Information potential of large-circulation newspapers of the oil industry enterprises of the Ural-Volga region in the 1960s- 1980s as sources for the study of labor motivation: content analysis of letters to newspapers

Aletkina Ekaterina Yur'evna Postgraduate student, Department of Historical Information Science, M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University 119192, Russia, g. Moscow, Lomonosovskii pr-t, 27 k 4 sun_shine1996@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The second half of the XX century is characterized by rapid development of the domestic oil industry. At that time, the attention of the country's leadership was drawn to the introduction of new oil regions into industrial development and increasing production rates within the framework of previously opened ones. In Russian historiography, the historian of the oil industry, MD M. V. Slavkina, calls the period of the 1960s - 1980s "the triumph of the domestic oil and gas complex of the USSR" ^[22]. Of course, in most works considering the history of the oil industry of the RSFSR, the period of "triumph" is primarily associated with the discovery of deposits in Western Siberia, but do not forget that until the mid-1970s the Ural-Volga region occupied a leading position in terms of oil production ^[11].

In the context of the history of the Russian oil industry in the previously mentioned period, the Ural-Volga region is often overlooked, although there are many issues that have been ignored. One of such problems is the motivation of workers of oil-producing enterprises. As part of the study of this topic, the author considered the problems of housing and wages on the example of the Tatneft production association on the basis of archival and published statistical materials, regulatory legal acts ^[1],[3]. In addition, special attention was paid to the analysis of "acute" issues for oil workers by comparing the subjects of letters to local territorial-branch newspapers of two leading production associations of the USSR and in particular the Ural-Volga region in 1956 – Tatneft and Bashneft. The content analysis of the materials of the letters of the employees of the associations conducted by us showed that they were most concerned about the problems that arose when interacting with the management of enterprises and organizations, since this largely influenced the other industrial and social issues indicated in the letters ^[2]. If in the 1950s the territorial-branch newspapers of oil industry associations were published on the territory of the Ural-Volga region, then later it was discontinued, and periodicals appeared in smaller structures (enterprises that were part of the associations). The research interest in the transition to multi-titles is determined by the fact that they focus on the actual problems of specific enterprises.

In this study, the study of the motivation of oil workers is carried out within the framework of a micro-historical approach, i.e. on the materials of letters to large-circulation newspapers of enterprises that are part of the production associations of the Ural-Volga region: "Oilman Arlan" (Oil and Gas Production Management (socr. NGDU) "Arlanneft" of the Bashneft association), "Neftyanik Polazny" (NGDU "Polyaneft" of the Permneft association), "Za Neft" (NGDU "Leninogorskneft" of the Tatneft association, "Neftyanik Prikamya" (NGDU "Prikamneft" of the Tatneft association). The scientific novelty of the article lies in the introduction into the scientific context and the use of new sources – the above-mentioned multi-editions.

The purpose of the study is to assess the information potential of newspaper sources, and then, on the basis of relevant materials, to identify problems of motivation and stimulation of oil workers in the Urals-Volga region in the 1960s -1980s with the help of content analysis of workers' letters. The novelty of this work consists in the introduction into scientific circulation of materials of large-circulation newspapers of oil workers. To date, the task of developing and testing a methodology for the study of periodicals in general and the Soviet press, in particular, remains urgent ^[5],[6]. The use of methods of content analysis of press materials makes it possible to study various spheres of life of Soviet society ^{[4],[7],[8],[9],[10],[12],[13],[15],[16],[26]}. At the same time, it should be noted that there have been no works on the study of such an aspect as the motivation of work based on letters from oil workers in historiography.

Source studies and methodological aspects of the studyThe main source for the research is the large-circulation newspapers.

It was during the Soviet period that this type of press developed and became widespread. A distinctive feature of large-circulation newspapers is the fact that employees of the company publishing the newspaper, and not professional journalists, work mainly on the creation of materials. In addition, in such publications, much attention is paid to industrial and social issues that concern workers ^{[21, p. 165]}.

Letters sent to newspapers are an important source for obtaining information about the work of the system of motivation and stimulation of labor, the moods of employees of oil companies and the problems that concern them. They are usually placed under the headings "From letters to the editor", "They write to us", "Letter to the editor", "In the wake of unpublished letters", "Sharp signal", etc. The form and content of such letters can be varied. Some readers express their opinions about printed articles, others inform about the work of party, Soviet and public organizations, and others ask for help in solving specific issues. In addition, the letters reflect the interaction between printed publications and readers ^{[14, p. 17]}.

