Vol 24, No 1 (2024)

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Such a formulation of the question as labor productivity in the context of higher education may seems unusual and controversial, since in most cases this issue is considered in the analysis of economic problems, of the use of such resources in production as the improvement of technology, equipment and management, working conditions and organization. However, this list of means for increasing labor productivity should include an analysis of the preliminary stages at which future specialists begin to develop a set of qualities for productive work - educational process in all its diversity, which receives insufficient attention. The article identifies the forms of participation of Russian universities in solving one of the central tasks in increasing the efficiency of the economy - training future specialists for productive work. As a rule, the concepts ‘productive labor’ and ‘labor productivity’ are used in relation to the real production, as evidenced by numerous studies, technological and economic policies, and actual production activity. The article shows that for the implementation of the national program “Labor Productivity and Employment” the preparatory stage for solving this problem is especially important, which involves a radical reconstruction of the universities’ strategies for training students for future work: career guidance, professional selection, professional practice, and professional adaptation. The author considers these forms of the higher education participation in solving problems of labor productivity and productive labor referring to the research conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and by the Russian State University for the Humanities and to the conclusions and suggestions of scientists, teachers and practitioners who studied, applied and/or summarized the experience of students’ preparation for future professional life.

In recent decades, the Russian education system has been constantly reformed. Its current state and problems cannot be understood without identifying the subject initiating and carrying out these permanent changes. Such a subject is an innovative bureaucracy - a specific type of bureaucracy that serves innovative processes and creates social and organizational routines from them. This bureaucracy managed to make a conveyor of innovations, which often moves in a circle - without beginning or end. The reforms have become pendulum and repeat at certain intervals. The article considers numerous consequences and excesses of the innovative bureaucracy’s dominance in the higher education management, which are determined by this bureaucracy success in replacing the real, socially significant goals of the higher education system with indicators that can be quickly achieved and reported as if for the public good. The harsh administrative pressure of the innovative bureaucracy leads to the constant updating and combination of standards (although not all their content can be standardized), to an increase in reporting (including in electronic, online form) and in teaching load. The lack and ambivalence of goals and the non-stop projects of changes hinder the formation of institutional matrix to meet the contemporary challenges and determine destabilizing processes in the education system. The authors argue that an institutional approach to the higher education management can change the situation, since it focuses not on administrative orders and formal goals but on establishing norms and rules for the education system self-development. Thus, the efficiency of the education system should be evaluated by the society and the state and not by representatives of the innovative bureaucracy, who strive to preserve the innovation conveyor. The principles of post-industrial management should be applied in the higher education system, replacing the bureaucratic approach to the implementation of innovations.

Today a new level-system of higher education is formed in Russia through significant changes that meet the new requirements for specialists in economics, social sectors, and all spheres of public life. The new system is to incorporate the developments of the Soviet educational model and the experience of recent decades. The article considers a new model of sociological training implied in the reform of the higher education system and in the fourthgeneration Federal State Educational Standard (FSES). One of the central ideas of the new system is to provide students with the opportunity to choose a field of study not upon entering a university, but at the third year of study, which would increase the awareness of professional choice, help graduates to more successfully integrate into the labor market due to a broader educational base and ensure the flexibility of educational programs, preserving the “fundamental core” in each. Thus, the first two years are for general (for the enlarged group of areas) training, and then specialized (sociological) training starts. However, the draft of the new standard proposed by the Ministry of Education and Science, which is based on updated, enlarged groups of areas, would not improve the professional training of sociologists. The mandatory general part for all areas in the group would inevitably reduce the professional part of training, thus, depriving the higher sociological education of connections with practice and destroying the focused training of specialists, which contradicts the demands of society and the labor market, and the goals of the country’s social-economic development. There are also other problems: an unpredictable extension of the time to enter the labor market; not identified mechanisms for distributing student quotas between areas within the group, for funding an extended period of study (20 %-40 % increase in cost) and an increased teaching load. The current pilot project designed for three years would not allow to make valid conclusions about the suggested changes as students will not even complete the basic level of higher education. Therefore, it is necessary to return to the FSES for each area of training, to further develop regulatory and legal grounds for the transition from the Bologna system with a focus on the values and goals of the Russian higher education, and to ensure a broad public-p rofessional discussion about the planned reforms.

