Vol 20, No 1 (2020)

The article examines the phenomenon of social media from the perspective of the McDonaldization theory. The author considers social media as inextricably linked with the consumer society systems to show that such media have become a new McDonaldized institution, the study of which provides new theoretical and methodological possibilities. The article provides an overview of the studies proving the increasing McDonaldizing effect on various social institutions of the Russian society, and considers social media in terms of factors of the McDonaldization theory. Two social networks - Facebook and VK - are described in G. Ritzer’s concepts of ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ as the McDonaldized institutions. The author identifies the theoretical-methodological significance of considering social media as McDonaldized institutions; shows that social media functionally correspond to all five factors of Ritzer’s McDonaldization; explains why the social network Facebook is a grobalized form of ‘nothing’ and, thus, a driving force of globalization, while the social network VK is a glocal form of ‘nothing’ and, thus, creates unique meanings at the border of local and global levels. One of such new meanings is that the VK reflects the traditional interpretation of gender identity, sexual orientation and marriage. The author concludes that social media are a McDonaldized institution that can become a new research optics, which presupposes the use of mixed methods research.

The article considers the stable ideas of the significant part of the Moscow students when assessing personal qualities typical for the Russian youth. The study presented in the report of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation in 2011 identified a high level of the youth’s criticism when assessing one’s generation and emphasizing its egoism and irresponsibility. In the surveys conducted in the Moscow University for Humanities in 2011-2019, a part of the same questionnaire was used to assess the qualities of the contemporary Russian youth, and the results were the same. In the ranking of such qualities in 2019, the first 10 positions were taken by laziness, selfishness, sociability, irresponsibility, aggressiveness, independence, indifference, optimism, naivety and cynicism, i.e. together with positive features there are qualities traditionally considered in the Russian society as unacceptable. The last 10 positions were taken by openness, kindness, pushfulness, initiative, greed, rationalism, responsibility, honesty, patriotism and conscientiousness. Thus, the highly appreciated by the society moral qualities are presented in the students’ estimates as not typical for the youth. The additional open questions clarifying the value orientations of students in terms of their estimates of such attitudes of people in the past, present and future showed that in older generations and one’s social circle the student youth appreciate the most the socially valued qualities and want their children in the future to have such. The ranking of such qualities starts with honesty, kindness, responsibility, purposefulness, openness, sociability, sincerity, responsiveness, punctuality and goodwill. The contradictions between the estimates of the youth qualities and the expected qualities of one’s social circle have been repeatedly confirmed at the empirical level. However, this is not a feature of the student youth but rather a result of the social anomie in the sphere of value orientations in the transition period. The authors believe that the transformation trend of students’ value orientations towards individualism is stable but not typical for the youth in general.

Every historical period forms a special generation with its own values and norms. Children and youth become the main driving force in the development of the higher education, but this system in Russia is going through a difficult period due to the problems unresolved after the 1990s: the quality, accessibility and effectiveness of the higher education, inequalities in the access to education, etc. Therefore, intellectual competitions can be considered not only a positive manifestation of the social activity of schoolchildren, but also a means to support talented youth and ensure the interconnection of secondary and higher education systems. The article considers social aspects of the intellectual competitions for schoolchildren which aim at the development of social practices related to research activities and teaching at school. The authors focus on the research and practice-oriented interests of schoolchildren within the intellectual competitions in social studies: priorities, values and life strategies of schoolchildren when choosing the sphere of their interests. The authors analyzed the written projects of schoolchildren, presentations of these projects, responses to experts’ questions, reactions to questions not directly related to the topic of the presented project, further participation in the section, and some additional information. As a result, the authors made conclusions not only about the content of the priorities, values and life strategies of schoolchildren, but also about the procedure and conditions necessary for assessing the quality of work and the creative potential of participants of intellectual competitions.

The peripheral (rural) regions in most countries face four vicious circles that contribute to their low level of development and inability to achieve the sustainable level of development. The first vicious circle is related to demography and is caused by the vulnerable population; very few young people and imbalance of women and men lead to poor economy, i.e. dominance of subsistence economy over production or trade; unfavorable age structure combined with poor services lead to very low birth rate and high levels of migration. The second vicious circle of remoteness is related to the fact that poor infrastructure does not attract businesses or new residents in the area, which contributes to high levels of migration as young and working-age population, especially families with young children, move out. The third vicious circle is related to education: the low level of education and skills mean that there is no labor force available in the region, which prevents business from entering the local market. Lack of employment means high poverty risk, which again accelerates migration from the rural areas. All these processes undermine the possibilities for local development simply because there is not enough human or economic capital to sustain rural development. These negative trends are not only typical for rural areas of Russia but have a strong impact on peripheral areas of many other post-socialist and European countries. The governments in Russia and European Union introduced various programs and measures to promote local development so that to overcome the negative consequences of all the mentioned vicious circles. In the first part of the article, the authors evaluate some local development efforts funded by the Ladoga Initiative project, successful and failed projects aimed at overcoming the vicious circles. In the second part of the article, the authors describe grant and priority programs introduced in Russia to support local development.

