Working for Idea Rather for Salary: Differentiation of Work Motivation between Orthodox Christians and Non-Believers in the Context of War (Case of Russian Design Engineers in Defense Industry)

We view work today as a place where transformations in the motivation and meaning of work occur under the influence of global cultural and geopolitical shifts. Over the past decades, the motivation of engineers at Russian defence industry has increasingly tended towards their materialistic model of remuneration. This opposite tendency replaced the Soviet work ethic of selfless service to society through socialist labor. Since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine, this trend has begun to change. Design engineers who work in defense industry find in their work Christian Orthodox ethics, which prescribes avoiding the increase of wealth through labor and viewing labor as selfless self-sacrifice. This work ethic is diametrically opposed to Protestant ethic of capitalism described by Max Weber. While Protestant ethic exploits purely rational abilities to calculate the profit for one's labor, the Orthodox work ethic is an example of value-rational action in which the idealistic goal is embodied (condensed). This reverse logic of labor seems to be more characteristic of non-Western societies today and will intensify over time. We present the results of a qualitative study of the work of design engineers from two Russian enterprises of the defense industry, as well as their colleagues from a private Russian plant. Based on natural sociological experiment, differences in the influence of the Special Military Operation on the transformation of labor regimes of teams, on the structure of motives of design engineers from enterprises with different forms of ownership are figured out. Despite the largely similar content of working activities, the differentiation of attitudes of engineers to various aspects of work and social significance of work is primarily due to contrasting value consciousnesses and the difference in ideologies, and only then belonging to different age cohorts and previous experience of labor relations.