Vol 18, No 4 (2018)

Human society exists in two temporal measurements. Astronomical time is uniform, homogenous, quantitative and continuous. Social time cannot be described in the same way for there are days for special functions, periods of time with specific features due to the activities, meanings and associations with them, and critical dates breaking the continuity of time. Social time has a qualitative character, a nonuniform flow - it can slow down, speed up and even stop, and it cannot be arbitrarily divided into parts. The concept of social time suggests that time is a human creation, social life produces different temporal structures of social phenomena together with the tools and units to measure time. Despite the duration and thematic richness, the debates on social time unfairly ignore C. Levi-Strauss’s theory of synchronic time. The article considers its prerequisites, criticism and main ideas, in particular, the famous typology of “hot” and “cold” societies distinguished by the criterion of time as manifested differently in different types of social systems and having different meanings. Societies with the same perception of historical time as our society today, i.e. considering time as a huge folder where historical events are systematized not to be forgotten, are called hot (and emphasize one’s historicity). Cold societies’ basic cognitive systems try to be static and indifferent to changes, i.e. strive to ignore historicity and externalize it as alien to them. The author emphasizes that when speaking of cold societies as not taking time and historicity into account Levi-Strauss does not want to rewrite the laws of logic or physics and just attempts to see the world through the eyes of another culture.

The belief that survey research instruments mediating communication between interviewer and respondent influence the quality of data obtained in the interview has become a conventional methodological wisdom long ago. However, the impact of the cognitive load experienced by the interviewer has not been systematically examined. When a questionnaire is filled up by an interviewer it is the latter who has to allocate limited individual resources of attention, memory, visual and motor control, active listening and interpretation in order to minimize the respondent’s misunderstanding of the questions and one’s own errors of the answers’ fixation. However, among various methods of pre-testing or evaluating survey mode effects and assessing instruments’ quality, the methods of multimodal quantitative estimation of instrument-related cognitive load experienced by interviewers during the interview are still rare or lacking. Thus, the article presents a brief review of subjective, behavioral and physiological measures of the cognitive load, which are used in such disciplinary fields as cognitive science, ergonomics, etc., and a discussion of preliminary findings of the field quasi-experiment conducted among the interviewers of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey on the first stage of transition to the CAPI mode. The quasi-experiment findings prove some possibilities and limitations of the parallel use of a version of the cognitive load rating scale developed by F. Paas and a simple physiological measure (heart rate) supplemented with a background screen video capture from Android-based tablets used for CAPI interviews for the multimodal quantitative evaluation and optimization of the interviewer’s cognitive load.

The today’s post-human era is characterized by transformation, mutation, and reinvention of social identities of agents. Transgenders, robots, сlones have been increasingly involved in social community and, thus, contributed to profound normative morphogenesis in the contemporary society. Consequently, there is a challenging primordial heteronormativity with some fundamental ascriptive binaries evident in transgressive confusion of the following oppositions: between human and subhuman (e.g. legitimation of animal or fetal rights); between cultural and natural (cyborgs); between animate and inanimate (android robots); between corporeal and incorporeal (virtual, ‘augmented’ and ‘mixed’ reality). A range of practices related to such transgression can be considered as trans-mobility that implies various selfdetermined individual transitions from the former ascribed position to a new transitive one and external transpositions due to forced alteration of individual or collective statuses/identities. The article considers three typical modes of morphological trans-mobility to identify the most important arrays the ontological binaries are de-ascribed in: visceral trans-mobility pertaining to all possible options to modify human corporality (including radical body modification); conversional trans-mobility beyond the line between life and death, being and nonbeing, corporeal (material) and incorporeal (immaterial) ontology (from bitcoins to clones); prosopopoeian trans-mobility involving initially non-social creatures into active social life (from pets to robots). The author seeks to answer the question of how current normative morphogenesis is embedded into social-normative order. Based on the theory of recognition, the article considers morphotaxis (an opposite of morphogenesis) as a latent compensatory mechanism to maintain the primordial social order by persistent reproduction of heteronormativity. Based on some empirical data, the author shows that dichotomized sexual (male-female), genetical (sexual-asexual) and biological (animate-inanimate) patterns with corresponding social norms still constitute the morphological foundation of the primordial social order despite the advanced post-human practices.