The Russian system of the professional sociological education, if we date its institutionalization to the creation of the first sociological faculties in the USSR in 1989, has functioned for more than thirty years. However, in the coming years, this education will have the most difficult period in its development due to the transition to a new two-level model of higher education and to the adoption of the Federal State Educational Standard of the 4th generation (FSES 4). The implementation of these plans creates certain challenges: 1) sociological training would lose the status of an independent enlarged group of specialties (EGS) and would be included into the political sciences EGS; 2) the suggested program of joint training of sociologists with representatives of political sciences in the first two years of study would reduce the study time for mastering sociological academic disciplines; 3) there are certain contradictions between the basic and specialized levels of higher education due to the suggested expanded opportunities for basic-level graduates to enroll in graduate school. Moreover, such issues as the target numbers for the EGS, mechanisms for their distribution between areas of training and possibility of simultaneous training in ‘related’ specialties have not been resolved. These challenges create risks for sociology of maintaining its status of a specialty, and, ultimately, a threat to its independence and identity. The author suggests some measures to develop the professional sociological education and to maintain its status under the current reform of the national higher education system, which is primarily the restoration of the sociological EGS in the List of Areas of Training in Higher Education, which would make the new FSES 4 focus on the related areas of training and improve the quality of sociological education.

To solve the integration tasks of forming a common labor market, interpenetration of values and ideas, ensuring mutual understanding and trust between peoples, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) needs a single educational space, similar educational and professional standards, mutual recognition of diplomas, academic degrees and titles. The article considers academic mobility within the EAEU and current practices of cooperation between its member-states and observer countries in the field of higher education based on the data of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) and the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (to assess the efficiency of promoting the ideas of Eurasian integration) and on the results of the authors’ empirical research (to identify potential for the development of cooperation between the EAEU member-states and observer countries in the field of education). The authors show a decrease in student exchange between universities of member-states and an increase in the number of students from non-CIS countries; Russia still accepts more students than its EAEU partners, which proves the inequality of student and teachers’ academic mobility and the need for changes in legislation and funding under the growing competition with Turkey, Europe and China in the field of education. The article considers the development of the structure and programs of educational cooperation, the expansion of branches of leading universities in other countries, the creation by leading universities of the Consortium, Eurasian Network University and Slavic Universities, and so on. The development of cooperation between the EAEU member-states and observer countries in the field of higher education requires an agreement between participants of integration at the highest level, classification of the higher education issues as a separate area of cooperation, expansion of legal regulation of cooperation issues and creation of an institutional form for the EAEU management in the sphere of higher education.

The contemporary system of sociological education undergoes all processes of digital transformation; therefore, the key challenges to the teaching community and risks associated with new functions and a decrease in the quality of education require serious rethinking in the context of digital transformation. Moreover, the tasks of identifying the capabilities of EdTech and constructive ways of using them in sociological education are also updated. The article considers the trends in the development of EdTech in education and conditions, technologies and directions for its use in sociological education. The empirical basis of the article is the results of sociological research conducted by international and Russian organizations on the use and development prospects of EdTech. The introduction and use of technologies in the education system determine the task of developing a new digital infrastructure and of the corresponding training/retraining of teaching staff. On the other hand, the education system should respond to students’ requests for emotional inclusion, support, psychological well-being and pedagogy of care in the digitally mediated environment. The author argues that the key tasks to be solved under the introduction of EdTech into sociological education are as follows: formation of a meaningful approach to the use of technology by all participants of the educational process; training in new methods for the analysis of transforming social reality; identification of legitimate ways to use artificial intelligence in education and research. The article emphasizes the dynamism of digital transformation in education, which determines the need for monitoring research and for a comprehensive (infrastructural, personnel, content) digital transformation strategy taking into account the features of educational programs.

