustment or labour market fit. Shadrina reminds us that transitions also carry symbolic wounds. The erosion of a recognized identity can be as consequential as the erosion of income.
The case of Alexandra, who moves from the Soviet intelligentsia into nannying work in London, is particularly useful here. She finds that the role offers better pay and even exposure to the luxuries of employers’ households, yet it also places her in a classed and intimate form of service labour that sits uneasily with her self-understanding. She is conscious of status descent, of being educated yet reduced to domestic utility in another family’s life. This is a deeply management relevant story because it exposes the moral asymmetries of care labour markets. Domestic and caring work can be indispensable, emotionally intimate, and relatively well compensated compared with alternatives, while still carrying strong associations of servility and loss of professional standing. SIM scholars interested in global care chains, migration, and labour dignity will find in Shadrina’s discussion a subtle reminder that work cannot be adequately assessed through wages alone.
Another major strength of the book lies in its treatment of community. Shadrina’s discussion of the lavochki, the benches where older women gather in Russian neighborhoods, is among the most elegant illustrations of how public space, class identity, and ageing intersect. These benches are not merely sites of rest or gossip. They are spaces of observation, judgment, support, and local participation. For some women they offer companionship and a sense of embeddedness in community life. For others, especially those who identify with education, culturedness, or former professional distinction, they signify social decline. One woman, Svetlana, speaks almost with disgust of “all these aunts” on the benches and insists that such spaces are not for people like her. The remark is telling because it reveals how the category of babushka is internally stratified. Not all older women want to identify with the role that society offers them, especially when that role has been coded as culturally low, provincial, or unrefined. SIM scholars should take note of this because inclusion is never a simple binary of belonging versus exclusion. Belonging itself can be classed, stigmatized, and refused.
Maria’s story in this chapter is equally compelling. A part time cleaner with a heavy burden of family care, she nonetheless tries to preserve small islands of self-directed life through dance classes and choir participation at a Palace of Veterans. Her pleasure in having “something just for myself” carries enormous weight in the context of the book. It signals how thoroughly her life has been organized around other people’s needs, and how rare autonomous time can become for older women whose labour is taken to be naturally available. This is more than an anecdote about leisure. It is a reminder that the ethics of social life must include the right to non-instrumental time. SIM scholars often focus on overwork in formal employment, yet Shadrina shows a different form of temporal colonization, one in which unpaid family labour continually absorbs the self. Rest, recreation, and frivolity become politically meaningful when they are scarce.
The chapter on love and sex in later life adds another layer to the analysis by examining the de-sexualization of older women. Shadrina shows that many women are expected to become post sexual once they enter grandmother status, as though ageing properly requires a withdrawal from desire. This expectation is crucial for understanding how later life is morally policed. If older women are socially authorized only as caregivers and not as desiring subjects, then age is not merely a biological category. It becomes a boundary of legitimate personhood. That point has wider relevance than it may first appear to have for management studies. Institutions do not only allocate jobs and rewards. They shape what sorts of selves can appear publicly without stigma. Shadrina’s treatment of sexuality reminds us that exclusion often works by narrowing the socially acceptable repertoire of identity. Older women are told, sometimes explicitly and often indirectly, that dignity lies in renunciation. The result is a reduction of personhood to service.
What makes the book even more useful for SIM scholars is its methodological range. Shadrina does not rely only on interviews, though the interviews are central and often deeply affecting. She supplements them with literature, film, television, online discourse, and cultural analysis, allowing the babushka to emerge as both lived reality and mediated figure. This is important because stereotypes are not external decorations on social life. They help organize it. The contrast between “good” grandmothers and “monstrous” grandmothers in Russian cultural narratives, for instance, shows how moral expectations are stabilized through representation. Older women are praised when they serve with stoicism and mocked or pathologized when they become intrusive, demanding, or excessive. This dynamic will resonate with SIM scholars familiar with double binds in gendered evaluations. The ideal career must give endlessly, yet if she gives too visibly, too emotionally, or too intrusively, she becomes intolerable. Such contradictions are among the most durable mechanisms through which domination is normalized.
The book is also politically incisive in ways that matter for management scholarship. Shadrina is careful to note that her data were gathered before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and that the monograph focuses on pre-war Russian society. Yet she argues that the social order she describes helps explain how an autocratic system sustains itself. The mechanism is not simply propaganda or repression. It is also the organization of everyday dependence. When older women shoulder the burden of helping children and grandchildren reconcile work and family amidst uncertainty, they help stabilize private life in ways that reduce pressure on the state to provide. The system delegates social risk downward, into families, and specifically onto grandmothers. This is a subtle but important account of power. It shows how political order can be reproduced through intimate labour. For SIM scholars interested in institutional ethics and systemic domination, the implication is significant. Power does not endure only through formal authority. It endures because someone is making the costs of endurance bearable.