We have complete sets of four large-circulation newspapers of oilmen of the Ural-Volga region for the 1960s –1980s. The use of content analysis tools makes it possible to identify acute problems in the daily and industrial life of oil workers of a particular enterprise. The search for the necessary materials was carried out in the newspaper collection of the Russian State Library (Khimki), where the control materials of all periodicals are sent.

The newspaper "Neftyanik Arlana" has been published since February 1963 for the oilmen of the Arlan field, one of the largest deposits of the Ural-Volga region. This field was discovered in November 1955 and a year and a half later, the oilfield management was organized as part of Bashneft to develop it. NPU) "Arlanneft" (Neftekamsk). The subtitle of the publication indicated that it was an organ of the party committee, the industrial committee, the Komsomol committee and the administration of the NPU Arlanneft, later due to organizational transformations, some publishers of the newspaper or their names changed. In the first years of the newspaper's publication, the circulation was not specified, in 1968 it was 1300 copies, and by 1985 it had increased to 1400 copies. The newspaper was published once a week, and usually consisted of 2 pages, but in the period from July 1966 to the end of May 1968, the newspaper was published on 4 pages. The subscription price was 1 kopeck, for double rooms – 2 kopecks. The usual issues were in black and white, timed to the holidays were printed in colored ink.

The newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" was published in the village of Polazna, Perm region jointly by the party committee, the group committee, the Komsomol Committee and the administration of the NGDU "Polazaneft" since August 31, 1973. The issue of the newspaper was timed to coincide with the All-Union Day of the Oil and Gas Industry Worker, which has been celebrated on the first Sunday of September since 1965. The first Porozhenskaya well was drilled in 1939, but industrial oil development began only 10 years later. In 1968, the maximum level of oil production in Polazna was reached, exceeding 8 million tons per year, which made it possible to take the eighth place in the USSR in terms of production (Photo of the day: [Electronic resource] // State Archive of the Perm Territory. URL: http://www.archive.perm.ru/projects/weeklyphoto/polazna / (Accessed: 02/25/2023)).

). The newspaper was published in a circulation of 1000 to 1200 copies once a week, consisted of two pages and was sold at a price of 1 kopeck.

The following two large-circulation newspapers were produced by enterprises of the Tatneft production association:

1) The newspaper "Za Neft" was an organ of the party committee, the group committee, the Komsomol committee and the administration of NGDU "Leninogorskneft" The origins of this production organization go back to the enlarged Shugurovsky oilfield, whose employees discovered the largest field of the Ural-Volga region – Romashkinskoye in 1948. The publication of the newspaper began in 1968. The circulation in the period 1968 – 1972 numbered from 1,700 to 2,000 copies, further information on the number of issues issued was not indicated. The price for the room was equal to 2 kopecks. The newspaper was published once a week in A3 format and included 2 pages of materials.

2)       The newspaper "Neftyanik Prikamya" has been published weekly since April 1980. The newspaper acted as the organ of the party committee, the industrial committee, the Komsomol committee and the administration of NGDU "Prikamneft". The newspaper was released in the year of the 200th anniversary of Yelabuga as a gift to the Kama oil producers (Congratulations, wishes //. Oilman of the Kama region. Yelabuga, 1980. April 3. (No. 1). p. 1.). There is no information about the circulation of the newspaper, it was issued at intervals of one issue per week. The price per room did not exceed 1 kopeck. Each issue of the newspaper "Neftyanika Prikamya" contained two pages.

The editorial materials of all the above-mentioned large-circulation newspapers included the following headings, as "Communists, forward!", "Innovators", "Sharp Signal", "Sports news", "Exchange of experience", "Corner of satire and humor", etc. Among other things, some issues published letters from employees of enterprises telling about their problems at work and at home, cases of social injustice.

As mentioned above, the main purpose of the article is to study the motivation of oil workers on the basis of letters to large-circulation newspapers, so first of all it is necessary to assess the substantive side of the issue, that is, to what extent the content of the source allows solving the task. At the same time, an important aspect of assessing the information potential is associated with the regularity of newspaper issues, chronological coverage. (see Table 1).

Table 1.Research source base

Note: * - in the binder available in the RSL.

