Vol 21, No 2 (2021)

The covid-19 pandemic has made the whole world face specific challenges that required urgent decisions on how to organize the work of social institutions, including education, in this new reality. Since March 2020, national education systems all over the world have been adapting their activities to the quarantine measures and have been switching to distance learning. In varying degrees, these changes affected all levels of education - from preschool to higher and postgraduate education. However, the tasks to be solved differed by the level of education. The article presents the results of the comparative analysis of the activities of the Russian higher-educational institutions based on their students estimates - during the forced distance learning in the spring of 2020 and during the planned switch to such a format in the fall of 2020. The article is based on the surveys of the Russian students conducted in June 2020 (N=31423) and February 2021 (N=32358). The study was conducted to test the hypotheses that negative estimates of distance learning and rejection of such a format by many students in the spring of 2020 changed in the fall of 2020. The results of two surveys show that Russian universities have passed through the stage of digital transformation which affected both the resources for organizing the educational process and the competences of the teaching staff. The experience of work in the difficult and unpredictable conditions of the pandemic changed the public opinion from the negative perception of distance learning to understanding and accepting its positive features for the education system and its actors. The introduction of digital technologies is an objective and inevitable process in the development of the educational sphere and the country.

The persistent gender imbalance in the labor market - both in Russia and globally - is largely formed during the school years as the period of the development of professional preferences and human capital. The article presents the views of schoolchildren on various aspects of the STEM school subjects, including their common interests, attitudes to the STEM teaching, their role in choosing a career related to STEM, and the ideas of schoolchildren about jobs related to STEM. The authors refer to the Soviet experience of overcoming gender inequality in the labor market, in particular, by helping women to get the industrial and specialized technical education. The results of the search study show that for the majority of girls, especially those not engaged in special education projects focused on STEM, school profile lessons do not contribute to changing gender representations of professions. The authors argue that to change these gender representations we need classes focused not on the academic achievements but on the practical features of professions that are in demand in the labor market. Such an experience is necessary for it is impossible to choose the most promising career if you do not know about it or if you are convinced that you would not cope with a particular job. At the same time, the schoolchildren should understand that some of today’s professions have very short future, for instance, due to the inevitable consequences of automation. The schoolchildren’s positioning of all professions as gender-neutral can be used for a positive study of career-related challenges and for designing career-guidance activities as taking into account those aspects that are essential for girls and boys, even if at the moment they are perceived negatively.

The article considers some indicators of the widespread social phenomenon in Russia - labor migration, which, according to the data for 2019, involves about 2.9 million Russians, or 4% of the employed population. These are internal labor migrants who temporarily work outside their regions. This type of labor migration of Russians has common features with temporary employment in the United States, Canada, and Australia (long distance commuting - LDC), fly-in/fly-out - FIFO). The empirical basis of the article consists of the statistical data (results of the labor force survey by the Federal State Statistics Service for 2011-2019) and the results of sociological research conducted in the region with a high level of shift employment - the Republic of Bashkortostan - in 2015-2019. The statistical data prove regional differences in the Russian shift employment: the majority (72%) of internal labor migrants live in a third of the regions with high and medium levels of temporary labor migration; in some regions, the level of temporary labor migration decreases. The sociological data show different involvement in shift employment depending on place of residence, gender and age, marital status and level of education. The same social-territorial and social-demographic features are evident at the national level. At the federal level, internal labor migration, as a tool for social-economic development, helps to solve the problem of labor shortage in certain areas and sectors of economy; therefore, such labor migration is supported by legal acts. At the regional level, it decreases the labor and demographic potential of the regions that ‘provide’ labor migrants. To preserve the economic and demographic potential and to strengthen the competitiveness of such regions, we need to develop regional labor markets and labor mobility within regions.

In developed countries, along with urbanization, the opposite process - ruralization or deurbanization - is becoming increasingly noticeable. Ruralization is not only the movement of townspeople to the countryside, but also the development of villages and the increasing importance of rural areas as a place to live and work. Townspeople make the decision to move by comparing the advantages and disadvantages of living in urban and rural areas, and non-economic motives (the desire to get closer to nature, to find one’s roots, to live in silence, without haste, to eat natural products, etc.) play an important role in this decision. Among economic motives, the difference in the cost of urban and rural real estate and of life in general is the most important motive, i.e., families, especially young and large, can improve their living conditions by moving to the countryside. The study, the results of which are presented in the article, aimed at identifying those groups of townspeople that tend to resettlement, their motives, and factors pushing people to leave cities and facilitating/hindering resettlement to rural areas. The research is based on the study of special literature on the topic and on the data of the survey of resettled townspeople and experts in ruralization. Unlike most publications on ruralization, the author focuses on the positive aspects of the resettlement of townspeople to the countryside and insists on the removal of administrative barriers that prevent ruralization, because the resettlement of townspeople to the countryside does not have a negative impact on the city and is compensated by the influx of people from the countryside, who want to get education or a new profession.