At several points, Shadrina explicitly places her analysis in dialogue with feminist theories that locate reproductive labour at the heart of politics. This is where the book speaks most directly to SIM. Social Issues in Management has often been strongest when it pushes the field beyond the narrow study of firms toward the broader conditions under which economic life is organized. Shadrina offers precisely such a broadening. She invites readers to treat care, kinship, ageing, and the hidden labour of household survival not as background variables but as constitutive elements of political economy. The older women in this book are not outside the economy because they are unpaid. They are part of the machinery through which labour market’s function and welfare failures are absorbed. Once that is recognized, many conventional management categories begin to look incomplete. Performance, productivity, employability, and resilience all depend on care arrangements that are often externalized and feminized.
The book’s broader comparative gestures make it even more compelling. Although rooted in Russia, it repeatedly suggests that the underlying logic it identifies is not uniquely Russian. Conservative political responses to demographic change in various countries have shifted responsibility for social reproduction back onto women and families. Grandparents are increasingly drawn into childcare in many societies where public provision is weak or expensive. Welfare retrenchment, labour insecurity, and moral appeals to family responsibility recur well beyond the post-Soviet context. Shadrina is not collapsing these differences into sameness, and she is careful about historical specificity. Still, her analysis offers SIM scholars a way to think comparatively about how systems manage scarcity by mobilizing unpaid care. The Russian case becomes a sharp lens rather than an isolated exception.
There is also something formally instructive in how the book is written. Its prose is academically clear without becoming bloodless. Shadrina avoids jargon when a simpler phrase will do, and she builds her argument through coherence rather than through conceptual display. The best parts of the book proceed through layered accumulation. A public anecdote opens into demographic discourse, which opens into welfare restructuring, which opens into family obligation, which opens into intimate feeling, all without strain. This matters because books that hope to influence a broad interdisciplinary readership, including SIM scholars, need exactly this kind of compositional discipline. Complexity is present throughout, but it is managed through clean argument rather than clutter.
If there is a point where some management readers may feel the need for further development, it is in the explicit translation of these insights into organizational contexts. The book is rich in implications for work, employment, welfare, and institutional design, yet it remains primarily within political sociology, feminist sociology, and ageing studies. It does not dwell extensively on firms, managerial decisions, or workplace policy in the narrow sense. Yet this is less a weakness than an invitation. The strength of the book lies in the way it forces management scholars to see that their usual objects of analysis rest on social arrangements they often ignore. It opens conceptual ground. It asks the reader to recognize that the boundaries between organization and household, economy and intimacy, policy and family are far more porous than most managerial accounts admit.
In that sense, The Babushka Phenomenon is not only a study of Russian grandmothers. It is a study of the hidden architecture of social order. It shows how inequality is reproduced through love, how exploitation is normalized through duty, how vulnerability is obscured by praise of resilience, and how entire systems depend on actors they refuse to center. Its relevance for Social Issues in Management is therefore considerable. It can inform scholarship on invisible work, care ethics, intergenerational dependence, gendered citizenship, dignity, and the social reproduction of labour. More importantly, it can enlarge the field’s moral imagination. Shadrina asks us to look at the older woman not as residual, not as obsolete, and not as a private matter, but as a crucial bearer of social continuity whose labour keeps institutions afloat while rarely being recognized in the language of value.
That is why this book deserves serious attention from SIM scholars. It provides a compelling account of how care and inequality are organized in everyday life, how political systems exploit moral obligation, and how older women become indispensable precisely by being made invisible. Few books make the link between intimate labour and social order with such clarity and human depth. Shadrina has written a study that is empirically vivid, ethically resonant, and theoretically generative. It belongs in conversations about social issues in management because it reveals, with unusual force, that what appears marginal to managerial thought is often what makes the whole system possible.
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
References
Antoni, A., & Beer, H. (2024). Ethical Sensibilities for Practicing Care in Management and Organization Research. Journal of Business Ethics, 190(2), 279-294.
Bergeron, S. (2016). Formal, informal, and care economies. The Oxford handbook of feminist theory, 179-206.
Gray, B., & Kish-Gephart, J. J. (2013). Encountering social class differences at work: How "class work" perpetuates inequality. Academy of Management Review, 38(4), 670-699.
Grenier, A., & Hanley, J. (2007). Older Women and ‘Frailty’ Aged, Gendered and Embodied Resistance. Current Sociology, 55(2), 211-228.
Rynes, S. L., Bartunek, J. M., Dutton, J. E., & Margolis, J. D. (2012). Care and compassion through an organizational lens: Opening up new possibilities. Academy of Management review, 37(4), 503-523.
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Reviewed by:
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive Doctoral Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Indore
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