Table 1 shows the ratio of the number of studied issues of large-circulation newspapers of the Ural-Volga region for 1963-1985 and the number of workers' letters identified in them. The Russian State Library has almost complete files of the newspapers we have selected, with the exception of the multi-issue "For Oil" in 1978. The table also shows that the materials of the newspapers "Oilman of Arlan", "For Oil", "Oilman of the Kama region" are not representative, since the number of letters is too small to analyze the sentiments of oil workers on their basis. With regard to the "Oilman Arlan", it can also be noted that the materials we have selected are unevenly distributed over the years.

At the same time, the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" contains a larger number of letters, which are fairly evenly distributed among the annual issue files. It should be noted that a number of letters (there were 16 of them) were not related to the problems of labor motivation, so they were excluded from the final set of letters. Thus, the total volume of the analyzed text was 111 pages (6.5 pp. l.) or 211,481 characters (without spaces).

***Due to the good degree of preservation of the sources, the digitization of newspaper materials was carried out by photographing.

Further use of images assumed their basic processing in Adobe Photoshop, which made it possible to improve the quality of text recognition of letters in ABBYY Finereader. Then the work was carried out to determine the semantic units that characterize the subject of letters. It was based on the system of categories and indicators that we developed in the previous article when studying the motivation of the oil workers of Bashneft and Tatneft ^[2]. After a careful reading of the materials of the multi-edition, focused on the issues of labor motivation, some adjustments were made, according to which the entire array of texts for analysis was marked up (see Table 2).

Table 2.Semantic categories and indicators for analyzing letters of oilmen of the Ural-Volga region to large-circulation newspapers

The semantic categories and indicators given in table 2 affect both industrial and social issues. One sentence is taken as a coding unit, so several categories may be mentioned in letters. The function "% code coverage" was used to evaluate the effectiveness of encoding the texts of letters. The use of this function showed that for the entire sample of letters from the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" for 1973 – 1985, 75% of the text was indexed, which allowed for a reasonable analysis. These actions prepared the selected 177 letters for the analysis of the frequency of occurrence of categories, as well as their joint occurrence in the MAXQDA 2022 program, and at the end of the work, visualization of the results of the analysis of the joint frequency of occurrence of categories in the UCINET program was carried out. It should be noted that the modern approach to the use of computerized content analysis (using the latest software) is used in research conducted at the Department of Historical Informatics of the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University, in particular, for the study of industry and large-circulation newspapers ^{[9],[17],[18],[19],[20],[23],[24],[25]}.

Analysis of the frequency of occurrence of categories in the texts of the large-circulation pressUsing the "Code Matrix Browser" function, the MAXQDA program calculated the absolute frequency of occurrence of semantic categories.

The visualization of this matrix is presented in Table 3.

Table 3. Matrix of frequencies of occurrence of semantic categories in the array of letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" in 1973 – 1985.

As we can see from Table 3, the maximum frequency values are colored in shades of red, the average values are shades of purple, and the low values are highlighted in blue and its shades.

Despite the fact that the letters in the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" were distributed quite evenly among the annual number files, some samples differ significantly in the volume of selected letters. For example, in 1973 only 4 letters were printed, while in the following 1974 – 29 letters.

Table 3 shows that such categories as "Labor and labor organization issues" (110 times), "Production management" (104), "Household and communal services issues" (94) and "Supply of workers" (83) are mentioned with the greatest frequency throughout the time interval under consideration. The categories "Education for workers" (9), "Remuneration" (13), "Socialist competition" and "Medical care" (39) are quite rare.

To a certain extent, the frequency of mentioning these components of labor motivation is associated with the ability to solve the problems raised in the letters at the enterprise level. Perhaps the readers of the multi-edition initially evaluate the range of issues that can be solved directly by the company, without contacting higher structures.

In order to adequately compare the materials of different volumes of annual samples of letters based on the matrix of frequency of occurrence of semantic categories in the texts of newspapers, relative indicators of frequency of occurrence of categories were calculated, for which the absolute indicators for each year were divided by the sum of the absolute frequencies of categories for the year. Thus, the relative frequency of occurrence of a category indicates the share of this category in the total sum of all frequencies in the letters of oil workers for a certain year.

Table 4.Relative frequencies of the occurrence of categories in the letters of the large–circulation newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" in 1973 - 1985.