The article identifies interpretations of (social) security which can be used in the sociological analysis of its features, factors and methods for ensuring it at the theoretical and empirical level. In particular, the authors note the current shift of security interpretations from the state-centric to the social-centric approach, which significantly expanded the possibilities of operationalizing this concept and explains the sociological interest in security despite the remaining terminological confusion. Security turned out to be embedded in the already established conceptual field consisting of such terms as risks, dangers, challenges, threats, violence, etc. (‘objective’ phenomena) and anxieties, fears, concerns, etc. (formats of social understanding and ‘measurement’ of ‘objective’ phenomena in the opinion polls). To demonstrate the possibilities of sociology of security (although this is rather a conditional branch of sociology) at the organizational level, the authors present the results of the empirical study conducted as a case study (both the region and the object serve as a case) in the form of a survey: the issues of ensuring security of preschool organizations in the Odintsovo District of the Moscow Region were examined through the requests of different actors of the educational process (administrators, teachers and parents). According to the survey results, parents and employees of preschool organizations (managers and senior teachers) agree that a video surveillance system in the premises and on the territory is a certain security guarantee for it would prevent outsiders from entering (security threats are considered as coming from outside); however, both groups do not consider a system of turnstiles and passes as a necessary measure. The heads and teachers of preschool organizations are more concerned about countering terrorism (pressure from ‘above’) and fire safety (they see security threats as coming from both outside and ‘inside’). Thus, there is a disagreement of different actors on the sources and severity of security threats for preschool organizations.

The article considers the unity of executive power in the federative model of contemporary Russia to show that a single system of executive power within the Russian political-legal culture presupposes a hierarchical relationship between executive authorities of different levels. Such specifics of the relationship between the federal executive bodies and executive bodies of the subjects of the Russian Federation contradicts the idea of a vertical division of powers. The Russian model of federal relations is based on the fact that if the interests of the federation and its subjects are intertwined the best decision is not to isolate or separate the levels of power but rather to help them to interact, to provide a joint solution to the challenges of the state and its constituent parts. The author studied the federal legal acts and the practice of the Constitutional Court, in which the principle of the unity of the executive power was reinforced and evaluated. The article is based on the culturological approach as a kind of the system-structural analysis of law and other elements of social reality. This approach allows to consider the specifics of the Russian federalism as a special model of public administration in dynamics, and the corresponding institutions in their constant interaction and development. The formal-legal method allowed to identify the legal content of the principle of the state power system unity as the ‘cornerstone’ of the Russian federative structure. As a result, the article presents the following cultural-historical model of the Russian federative relations: it allows for widespread decentralization in the political sphere (by providing a list of objects of joint jurisdiction of the federal center and the subjects of the Russian Federation, and also - by residual principle - the exclusive legislative competence of the subjects), while the federal center strengthens centralization mechanisms in the administrative sphere (through the distribution of powers within the joint jurisdiction), thus, ensuring political competition under the tough statist principles in public administration.

This article is a review of the books by the famous Czech sociologist, head of the Historical Sociology Chair of the Faculty for Humanities at the Charles University (Prague), Jiří Šubrt Historical Processes, Social Changes, and Modernization in the Sociological Perspective (Moscow: RUDN; 2017. 248 p.), Antinomies, Dilemmas, and Discussions in the Contemporary Sociological Thought: Essays on Social Theory (Moscow: RUDN; 2018. 280 p.), and Individualism, Holism and the Central Dilemma of Sociological Theory (Bingley: Emerald Publishig; 2019. 184 p.). All three works focus on the key sociological dilemma - individualism versus holism, which has been the main scientific interest of J. Šubrt in recent years. The relevance of this dilemma is obvious: individualism declares the subjectivity of the person, while holism insists on the objectivity of the supra-individual social reality, and this contradiction hinders the development of theoretical knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to try to resolve this contradiction, which Šubrt does by critically analyzing the previous attempts to resolve this dilemma and by considering it in the ‘duplex’ perspective that reflects both voluntarist and social principles.