Applied sociological projects can play an important role in reducing the gap between higher education and labor markets, but for this educational organizations need to develop a mechanism for interaction between students and employers. The article presents the clinical model used at the Saint Petersburg State University as a tool for organizing applied sociological projects as a part of the educational process. The authors describe the features of the Sociological Clinic of Applied Research of the Saint Petersburg State University, the results of its work and the directions of its development, providing some practical recommendations for introducing a clinical training infrastructure in educational programs in sociology. These recommendations may be useful for universities that want to improve their interaction with the labor market and their quality of education. The development and assessment of forms for integrating employers’ requests into educational institutions are current methodological tasks, and solutions developed and tested by the Saint Petersburg State University, namely the clinical approach, may be interesting for all participants of the education market. Its uniqueness is determined by the flexible organizational model which focuses on characteristics of different educational areas. Over a five-year period, the Sociological Clinic of Applied Research has become an educational form that successfully combines classical education with project-based activities, giving students the opportunity to include in-demand cases into their portfolios and establish relationships with representatives of local communities. This experience will be useful for improving the quality of education in sociology-related areas.

Under global challenges, the Russian state looks for ways to develop the national intellectual potential as a guarantee of technological sovereignty and country’s competitiveness. National research universities are supported, grant mechanisms for research activities are implemented, and programs for attracting and promoting young scientists are adopted. However, some objective indicators show persistent problems in the academic sphere: the number of research staff declines; “brain drain” continues; the number of graduate students and people who defended the thesis is not enough to solve the key problems of the state. The article considers social representations of the prestige of the scientific profession and the image of the scientist as factors that have a negative impact on human resources in the academic field. The research consisted of two stages: 1) 21 focus groups in 7 large Russian cities to identify the prestige of the scientific profession among three generations; 2) 207 interviews with students of Moscow universities (as the main source of personnel for scientific activities) to get a more detailed understanding of the image of the scientist. According to the results of the study, none of three Russian generations consider the profession of the scientist prestigious (inferior to politicians, businessmen, artists, bloggers, and IT specialists). The youth feel social injustice more acutely: they note the exceptional importance of scientists for national development, outstanding intelligence and complexity of this profession, but consider scientists an undervalued and low-income group. The image of the scientist is extremely distanced from the youth and is not an attractive vector of social mobility. One of the key reasons for the current situation is the absence of scientists in the Russian information space. Neither on television, nor in cinema or on social networks the image of the scientist is attractive to younger generations. If efforts are not made to eliminate this contradiction, the shortage of personnel in science will worsen, which would jeopardize the implementation of Russia’s national development plan.

The article continues the authors’ thoughts about the necessary conceptual frameworks that would help rural sociology provide more reliable insights and data in the study of such a relatively new (in the conceptual-analytical perspective) social phenomenon as rural human capital. In the previous article, we presented a brief overview of such half-forgotten but still relevant theoretical foundations of rural sociology as agricultural economics, theories of peasant agrarianism, and theory of rural-urban continuum, which to a greater or lesser extent can be applied in the analysis of rural development and rural social and human capital. In this article, we provide a brief overview of some more recent agrarian ideas that seem to have sufficient but questionable heuristic potential for rural sociology. First, the idea and repeatedly tested projects of the Green Revolution, or the Third Agricultural Revolution, which implied technology transfer initiatives to greatly increase crop yields, opposed the concept of “Red Revolution” (comprehensive agrotechnological transformations instead of radical political ones), despite some skeptical assessments, in the last decades of the 20th century contributed to the reduction in global hunger, and, especially in its Soviet interpretations, seemed to be consonant with the more recent intellectual direction - development studies. Second, Peasant Studies defending the position that the very question about the need for a special theory of the peasantry and peasant societies is untenable, and presenting an attempt to develop a middlerange theory within historical sociology, which is based on the four most important characteristics of the peasantry in the past and present: family economy, work on land in interaction with nature, local culture of self-organization (rural community), and marginal role in relation to the state. Today’s disputes about the peasantry in the contemporary world are complemented by two macroconcepts - theory of international food regimes and theory of global rural development. Thus, we still miss unambiguous theoretical generalizations regarding rural development due to the extreme diversity of both rural areas (and their social/human capital) and interpretations/definitions of rural/agricultural development (for instance, deagrarianization and extractivism or rural-urban glocalization and optimistic “unorthodox” social-ecological model).

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