As follows from Table 4, the categories had the maximum relative frequency of occurrence in the sample of letters for 1973 – 1985.:

1) "Questions of life and communal services" in 1983. A letter dated June 11, 1983 illustrates the essence of such problems:

"In our houses on Druzhby, 10, 12, 14, 50 years of October, 17, 19, there is a systematic shutdown of hot water throughout the winter and spring. And in May, from the beginning of the month, cold water flows from the hot tap.

We have repeatedly called the housing and communal services, steam plant, but neither there nor here received a clear answer to the question: when will we have hot water?We hope that the management of these workshops will take appropriate measures and inform the editorial office when we will be able to use water.".

(When will there be hot water?

// Oilman Polazny. Polazna, 1983. June 11. (No. 22). p. 2.).

2) "Labor and issues of organization of labor activity" in 1977. This category was reflected in 31% of all mentions for this year. The problems, according to readers, were related: a) with poor labor organization:

"Dear editorial board of the newspaper "Neftyanik 2", the workers of the PKRS workshop working on the repair of wells in Olkhovka write to you.…

...And the poor organization of labor also negatively affects the implementation of the plan. It happens that we sit for hours and wait for the tool and the parts necessary for repair to be brought to us. But we made socialist commitments. They must be carried out. And how will you do it if there is no car, no tools, no parts..."(The reasons preventing the implementation of the plan // The oilman are obvious.

Polazna, 1977. October 22. (No. 43). p. 1.);

b) with the presence of misunderstandings between different production structures:

"On the sixth of November, our drilling team prepared drilling rig No. 814 for logging operations. According to our request, a logging party headed by Comrade arrived from the Post-Smolensk Geophysical Office on this day. Hatenovsky…...The Geophysical Office has successfully completed the annual plan.

This was recently reported in the press. But we cannot accept that geophysicists forget about us while carrying out their plan. But we are doing one common thing, we all have one concern — oil.We hope that the management of the geophysical office will draw the appropriate conclusions, and we will not pull the "who" in different directions, as they did in Krylov's fable Swan, Crab and Pike.".

(As in the fable… //

The oilman of Polazny. Polazna, 1977. October 22. (No. 43). p. 2.);

3) The third most common categories were "Nutrition" and "Supply of workers", they accounted for 29% of mentions in 1973. The letters most vividly describe the problems associated with the nutrition of workers. Here are excerpts from two letters:

"... When you approach the food distribution counter, another disappointment awaits you: cutlets, fish, schnitzel are cold for some reason. The choice of side dishes is not always rich. For example, on the eleventh of October, there was one cold boiled rice for breakfast. And this is now, when there is an abundance of fresh vegetables. Mashed potatoes, fresh stewed cabbage, carrots, where are they?Where is the real concern about the nutrition of workers?"

(Contrasts of the working canteen // Oilman Polazny.

Polazna, 1973. October 18. (No. 8). p. 2.);

"In our dining room "Chaika", which stands on the bank of the Kama River, something incredible has been happening lately: there are no schedules and food schedules here. The dining room opens in volovin on the twelfth. And you can't get through here at these hours. And if you come an hour or an hour and a half later, there are no people or troubles.And what happens here during lunch?

There are not enough trays and dishes, the tables are dirty, clean trays are used only by the first 15-20 people, the rest, as necessary. It seems that the leadership of the ORSA will take the necessary measures to restore proper order and the working canteen"

(Riots in the workers' canteen // Neftyanik Polazny.

Polazna, 1973. November 22. (No. 13). p. 2.).

4) "Issues of everyday life and communal services" in 1982, when this category accounted for 25% of mentions: The range of issues that were brought up for discussion was diverse: from the problems of waste disposal to the repair of communal systems. Below are examples of such letters:

"Dear editorial staff!I want to write about the cleanliness of our village.

I want this letter to reach the heart of every inhabitant of Polazna.Comrades, we all live in Polazna and love it.

But look carefully, look around, because we do not take care of what we create with our own hands at all. There are people (and there are a lot of them) who throw garbage everywhere. Garbage is everywhere, even on the main street. Of course, there are a lot of complaints about the work of a garbage truck, but this does not mean that garbage can be thrown out everywhere.Go beyond 100-apartment buildings, and even in winter you will see a terrible sight.

They throw everything out on the wasteland, even mattresses. Do not hope that the snow will hide everything, because soon I want to tell people at the top of my voice: come to your senses! Is it really so nice to drown in mud?" (The village is our home //.

Oilman Polazny. Polazna, 1982. February 20. (No. 7). p. 2.).

