Vol 21, No 3 (2021)

The author considers the becoming complex reality as developing nonlinearly and demanding new transmission mechanisms for the formation of human capital and also factors that contribute to changes in these realities: self-reflection of both nature and society; social gaps and traumas as becoming a ‘norm’; backward and forward trends; the increasing number of bifurcation points; ambivalences; side effects of digital innovations; consequences of global pandemics, etc. - all of them facilitate changes in the mechanism for the development of human capital. In the 1960s, G. Becker and T. Schultz introduced the term ‘human capital’ to start the studies of factors that make mechanisms of its formation more complex. Since then, many theories have been introduced to explain challenges to human capital, because various transmission mechanisms of influencing human capital have been formed as culturally and politically determined. Today, there are two challenges affecting the nature of human capital: digitalization and the global covid-19 pandemic create new requirements for human capital and change the transmission mechanism of its formation. However, the dominant pragmatic and formal-rational approaches to human capital distort its humanistic and sustainable components. The author insists on the need to create a new transmission mechanism for the sustainable and humanistic human capital development, which would include social-cultural and value elements, humanized digital technologies, bioethics and social epidemiology - in order to help social actors to function more effectively under the global complexity and nonlinear development. The author outlines the theory of the ‘rigidity turn’ as a social discourse, which aims at studying long-lived phenomena of social order and developing intellectual and practical foundations of the sustainable and humanistic formation of the human capital.

The article considers the transformation of basic values, life plans and behavioral strategies of the youth in contemporary Belarus. The changes in basic values are directly connected with the youth’s adaptation to the conditions of global instability. The new generation is sensitive to social injustice, violations of rights and freedoms, unwillingness to take into account their opinions on current issues of social development and the future. The self-perception of people regarding the possibility to realize basic values in the current social-economic conditions is an important factor of social stability. In both 1990 and 2018, family holds the first place among the basic values in Belarus; work takes the second place as a factor of decent life and family’s success; the importance of friends and leisure remains the same over the decades, while the importance of politics and religion grows. International comparisons show that Belarus has the same hierarchy of values as European countries. The surveys prove a decrease in popularity of the traditional media among the youth and an increase in individualism, importance of personal self-realization in family and at work, and in reliance on one’s own forces. In the public space, the needs and expectations of people have changed - there is an increase in political radicalization and critical perception of the most important events, which affects the behavioral patterns of social-demographic groups. Education together with the family and new information technologies have a significant impact on values - there is an intragenerational gap, alienation from society and increasing informatization. The article is based on the results of the sociological surveys conducted in the framework of the European Values Study (EVS) (the results of 1990 and 2018 are compared).

In the past thirty years, social memory of the Eurasian youth has been influenced by many ‘actors of the commerative space’, who often pursue their own goals in the struggle to legitimize the new political order and their policies of the radical economic transformation. The results of their efforts should be taken into account in the implementation of one of the most important joint projects of the post-Soviet countries - Eurasian integration, because social memory of the youth is the most important resource for its success. The study aims at clarifying and evaluating the mechanisms for preserving information about the past, the peculiarities of the generation Y ideas about the common history and the current stage of the EAEU construction, which are present in the public discourse, and at revealing the relationship between attitudes to the past and to the Eurasian integration, the influence of social memory on the personal worldview, the forms and methods of its reconstruction in the interests of the post-Soviet countries interaction and efficiency of the politics of memory. The formation of social memory is defined as the activity of actors (individuals, groups, organizations, social institutions, communities) aimed at the interpretation of the collective past and common present by the youth of the countries participating in the Eurasian integration. The empirical object of the study - young citizens of the member states and candidates for joining the EAEU (18-38 years old), who live, study or work in Moscow. The article considers the respondents’ assessments of the contribution of each of the actors to the social memory formation and describes social memory of the generation Y as a set of views, feelings and moods reflecting the perception of the Soviet past and the common present. The authors insist on the purposeful policy of the leaders of the countries, participating in the Eurasian integration, to ensure the reconstruction of the youth’s social memory and the consolidation of societies.

Under the transformation of the Russian higher education, its development is hindered by the wide spread of anomalies which carry serious risks for the universities, higher education and society. The article presents the authors’ interpretation of anomalies in higher education as violations of the substantial, structural and functional nature, determined by the mismatch of actions and interactions in universities with the fundamental norms of higher education. The research aims at providing typologies of anomalies in higher education. The practical meaning of these typologies is to use them as a basis for developing social technologies, mechanisms and forms of prevention and overcoming various types of violations in higher education. The authors use three methodological approaches - institutional, structural, and community-based - to introduce a theoretical framework for the study of anomalies in higher education. The typologies of anomalies were identified on the basis of the following criteria: 1) the nature of norms violated - anomalies of deviant (violation of moral norms) and delinquent (violation of legal norms) types; 2) the nature of anomalies’ manifestation - explicit and latent types; 3) the spheres of their manifestation - anomalies in the educational process, research, management, and social activity; 4) the levels of their manifestation - institutional, systemic and community-based anomalies; 5) subjects of abnormal behavior - anomalies in the communities of students, pedagogical, scientific stuff, and managers.

