Vol 20, No 3 (2020)

Conceptualization of the social-cultural contexts of the 21st century in terms of superdiversity implies diversification of the current diversity due to the changing patterns of global migration and transnationalization. The concept of superdiversity introduced by S. Vertovec means a new way for describing and analyzing contemporary social and cultural processes. The author considers three interrelated aspects of superdiversity: descriptive, methodological and practical (political). As a rule, superdiversity implies new immigrants who move from a larger number of countries than before, including those that did not have colonial relations with the places attracting immigrants. The emerging contexts of superdiversity are not limited to the growth of “diversity in terms of ethnicity” - a multidimensional approach to superdiversity allows it to reflect patterns of social inequality, creolization and the experience of social contacts determined by diversification of migration channels and social statuses of immigrants, of their ethnic, gender and age characteristics. Under the permanent mobility, multiple identities and diverse transnational practices, not everything can be represented in terms of ‘we-they’, ‘majority-minority’, ‘inside-outside’. Therefore, superdiversity is not related to the Other or minorities but presents a new framework for all residents of the country, regardless of their origin. Moreover, in local contexts, cultural diversity is increasingly perceived as a norm. Thus, the concept of superdiversity contributes to the development of a new cultural narrative that would replace the outdated concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism.

The article considers the features of the political field of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ power, and social institutions and structures that influence the transformation process. The authors propose a new reading of the concept of ‘political field’, and its main characteristics are the status roles of subjects, configuration of space, nature of the relationship of opposing forces, and methods for preserving the priorities of the opposing subjects. The article identifies interaction problems between the government and the opposition, mechanisms of power retention, tendencies and prospects for the development of the political field of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ power under crises, global instability and government mistakes that lead to dramatic changes in the public opinion. The authors note that clashes in the political field restructure the political space in a new way, which is due to both peculiarities of the historical development and the social-economic and political situation. Transformations of the post-Soviet world are not complete, and the transition of post-Soviet countries to the sustainable development is possible only by adaptation to new realities. The peculiarity of the political field is the constant confrontation of its subjects: the more unstable the political field, the higher the unpredictability of events and the role of the leader. In the contemporary state, there is always a danger of destabilization due to information wars and new forms of influence on the mass consciousness, values and behavior. The empirical basis of the article are monitoring sociological studies conducted from 1987 to identify the level of social tension and political stability, ‘fullness’ of the political space, rankings of politicians, etc.

The quality of life depends on the place in the social structure. Social groups have different opportunities for meeting needs and achieving goals. Positions of different social groups in the subjects of the Russian Federation differ, which can significantly influence social well-being and protest moods; therefore, the study of the quality of life in the regional space is important in both theoretical and practical perspectives. The article aims at considering differentiation of the quality of life in the regional space and identifying the most vulnerable social groups. The authors study the quality of life with the multidimensional hierarchical approach based on a complex of interrelated objective and subjective criteria. This methodology was tested in the empirical study of the quality of life in the Oryol Region. The study used the following set of indicators of the quality of life: subjective assessments of the most significant forms of deprivation; movable and immovable property; housing and the quality of living conditions; savings; access to paid social services; professional position, possibilities of professional self-realization; political activity and political culture; leisure preferences and opportunities that entail additional spending; self-identification in different spheres of life. This set of indicators allowed to describe positions of social groups and their regional differentiation: social groups that make up the regional population, their positions in the stratification system, their quantitative and qualitative characteristics were identified. The authors also identified the most vulnerable groups affected by social tensions and showed that the growth of social inequality can lead to an increase in the protest and destructive behavior.

There are many studies focusing on various effects of women’s education, in particular, on decline in fertility in those societies that are at the second stage of the demographic transition. However, in societies that have completed this transition, the relationship between these phenomena is changing, which requires a special study. We need to understand how women’s education affects fertility in Russia to assess the efficiency of social and demographic policies. The study aims at analyzing differences in fertility rates and women’s reproductive attitudes as depending on the level of education. The study is based on the data of the sample surveys of reproductive plans (2017 and 2012) and of the 2010 All-Russian Census. In general, the results confirm the global trend: on average, women with a high education status have fewer children than women with a lower level of education; on average, the former are older when they have the first child and tend to have larger intergenetic intervals. The analysis of reproductive attitudes and intentions shows that women with higher and postgraduate education have a larger gap between the average desired and the expected number of children. Among the factors hindering the birth of the desired number of children, women of almost all levels of education name material and housing difficulties and uncertainty about the future; however, women with higher and postgraduate education mention these reasons less often - for them, it is more important to combine motherhood and work and to have high-quality services in various spheres.