"I work as a garbage truck driver. Every day at a certain time we drive up to the established parking lots. Residents come out of their houses and empty their buckets. Neat people can be seen immediately: the bucket carries a closed lid or paper. And the sloppy ones — everything is open. He runs, hurries, and the garbage is pouring out of the bucket., papers are flying in the wind.Unfortunately, there are days when the garbage truck does not come.

But this happens very rarely.And on such a day, some "over-careful" residents, without waiting for the car, dump the contents into the pits, or even just near the house.

Can't we wait until the next day? After all, garbage does not accumulate in one day.

I think that the management of housing and communal services should take care of allocating another garbage truck for garbage removal in the daytime, especially from the area of multi-storey buildings. Now, although three machines are working, but they are not completely coping..."(Everyone should take care of cleanliness // Oilman Polazny.

Polazna, 1982. May 8. (No. 18). p. 2.).

"In the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" for July 31, in a note by G. Uvarova "Useful work of schoolchildren" it says that under the guidance of a painter And, F. Spila and V. M. Penzina, schoolchildren were engaged in repairing entrances. Such repairs were made here, in the third entrance of the house No. 17 on Neftyanikov Street. However, we have little joy from this. The repair here is not done qualitatively. The walls are whitewashed with "smudges", the panels have become an incomprehensible color after painting.We understand that the repair was carried out, not by specialists, by schoolchildren, but there were experienced people with them.

You can't hand over work like this when all the doors and railings are stained with paint.We were in the entrances of other houses, everything was done neatly there.

We ask the responsible heads of housing and communal services to give us an answer to the question: Why have we made such poor-quality repairs, and is there any hope that the entrance will be put in order, even with the help of the residents themselves."

(Repair of entrances is not high-quality everywhere // Oilman Polazny.

Polazna, 1982. August 14. (No. 32). p. 2.).

"The gusts of the water pipe on our Lugovaya Street have already become a system. In the spring and summer period, when the need for water supply increases in all private households, we have a flood. From the torn water pipe, precious moisture goes into the log, and then into the Potomensky pond, eroding roads and vegetable gardens along the way.Residents of the street constantly signal about taking measures, but the situation does not change.

And now, for the third week, water is gushing from the burst water pipe.Since most of the residents of the street are oil workers, our PVS and housing and communal services workshops should take care of the normal supply of water to them.

But they are not in a hurry, and meanwhile thousands of cubic meters of good drinking water goes into the river. Will there be an end to this?"(When will measures be taken?

// Oilman Polazny. Polazna, 1982. September 25. (No. 38). p. 2.).

At the same time, it is necessary to note the categories whose relative importance indicators are consistently high.  Throughout the study period, the letters most often covered the problems of "Production management", "Labor and labor organization issues", "Household and communal services issues", as well as "Supply of workers". These categories had consistently high relative frequencies of occurrence in letters to the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny".

Thus, the analysis of the frequencies of absolute and relative occurrence of categories allowed us to conclude that in 1973 -1985 considerable attention was paid to both social ("Issues of life and communal services", "Nutrition") and industrial issues ("Production management", "Labor and issues of labor organization").

Analysis of the frequency of joint occurrence of categories in the texts of large-scale printingOne of the advantages of computerized text analysis is the ability to identify hidden relationships between categories to reveal the information potential of the source in full.

The "Code Link Browser" function shows the joint occurrence of these codes within a text segment (the author selected one paragraph per unit of analysis. – note). The results of calculations of this function are presented in Table 5 in the form of a matrix.

Table 5.Matrix of frequencies of joint occurrence of categories in letters sent to the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" in 1973 – 1985.

Visualization of category relationships based on the frequency of their joint occurrence allows you to visualize the internal relationships between categories and simplify the analysis of tables. An additional tool for such analysis is the UCINET software, in which the NetDraw network visualization program is integrated.

As the experience of visualizing the structure of links of categories of content analysis shows, the interpreted graph of links should be formed by setting a certain threshold for the strength of links (in order to avoid an overloaded structure in which almost all categories are connected to each other) ^[23],[25]. In this case, the value 40 was chosen as such a threshold value (after testing a number of threshold values). The resulting graph is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. The results of visualization of the frequencies of the joint occurrence of categories in the letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" for 1973 – 1985, the selection threshold > 40.