The relevance of the study is determined by the Russia’s technological backwardness from developed and dynamically developing countries and by insufficient knowledge of mechanisms and tools to stimulate innovations in a particular social-economic environment. The authors focus on the issues of patents regulation as a key link in the transfer of innovations from science to production. The article aims at identifying features of stimulating innovation through the regulation of patent laws and practices in Russia and the United States, and possibilities of using the US experience to enhance inventive activity in Russia. The main research method was a survey of the experts representing main participants of all types of innovation activities - from design to regulation and commercialization. The theoretical base of the research consists of conceptual findings on the issues of intellectual property as a key mechanism of regulating innovative modernization. The authors also considered official documents reflecting trends in the development of patent law and practices. The intellectual property institution in today’s Russia does not ensure effectiveness of patents due to inconsistency of the state and market mechanisms for stimulating innovations. In the US, the emphasis is made on the balance between protection of property and market competition under the global technological trends. Thus, the effective innovative policy is based not on directive management and planning but on stimulating the interaction of all participants of innovation activities, which gives them the opportunity to realize their interests and opportunities both now and in the future. According to the experts, such an approach can ensure the advancement of innovations from development to commercial use, interconnection of economic sectors and, ultimately, technological modernization of the country.

Despite the popularity of interdisciplinary assessments of social well-being and quality of life of people in different countries, neither national nor international comparative projects provide a unified approach to assessing the quality of life. There are many approaches that differ in the amount of information used, methods of its analysis, details of the problems studied, approaches to their measurement. In sociological studies of the quality of life, we still search for an optimal combination of objective indicators of the social-economic development of countries and subjective estimates of life by the population. Moreover, quite often, when comparing objective and subjective indicators, the rankings of countries do not coincide even if the dynamics of indicators looks similar. The article presents a new approach to the analysis and measurement of the quality of life that takes into account not only physical existence, social environment, well-being and safety but also opportunities for personal growth, creativity, freedom to choose one’s life trajectory and style. Based on the data of the 2016 and 2012 European Social Studies (ESS), the author conducted a comparative analysis of the subjective life quality in Russia and other European countries. The article presents a method for calculating a composite index of 24 indicators including 11 indicators representing the existential aspect of the quality of life. The comparison of Russia with European countries shows that the subjective quality of life in Russia is lower than in other countries of Europe due to the long-term social transformation, unjust distribution of property and incomes, and strong social-economic differentiation. The social trauma had serious consequences for the identification, social connections, loyalty, patterns of thinking and behavior, and is still accompanied by a significant social-psychological tension and low estimates of most life quality parameters.

The content of the concept ‘social risks’ has become a scientific problem for all areas of knowledge and social practices related to the study of uncertainty and its undesirable consequences. The author relies on the approach, according to which social risks should be interpreted as developing and manifesting themselves in the social sphere. The article analyzes the data of monitoring surveys of the Russian population conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation for the project “The dynamics of social transformation in contemporary Russia in the social-economic, political, social-cultural and ethno-religious contexts”. The article shows the dynamics of some indicators of the changes in the social sphere: in addition to standard socialdemographic indicators, the author considers individual-personal ones such as emotional-psychological condition, assessment of the situation in the country, level of trust, confidence in the future, social orientations and preferences, satisfaction with different aspects of life. Based on the results of the analysis, the author makes conclusions of the theoretical and methodological character. For instance, the target-group analysis proved to be a method that expands boundaries and possibilities of interpreting data of the monitoring “contextual” opinion polls. Selection of subgroups of respondents according to the researcher interest allows to identify specific features within the general trends. The article shows that the group with negative assessments of social situation possesses the smallest resources to confront social risks and threats in all spheres of society. The estimates of the situation in the social sphere are determined not so much by socialdemographic characteristics or the level and quality of life as by individual and world-view peculiarities, especially by the perception of the state as the main adaptation resource.