The article identifies the deep causes of the new wave of minors’ criminalization in the Russian society. The authors considered the expert opinions on this issue and found them inconsistent; described the main forms of behavior associated with the adoption of criminal values - primary, game, and re-criminalization which usually have different social localization; summarized the historical aspects of adolescent criminalization in the Russian society and its social-cultural factors. Based on the analysis of the official statistics and the results of the empirical studies conducted in 2019-2020 within the project “Deep causes of teenage (neo)criminalization in contemporary Russia” supported by the RFBR, the authors assess the scale of real and virtual criminalization, features of legal outlook, social-psychological well-being, and worldview of criminalized and ‘ordinary’ teenagers. In addition to the traditionally identified causes of criminalization (social-economic and cultural-educational inequality, deprivation, territorial-geographical specificity, etc.), the authors consider social-cultural factors: first, violations in socialization and child-parental relations - as leading to the deprivation of the need for love and recognition of minors by their parents and to the attempts to compensate this deprivation destructively, with criminal practices; second, the types of minors’ heroes, which determine the normative and gender inversion and the spread of the criminal subculture - as a source of the surrogate pseudo-masculine discourse. The authors make a conclusion that the prevention of minors’ criminalization should be based on psychological-pedagogical and social-cultural technologies, the main actors of which are the family, school and state information policy, while the normative-legal technologies of social control, the actors of which are administrative and law enforcement agencies, should focus on the crime-deterrent function.

With the advancement of the contemporary society to the stage of global digitalization, the issues of personality education, its means and methods are becoming increasingly important. The strategy of Russia’s scientific-technological development presupposes, among other things, the formation of certain ideological and axiological priorities, in accordance with which the value characteristics of the information society change and reproduce. Moral education is a purposeful development of the personal moral culture: moral activity, system of values, moral feelings and behavior that corresponds to the ideals and principles of humanistic morality. Moral activity as an important personal quality in the information society presupposes an internal need for continuous moral improvement, a desire to creatively set and solve new, increasingly complex tasks of the technological development. The development of such moral activity of the student also means his ability to choose actions on the basis of the contemporary trends of the dynamic social development, and to choose actions that are the most appropriate for a specific situation. The organization of moral education at the university consists of two main interrelated directions: moral education and teaching students the skills of moral behavior. Complex activities of the university serve not only as a means of moral education but also as its condition, which requires their inclusion in the educational process and purposeful organization. The efficiency of moral education at the university depends on the system of influence on students, and its main components are as follows: ethical education and teaching ethical disciplines; development of sustainable traditions of corporate culture (mission of the university, system of life values, ethical codes of students and teachers, etc.); ethical orientation of general-theoretical and professional disciplines; moral-educational components in the organization of the educational process; non-learning activities with students, labor education, volunteer activities, etc.

One of the fundamental challenges for sociology is the interpretation of its key terms, which is determined by the fact that many words of everyday language and scientific discourse are the same despite implying a much higher level of generalization as sociological categories. Certainly, such challenges are more typical for the empirical research - when sociologists turn their theoretical concepts into sets of empirical indicators which have to be clear enough for the respondent to understand and answer the questionnaire and for the sociologist to interpret these answers correctly. Nevertheless, the lack of generally recognized conceptual definitions is no less important, because the general picture of social reality is necessarily made of them (the society is described as either fair, consisting of trustworthy institutions that provide opportunities for being happy, or in the opposite statements). The article presents a possible reconstruction of the strategy that sociologists use in the search for conceptual definitions for such complex concepts with varying connotations as love, happiness, trust and justice. This strategy consists of two steps: focus on the macro-sociological dimension of the phenomena under study as determining its various manifestations and everyday interpretations (the key step in the study of love and happiness); and identification of objective and subjective indicators of the phenomenon under study (the key step in the study of trust and justice). For instance, in the study of love and happiness, there is the obvious micro-sociological perspective that implies personal responsibility for being happy and loved, and the hidden macro-sociological perspective that implies social standards for identifying and achieving love and happiness; trust is defined as a source of social order, cooperation, institutional, organizational and everyday interactions, which reduces the level of uncertainty; in the searches for the conceptual definition of justice, there are two main approaches - the first approach considers justice as one of many grounds for developing some theoretical model; the second approach reconstructs justice either as an ‘ideal’ political-philosophical model of social order or as a ‘means’ of the comparative analysis of its practical implementations.

Online communities in the study of political communication are a relatively new research field. Within its framework, independent thematic sections are developing, which in many respects remain fragmented due to the insufficient systematization. The article presents the results of the analysis and description of the research field of online communities in the context of political communication based on 60 English-language sources. This sample included publications on a wide range of issues: from the activity of official accounts and websites of politicians, parties, organizations to the user behavior and political discussions in virtual communities. The authors identified five large thematic groups that consider online communities in different research perspectives: classification of communities, study of their structure and elements, analysis of their strategies and tactics, functions and effects, and ‘life cycles’. The article describes the main features and internal structure of the identified thematic groups, considers approaches and methods for solving specific tasks in the study of actors, channels, practices and models of political communication. The authors also consider the technical factors of the formation of communities, differences in methods and units of analysis, types of political communicants. The authors make a conclusion about the sufficient ‘maturity’ of the research field and its thematic sections, which is combined with the differing popularity of research topics. Online communities represent a special public space which allows researchers to answer questions about the success of political leaders, movements and organizations, the effects of the viral spread of online protests and flash mobs, and the audience’s response to significant politicized issues. The authors identify two trends in the development of the corresponding methodology: strengthening practical orientation and increasingly complex techniques based on the machine algorithms for data analysis.

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