Let us turn to the interpretation of the matrix of internal relationships of the main problems (Table 5) and the graph obtained on its basis Fig. 1

Figure 1 shows the categories of industrial and socio-cultural blocks, and the production categories directly made up the graph and reflected the closest ties, while most of the categories related to the social sphere were outside the graph structure. At the same time, when the selection threshold is lowered, these categories are included in the system of links. It should be noted that the factor "Production management" along with the category "Labor and issues of labor organization" play a major role in most of the problems discussed in the letters of oil workers.

As follows from Table 5, in the letters published on the pages of the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny", the highest frequency of occurrence is observed between the categories "Production management" and "Labor and issues of labor organization" (100). Stable links were also formed between the categories "Housing problem" and "Household and communal services" (79), "Household and communal services" and "Production management" (69), "Nutrition" and "Supply of workers" (68), "Production management" and "Supply of workers" (66), "Household and communal services issues" and "Labor and labor organization issues" (59), "Labor and labor organization issues" and "Transport" (56), "Labor and Labor organization issues" and "Supply" (50), "Production Management" and "Transport" (50). Based on the results of the content analysis presented above, it can be concluded that the category "production management" has the largest number of links with other categories in the array of letters published in the newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" and is the basis for creating close relationships.

Summing up what has been said about the mutual frequency of occurrence, it should be emphasized that these relationships characterize the problems that employees write about in letters to management. For example, the analysis revealed that the issues of the organization of labor activity and the social sphere are closely related to the improvement of production management. The relationship between the categories "Production management" and "Labor and organization of labor activity" showed that employees had the opportunity to influence decisions made by management to make adjustments to the workflow, as well as to point out existing shortcomings. In turn, the timely solution of such problems will help prevent "failures" in the production process and prevent the fall of such an important indicator as "labor productivity", which is closely related to the topic of labor motivation.

At the same time, the letters trace the connection of the social sphere with the management structures of the enterprise, which draws their attention to the most significant elements of labor motivation for employees. For example, the close connection between such elements as "Housing problem" and "Household and communal services issues" or "Supply of workers" and "Nutrition" is important for motivating employees due to the fact that these issues provide people with basic needs. In addition, housing is an important motivation factor, due to which new employees are attracted to enterprises.

Thus, the general conclusion arising from the analysis of the frequency of joint occurrence of categories shows that the main form of letters to the newspaper was an appeal to the management of enterprises. The goal of the company's employees was to draw attention to unresolved problems in the organization of labor and in the social sphere, the solution of which could increase their motivation for productive work. On the one hand, the management of the enterprise is seen as a key factor in solving problems related to work at the enterprise, which is expressed in proposals, complaints, requests and assessments of management activities, pointing out shortcomings in the management system, etc. On the other hand, workers hope to solve these problems with the help of management and try to influence these processes through their letters to the newspaper.

ConclusionThis article continued a series of works on the study of the motivation of oil workers in the Ural-Volga region.

Comparison of the content aspect of the large-circulation newspapers of the oil industry enterprises of the Ural-Volga region allowed us to take a closer look at the choice of the research source. For the first time, the large-circulation newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" was introduced into scientific circulation.When studying the letters, the study showed that the large-circulation newspaper "Neftyanik Polazny" has a sufficiently high information potential for studying the issues of motivation of oil workers. This edition contains the required number of letters for analysis.

At the same time, the large-circulation newspapers of the Bashneft and Tatneft production associations considered in the work do not allow forming a relevant sample of letters, however, such sections as "Correspondence", "Essay", "Feuilleton", etc. can act as a source for the development of the social and industrial sphere at enterprises, which is also related to the issues of motivation and stimulation of labor.

The analysis of the content of the letters of the oilmen of Polazna showed that the problems related to the improvement of enterprise management are especially important for them, as this affects the solution of actual industrial and social problems. The category of "production management" was identified as one of the most important factors determining the "bottlenecks" in the system of employee motivation. The materials of the multi-issue show that if employees do not agree with the production or social policy at the enterprise, the decisions taken by the management, then they express their dissatisfaction in letters to the newspaper. 

This work was based on the calculation of the frequency of occurrence of categories and their joint occurrence, as well as visualization of the structure of their relationships. The use of the MAXQDA 2022 and UCINET programs confirms their effectiveness for analyzing the information potential of territorial-branch newspapers. The results of the study expand the understanding of the motivation system of oil workers in the Ural-Volga region.