The article considers practices of using virtual social networks and attitudes of the student and working youth to the digital detox under the influence of objective and subjective factors (age, social status, competitiveness, social trust). The research was conducted with the survey of students (high school, vocational and higher education) and working youth in the Tyumen Region. The sample consisted of 10th-11th grade students (N=1130), university students (N=1097) and working youth (N=942). The results show that the main purpose of using social networks is to get new information (81%), entertaining video- and audio-content (72%); only 32% of students satisfy their educational needs. When getting older, the intensity of the youth’s search for identity decreases together with the desire to keep one’s social status in the virtual reality. The high school students show the highest level of readiness for digital detox for a short period (84%), the long-term detox is more typical for the working youth (32% vs. a quarter in two other groups). The lower the level of the general social trust, the easier respondents choose digital detox from social networks. The results of the survey prove the following trend in using virtual social networks: those who accept a day detox are rarely ready for a month detox; those who accept a week detox from virtual communication consider it quite realistic to extend it to a month.

The article presents the results of the regional sociological study of the student youth civil activism and predicts the development of its destructive manifestations in the Volga Region. Civil activity is an integral component of renewal and social development, which is based on the multi-format and multi-vector activity of young people who strive for social transformations ‘here and now’. For some young people, activism became a kind of employment in offline and online formats. In some cases, destructive (even delinquent) civil activism of the youth is a response to an unfair, unlawful action or attitude, primarily of the authorities. Based on the theoretical ideas of structural functionalism, conflictological and interpretive approaches, the article reveals peculiarities of the youth activism in the Volga Region and presents their interpretation. The expert survey allowed to identify relationships between social injustice and civil activity. The authors also identified active dissemination of radical ideas at the grassroots level of everyday life, within everyday forms of interaction and under the decrease in public civil activity, which determines latent conflicts between the population and the government. The risk of an increase in social destructiveness is determined by the crisis of expectations of changes, unsolved social-economic problems, renaissance of socialist ideas that become popular among the youth, and an increase in the number of nonresident and especially foreign students. The student civil activity in the Volga Region focuses on the most pressing challenges at the federal and local levels. Sanctions against students participating in rallies and protest groups in social networks only stimulate the youth’s interest in protest activities. The region needs a youth policy responsive to the needs and demands of the youth and capable of creating a multi-format space for positive youth activism.

The objective request for the compliance of all spheres of life with the requirements of the information society has accelerated processes determined by the restrictive measures of the covid-19 pandemic. Almost all sectors of the economy were forced to switch to remote working; however, the education system was the most affected. The mass transition to distance learning revealed a number of challenges and contradictions in distant forms of the higher education programs and made the Russian education system respond to the challenges of the digital society. This required a deep analysis of various aspects of distance learning, readiness of all education actors to work remotely, availability of material-technical facilities, methodological support and software, and also an assessment of prospects and scenarios for the development of the Russian education system after the pandemic. In May 2020, the Center for Education Development Strategy at Lomonosov Moscow State University and the RUDN Department of Sociology, with the support of the Russian Professors Assembly, conducted a survey of the academic personnel to study universities’ transition to distance learning. The survey data reveled the real situation in the education system, features of the forced transition to remote working and challenges of such an educational format, and allowed to reconstruct a ‘portrait’ of the teacher most skeptical to distance learning. The study helped to make a number of recommendations on improving forms and methods of learning and on developing education technologies in universities; to identify the main risks of distance education and to suggest possible forms of mixed learning in Russian universities.