The study of the specifics of professional choice and of the factors that determine labor orientations of the youth is one of the urgent sociological tasks for researchers all over the world. The universal, supranational nature of this task under globalization explains the need to compare labor orientations of the Russian youth with their foreign peers. The article aims at assessing the basic ideas about the labor market of the youth in Russia, Germany and China. The empirical part of the article is presented by the survey and interviews of the Russian, German and Chinese youth. The author considers typical problems that the young professionals face when searching for a job, their opinions on the most important work qualities, similarities and differences in the perception of the ‘ideal worker’. Young people in Russia, Germany and China name different aspects of working life as the most important: Russian respondents value wages and the stability of organization more than the Chinese and especially German. On the other hand, German and Chinese students prefer activities that reveal personal creativity and leave space for personal life. Considering social capital, unlike their peers from Germany and China, Russian respondents do not associate the fact of having a university diploma with potential success in the labor market. More often than the Chinese and Germans respondents, the Russian youth mention nepotism and corruption as an obstacle to successful employment. Among the similar social perceptions of the respondents from three countries, one can name the difficulties associated with the lack of work experience. The interaction of educational institutions and employers can help in overcoming the difficulties that the young Russians face when searching for a job.

Since gaining independence, Kazakhstan has undergone significant changes in the territorial structure, which affected social representations of its regions. The authors reconstruct the dominant territorial images of the younger generations that grew up in independent Kazakhstan. The article is based on the results of the mental maps method applied for revealing images of the country. The authors studied the representations of the country’s territories from two geographical positions - the center (Karaganda) and the south (Shymkent). According to the research procedure, the informants drew their version of the country’s map with the most important territorial objects, and proposed associations for the features of certain territories. 80 first- and second-year students were questioned in the higher educational institutions of Shymkent and Karaganda. In the first part of the article, the authors examine the images presented on mental maps, in the second part - associations for regions of the country. Thus, the authors identify three circles of the territorial vision: core, semi-periphery and periphery. The core consists of the place of residence and the cities of republican significance - Almaty and Nur-Sultan (the so-called southern and northern capitals). The dominant images of the core are political, cultural, toponymical and resource. The semi-periphery consists of regional centers with the natural-resource and climatic images, the periphery - of cities far from the students’ place of residence and of the “voids” - territories not indicated on the map. The images of the periphery reflect mainly the climatic features of territories. The authors argue that the ‘recognizability’ of territories in the perception of the student youth reflects a certain hierarchical spatial structure in which the status cities dominate.

Sociology of media space is a new and still developing branch of sociology, just like sociology of space - a basic branch of sociological knowledge. Sociology of space focuses on natural space as a framework for the development of social connections and relations; while sociology of media space considers this space as a part of social space, not as its measurement but as a metaphor. Some natural space turns into a social space only if people use it and live in it. Social boundaries and meanings are added to natural space, which transforms it into a social phenomenon. Although sociology of media space is still developing, there is no doubt that the mass media have made a significant contribution to the development of social relations and sociology by filling social space with messages of all kinds. Media space is a platform that serves as a basis for social communications, a key to the social development, and a means of positive impact on the life of individuals, groups and organizations. Everything social is located in a space-time continuum, and the sociological approach to the theory of network media space is based on the assumption that there is a strong connection between network media communications and social changes. Sociology of media space does not emerge from sociology of space: the developing media space, which is studied with sociological methods, manifests itself in its social coordinates - this is how sociological knowledge expands to consider not only various spatial aspects of social life, but also the features of different contents and information chains created by the convergence of various media and ways of disseminating information.

The article considers the urgent issue of a scientific-practical nature - the relationship between the institution of human rights and such a complex social-legal phenomenon as information extremism, which the authors consider from the standpoint of the theory of complex social systems - as one of the varieties of intellectual extremism in information society. The authors apply the axiological approach to position human rights as universal values. Therefore, information extremism is a legally prohibited activity (a set of acts, actions) in the information space, which is illegal in nature, threatens the foundations of the constitutional order and security of the individual and society, and violates human rights and freedoms. Information extremism aims at destroying and discrediting social and personal values, imposing values and simulacra that are unacceptable for the individual and society, i.e., information extremism is a universal human anti-value. Information is a construct of reality and one of social values; therefore, information extremism, which deliberately uses fake information, creates conditions for a distorted perception of reality. Thus, under the current global geopolitical and social-communicative transformations, information human rights are the main object of the purposeful and destructive influence for information extremism. The article focuses on the fact that in the contemporary pandemic realities, the human right to information needs to be significantly changed - the authors propose to develop a new charter of human rights in order to develop mechanisms for protecting information rights. Under the constant expansion of telecommunications, the growth of information flows and digitalization of almost all spheres of life, it is necessary to ensure the human right to reliable information: the UN Human Rights Committee should make an appropriate General Comment in accordance with the Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to clarify the nature and quality of information which can be sought, received and distributed according to the Paragraph 2 of this article.

The article is a reflection-review of the book by Scott R. Harris An Invitation to the Sociology of Emotions (translated from English by O.A. Simonova; Moscow: HSE; 2020). Certainly, such a type of scientific works does not need a review after publication, but this book requires special attention for sociology of emotions seems to be a marginal area of Russian sociology, at least in the institutional perspective. After a brief description of the origins and manifestations of the ‘affective turn’, the author considers its consequences for social sciences (recognition of the cultural nature of emotions, perception of ‘emotional standards’ in the course of socialization, etc.), and reconstructs the sociological model for the study of emotions as developed by Harris: reliance on symbolic interactionism and the social exchange theory, analysis of the normative aspect of emotions (cultural expectations about how one should feel in different situations, social standards for assessing the acceptability of emotions, etc.) and of the ‘procedural’ side of the emotional life (exchange of emotions, management of emotions, identification of emotions, and ‘emotional labor’).

On February 18-19, 2021, the St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University for the Humanities hosted the VII international scientific conference “Digitalization of society and the future of Christianity. On the transformation of the value-normative system of society”. At this scientific event, prominent scientists from Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Taiwan, China, India, Nigeria, Ukraine and Belarus made their presentations. They considered in the Christian perspective the challenges and benefits of digitalization for the contemporary society. A special emphasis was made on the changes in values and norms under digitalization.