The article presents the first results of field expeditions of 2018 as a part of the project that aims to assess problems and prospects of two most important social institutions of the Russian countryside - local authorities and entrepreneurship - in terms of the dominant scenarios of their interaction and their role in maintaining and stabilizing the situation in rural areas. Such an analysis of the practices of coordinating the interests of local authorities and entrepreneurship at the local level is important for understanding the balance of formal and informal elements in rural life for the real mechanisms of interaction of government institutions and key actors of local communities often differ from the regulatory rules if the latter fail to solve the problems of rural society. The planned three-year research will repeat the field expeditions of a decade ago, i.e. this is a comparative case study that combines quantitative and qualitative approaches (statistical data, participant observation and semi-formalized interviews), and the cases represent the features of the non-black-earth regions of Russia (where depopulation has become practically irreversible). The authors briefly summarize the findings of the first expeditions (a fundamental change in the composition of power structures, destruction of economic ties, dependent position of local government due to its financial and legal weakness, etc.) to set the context for comparative analysis, and describe their first impressions of the new field expedition to the old addresses (the scale and success of business activities in different areas are compared, factors that determine such activities are the heroic efforts of local authorities, new young and active entrepreneurs, reorientation of production to more popular and commercially successful niches, etc.).

The article presents the results of the analysis of classical and contemporary theories and approaches to the study of professional ethics. In the first part of the article, based on the ideas of H. Spencer, E. Durkheim and T. Parsons, the authors question the general sociological interpretation of the nature of professional ethics mainly in its functionalist perspective. According to Spencer, professions play an important moral role in social development such as improving the quality of life. Durkheim believed that professional ethics should contribute to solidarity and prevent labor and commercial conflicts, which can be facilitated by the restoration of guilds in a renewed form - as institutionalized moral regulators. Parsons conducted a theoretical analysis of medical ethics to emphasize the presence of prestigious professional positions based on altruistic values in capitalist societies. In the second part of the article, the authors prove that professional ethics was studied in Soviet and Russian sociology although in general it is represented rather poorly with the exception of works by A.V. Yadov, Yu.V. Sogomonov, E.A. Grishin and V.I. Bakshtanovsky, who emphasized practical aspects of the ethical actions of professionals. Today, the dispositional theory of personality developed by a group of researchers led by Yadov needs to be reinterpreted to take into account emotional and ethical components of professional work. Nevertheless, Russian authors developed an original theory of professional ethics as a special type of applied ethics, showed its purpose and criticized its social-philosophical models. The article presents an overview of contemporary Russian publications on sociology of professions, which allows to state a low interest in issues of professional ethics although most of the works mention “codes of professional ethics” as a mandatory attribute of professionalism. Despite the developed tradition of research in this field, the western sociology of professions is captured by functionalist and critical interpretations of professional ethics and rarely goes beyond the practical aspects of assessing the role of ethics in the actions of professionals.

Despite the obvious interest of the media to cultural industries, this specific segment of the intellectual market still remains outside the focus of sociological interest. For example, “products with subtext” deserve our close attention for they are responsible for the ideological consistency of the information society especially due to the fact that information technologies, having become part of the production chains of cultural industries, have significantly expanded the functions of education and leisure. The seemingly heterogeneous productions of ideas and meanings are quite similar and unified in the elaboration of the repertoire, creation of the cult of the hero of his time and the culture of consumption of information products. E. Morin mentioned that creative technologies possess the “ability to standardize great romantic themes, thus, transforming archetypes into stereotypes”. Under the widespread digitization of production, this process has gained unprecedented dynamics, scale, ideological orientation and material interest. The persisting dramas of the Cold War and the post-Soviet conflicts prove that the “smart power” of Russia’s opponents is quite effective. On the one hand, it consolidates the public opinion of other countries, and, on the other hand, deforms the political culture of the object of its influence by sophisticated manipulations of the world picture of the younger generations. Investors of cultural industries not only invest in the expansion of a profitable intellectual business but also serve the political reproduction of power, which, in turn, provides optimal conditions for the “dual-use products” entering foreign information fields and cultural spaces. Whether or not the Russian society is ready to neutralize and counter the new class of information threats - the authors consider this and some other debatable issues.