The higher education of China has achieved significant results in recent years. Therefore, it is important to study management of this system and basic mechanisms used by the party and state institutions. The article is based on the analysis of open data sources, including official documents on the development of the higher education (laws, national programs, projects and plans), and the results of the Russian and Chinese scientific research. The authors consider state and party institutions as a unified system of the education system management: central and local party institutions, party organizations of the central and local government and primary organizations of the party (CPC), central and local executive authorities of the state. Party institutions of the higher education management include executive bodies of the CPC and the local provincial party committees, party organizations of the central and local governments (Ministry of Education and other State Council’s structures, local people’s governments) and primary party committees of universities. State administrative bodies in the higher education include central (State Council of the PRC including Ministry of Education and other institutions) and local administrative bodies (local people’s governments, including education committees of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities under the central government). The main mechanism that determines activities of the party bodies and the state university management system consists of special projects and plans. The authors present five main plans for the development of the higher education system in China and identify their features and goals.

The article aims at systematization of approaches to understanding the evolution of pre-class society in historical sociology. The sociological tradition of interpreting the history of pre-class society developed in the late 18th century, when A. Ferguson defined the development of society as a natural process consisting of three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. In classic sociology, there were two approaches to understanding the pre-class society evolution. The first approach is presented in the works of H. Spencer, who suggested a natural-scientific interpretation of social evolution but with a more elaborated scale of the development of pre-class societies - as differing by the complexity of their social structure. The second approach is presented in the research of L.H. Morgan, who used Ferguson’s three-stage periodization as a basis but expanded the list of fundamental criteria for their differentiation (progress in inventions and discoveries, ideas of management, family and property). In the middle of the 20th century, sociology managed to overcome its dependence on psychology and economics by neo-evolutionism that linked social evolution of the archaic society with qualitative changes in its structure. Sociologists proposed schemes for the evolution of pre-class society based on the empirical evidence of its complexity - institutionalization of leadership and increasing social inequality. Moreover, sociologists included the level of labor productivity achieved in the archaic society into the list of criteria for its development, which determined a single scale of progress even for societies with other types of social organization. After debates, sociologists came to the conclusion that the evolution of pre-class societies is determined not only by their development but also by their degradation and even collapse; that all social systems can have analogues with a comparable level of complexity; and that a certain level of social organization can be achieved by different evolutionary paths.

Gamification is a new management approach implying the use of computer games technologies in non-game contexts, particularly to improve motivation at work and efficiency of organizational processes. The key assumption is that introduction of game elements into the working routine can increase employees’ motivation, involvement, and loyalty. The first attempts of sociological reflection on gamification were based on the critical approach and concluded that this technology could only exacerbate inequalities, exploitation, and control. However, this claim remains unconfirmed, partially due to the fact that the available evidence was provided by the managerial research that focus mainly on the gamification efficiency. The article is based on the analysis of gamification projects in eight companies and aims at testing the claim of critical sociology that gamification is mainly a tool of control and exploitation. Today gamification is a multifunctional technology and solves different tasks: increases productivity and quality of work operations, stimulates organizational communications and knowledge transfer, learning, teambuilding, control, and employees’ loyalty. Gamification can have positive effects, but often they are short-term and accompanied by side effects. Generalization of the available data does not support the conclusions of critical sociology; however, in some cases, gamification is used to strengthen control and reinforce the structural inequality. The critical approach tends to underestimate the influence of institutional and sociocultural factors that make the company strive for a balance of actors’ interests, and employees’ strategic planning. Thus, gamification, despite its ambiguity, has a positive potential - it is capable of improving the quality of human and social capital.

The article is a review of the book by T.A. Alekseeva Theory of International Relations as Political Philosophy and Science (Moscow: Aspect Press; 2019). The last decades have been marked by large-scale transformations: the spatial-temporal characteristics of political processes change - political time accelerates, political space shrinks, sequence of the political development stages changes; boundaries between internal and external, center and periphery, material and immaterial blur. Despite the fact that these changes affect both domestic and international policies, the complexity of global political shifts significantly exceeds all internal conflicts. However, understanding of large-scale transformations lags behind the need for their meaningful interpretation. The need to understand the essence of large-scale processes is an inevitable and serious challenge for the management system. Thus, we need a theory of international research that would become a basis for both understanding the essence of changes and predicting the future development. Based on the achievements of foreign and Russian theory of international relations, T.A. Alekseeva presents a detailed conceptualization of this science. In the book, all its essential components are described in detail and combined into a logically consistent system, which brings the theory of international relations to a new level of the theoretical-methodological conceptualization. The author’s comprehensive analysis allows to use its results for solving practical problems, in particular, for resolving international crisis situations, implementing large-scale projects of scientific diplomacy, and training a new generation of experts.